AS A swinging single, I often craved to hear three little words from the male species. That’s right: “More wardrobe space.”

When a commitment-phobe former boyfriend cleared out his decades-old junk from his bedroom cupboard, led me there proudly and uttered those words before the niche he had made for me to store my stay-overnight clothes, I was giddy with joy.

You’d have thought he’d said: “Marry me, please” or “Three carats, darling.”
The next day, my girlfriend and I celebrated over lunch, flapping our hands in excitement (she was also triumphant – her boyfriend at the time had called her his “fiancee” in front of a bank officer).

Over the years, I’ve raised my bar a little higher where sweet nothings are concerned. But the Supportive Spouse – who still has me at “hello” – can reduce me to delicious jelly with the words: “I’m coming home.”

Last week, after the SS said those words again, I bustled around trying to make an easy beef stew from a recipe by my latest obsession, British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.

As I was trying to brown my sirloin beef cubes to a perfect shade while making sure I didn’t over-sautee my mushrooms, my four-year-old son, Julian, wandered out.

Rumpled and wild-haired from his afternoon nap, he pouted glumly before bursting into tears. Frazzled and smelling of meat, I dropped my cooking to attend to my moody child.

Some yelling and a stand-off in the bathroom ensued.

As I was popping some white wine into the fridge to chill, the problematic Julian appeared like a Ring Wraith around me and began to raid the fridge.

He dropped chocolate rice all over the kitchen floor. I screamed.

He broke a china plate while carrying his peanut-butter sandwich to his room. I hollered.

He declared that he was not going to speak to me. Then he repeated: “I am not going to talk to you anymore, Mummy. Okay?”

“If you are not going to speak to me, don’t ask me to say okay,” I shot back to irritate him.

That kept him quiet. For the next five minutes.

By this time, my stew was starting to turn into shambles.

In the end, I decided to turn the seared beef cubes into steak instead, plating them in a small, artful pile.

The SS came home and ate, vocal about his appreciation. The grumpy Julian morphed into a happy boy and spent half an hour whizzing round and round on our reclining armchair with six-month-old brother Lucien.

Later, sated on steak, Julian and I laid in bed and he began telling me about his day at school, where the kids had been making Mother’s Day cards for the impending occasion, which was then four days away.

Then, right after an earnest description of how he had drawn a heart on a card for me, he suddenly lurched forward and gave me the nicest, sweetest, heartfelt bear hug.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” he cooed, with his face buried in my shoulder. And, just like that, never mind the love-hate bickering we had been engaged in all day, I discovered that I had three new favourite words.

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