Being a Yummy Mummy looks kind of tough. "Mummies were better off when they were allowed to have baby sick on their cardigans, " a friend of mine mutters darkly. "And to lose their figures." Being a Yummy Mummy seems to be like participating in a pentathlon or something. Not terribly sure what a pentathlon is, but am pretty certain that there are many ways at which you can fail at it.

It's kind of like being that other, older, female caricature, the Career Girl.

Career Girls were just women with jobs, back in the days when that was unusual. But being a Career Girl then suddenly came to mean that you had to have a good haircut, great clothes and a predisposition towards multiple orgasm. How hard were those girls meant to work, exactly?

Being a Career Girl became tiring, then kind of insulting, and then the term fell out of use altogether, pushed into extinction by the rising numbers of women in the workforce and just a soupcon of reality.

We can expect the Yummy Mummy to go the same way, just as soon as her marketing potential has been exhausted, along with her poor adrenal glands.

Mothers, eh? Another notch in the gold-topped cane of the greetings card industry. Mother's Day always throws up something interesting. Like Saira Khan, from the first series of The Apprentice, paying tribute to her Kashmiri mother in the Daily Mail. They watched Dallas together. Her mother worked in a factory: "Mum runs a spotless home. Walking in the door from school, the smell of spicy home-cooking always met me . . . she made it appear effortless. I've never once heard her moan about being tired.

It's a great lesson."

Saira's mum, to judge by a rather old photograph, was not a Yummy Mummy.

She looked like an ordinary Muslim woman. Yet she seems to have done rather well at mothering, if the love and admiration of her adult daughter is anything to go by.

But the Yummy Mummy was around in the days of Saira's childhood. She just hadn't been named yet.

Nigella Lawson recently remembered her own mother, who was also a great beauty. Of course, we all associate our mothers with food, whether consciously or not. Nigella's best cookery book, How To Eat, is full of memories of her mother's kitchen. And Nigella Lawson's mother, she says, is the reason that she does not diet anymore.

When she was dying, Nigella Lawson's mother told her that having cancer was a great way to lose weight. A Yummy Mummy statement if ever there was one, passing on a bonkers worldview to another generation . . . a recipe for disaster. God help us, the suffering which goes into being a Yummy Mummy seems unknowable . . . not to mention the cash and all those organic vegetables, plus the manicures. The ceaseless striving, as if being a parent isn't tiring enough as it is.

It is strange to think that men once managed to find women with children . . .

that is, mummies . . . quite yummy for the thousands of years before the Yummy Mummy was born. Presumably, that is why families with more than one child were so common.

Historically, mummies have usually been young women, who do not have to try too hard to be lovely. Now we've made this happy life state into a sort of exam.

Whatever happened to the Slummy Mummy? Was she too relaxed to turn up for the interview? Was she too busy chatting to fill out those census forms?

Did she turn up too late for roll call?

Whatever, we know you're out there.

And we want to wish all Slummy Mummies a very happy Mother's Day. Don't lose your cards.