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Given the contact sport that mothering has become, it's high time Mother's Day got a millennial makeover. If Hallmark wanted to get with it, for instance, a truly contemporary card wouldn't have pink tulips on it and wish us "Happy Mother's Day," but would come in blood red and include a convenient, pop-out mea culpa sticker. And while we're at it, flowers and perfume are looking so last century. How about a set of 18-karat gold knuckles, a lead handbag, or a stiletto for our stilettos? At least that way, we'd be armed and ready to beat ourselves up in style.

Now that being a good mother is something you've already failed at from the moment the test stick turns blue (oh my God, you had three martinis last Thursday, you haven't been listening to Mozart and you've been living on mercury-laced sushi), guilt and self-recrimination have emerged as a leitmotif that is as maddeningly difficult to ignore as Madonna.

So inured are we to feeling responsible for everything, we don't even flinch at our collective tendency to wonder how the wife of that Austrian monster (even though she lived under the tyranny of someone so mythically cruel that he actually locked his child away from the daylight for 24 years) could have let it happen. "Where was the mother?" we ask. "How could she not know?"

And instead of feeling sorry for the sad mothers in that Texas polygamist cult, forced by their faith into a life of sexual servitude, cloned dresses and strange braided hairstyles, and now separated by the authorities from their own children, we seem to accept that they should be treated as the perpetrators rather than the victims.

These are extreme examples, but their lesson is no less true. Like the iconic Madonna, as depicted in classical Western art, motherhood has a majestic power that comes with a heavy mantle of responsibility. What never ceases to amaze me, when talking with my girlfriends, is the sheer weight of the things we must care about in our roles as mothers - no matter how much our roles may be changing.

Now that parenting is a verb, we can't just kick back and do as our mothers did. Because of the guilt cult we gave birth to along with our children, it doesn't matter how long we breast-fed, whether we chose a family bed or Ferberized, fed our children organic rice cakes or Happy Meals, worked outside the home or ran the after-school program, we must continually ask ourselves, like maternal overachievers, whether, as Mother, we are being All That We Can Be. What's more, now that we've made ourselves the punching bags for our own neuroses, if we ain't happy, ain't nobody else happy: Like it or not, mothers are still the emotional centres of the household, the custodians of the family's well-being, the daily DJs of its groove.

Which makes knowing whether you are being a Good Mom or a Bad Mom difficult sometimes.

I got a little test of this kind just the other day when my eldest, who has just wrapped up her first year away from home at university, rang me up in a panic.

"Mom, I know it's kind of late notice, but is there any chance you could come out here and help me pack up my stuff?" she asked in her sweetest, most helpless tone, adding, "Everybody else's parents are helping them pack too."

Needless to say, my inner A-type Mom went into overdrive. Wouldn't it be fun, the two of us laughing over dust bunnies and cardboard boxes? I could take her out for dinner, just the two of us, to celebrate. We hung up and good mother that I am, within minutes I had cleared my schedule and was on the Internet trying to book an expensive last-minute flight to Halifax - to help my 18-year-old clean her room.

Yes, I was almost that stupid. I was so thrilled to hear that she wanted and needed me that I was ready to run across the country at great expense in order to infantilize my child.

The next morning, I called and told her that as much as I was always available, I knew that she was fully capable of doing it all by herself. Fast-forward two weeks and her stuff is all over the living room (yes, she got it all here just fine) as I try to restrain myself from helping her land a summer job.

The moral of my story is that sometimes you can be too good a mother. And sometimes being a good mother can look a lot like its opposite. So if there's one gift I can recommend to all the mothers out there this Mother's Day, it's to quit the guilt cult. Our membership certainly isn't helping our children any. And even if they did make over Mother's Day, the best gift we could get is ours to give.