God knows, I’m knackered. I’ve never known fatigue or stress like that involved in looking after a young child. My son is now two and it’s supposed to start getting easier now.

I certainly hope so. But you know what? That’s just two years. And two years of doing a thing I chose to do and went into with my eyes open about what it involves. I am still nowhere near the chronic levels of tiredness and stress I see in my friends.

Anyone with a ‘proper’ (ie non-freelance-journalist-workingfrom- home-in-her-pyjamas-andmanaging- a-shower-every-other-day) job is grey with one and jittery with the other by the middle of the week. And two days of weekend – even if they weren’t intruded upon by emails and text messages from bosses unfamiliar with the concept of days of rest – are no longer enough to restore them to health and vigour.

They are, in the terms we all understood it to mean when we (yes, even me back in the day) first started our proper jobs, succeeding. They have money and power within their chosen fields. But at what cost? Living to work instead of working to live is a bizarre state of affairs, when you stop and pull back long enough to consider it properly.

Which is why Arianna Huffington, the 62-year-old creator of news website The Huffington Post held a conference to launch a global discussion about our need to redefine success. As a woman who has succeeded so plentifully on almost any terms you care to name, she is now free to consider these things more philosophically and has stated that we should measure our true success in life in terms of, ‘wellbeing, wisdom and our desire and ability to give back’.

We need to find, as she puts it ‘a third metric’, in addition to the traditional corporate markers of achievement – money and power – that will allow all of us to ‘succeed’ in a more humane and sustainable way. In specifically female terms, I’d suggest we need a new definition of ‘having it all’ which doesn’t involve believing in the mathematical impossibility that you can fit a full measure of professional achievement, a full measure of personal achievement and a full measure of flawless caring for children/husband/ageing parents/all three into one little life.

Lucy Mangan “We need a new definition of having it all”