Oh no! It's the day I've waited 16 years for and I've missed it. Parents' Night, that is. Smaller Son's Parents' Night last month would have been The Very Last Ever. And we were away.

It's not that I'm sorry to have missed it as such - no way - it's just that I wanted to savour the moment, treasure the pleasure of never, EVER having to go through that ritual humiliation again.

To be fair, Smaller Son's evenings aren't that bad and have actually got better as he's got older. It's just that the experience with his big brother has affected me for life. I just have to see an appointment list on a scrap of paper and I come over all peculiar. So does his dad.

The boys' father rarely drinks at home. An occasional beer when we have a house full of visitors perhaps, but otherwise, never.

Until Senior Son's Parents' Night. After two hours of hearing what a disaster his school work was, what a pain in the neck he could be and - obviously - what hopeless parents we must be, we crawled home totally defeated, demoralised and depressed. And his father - in depths never before plummeted throughout the lad's increasingly rackety school career - tottered in and headed straight for the booze cupboard.

That's what Parents' Nights can do to you. As for me, if I could have had gin fed through an intravenous drip, it still wouldn't have been enough.

The worst of all was when we had our very own private parents' afternoon for Senior Son - just us and his teachers all together in a little room. I just felt so utterly miserable. It was like being back in school myself again and being totally out of my depth, that awful feeling of helplessness. Like having double trigonometry. In Greek.

I hated my schooldays, was always in trouble myself, so whenever we were summoned on behalf of the boys, there wasn't just today's tribulations to cope with, but a whole can of worms from my own childhood. As we sat and waited, checked our appointments, joined yet more queues, listened to yet more all too familiar opinions, the past was waving before me like a drowning man. It didn't help.

Even on Smaller Son's parents' nights, when the news was invariably good, we could hardly bring ourselves to believe it. So conditioned were we by his brother, that on the last two - very cheerful - parents' nights for Smaller Son, we couldn't cope with the nice things his teachers were saying. As they beamed and heaped praise upon the lad's head, his father and I were sitting, tense and defensive, muscles coiled and clenched, waiting for the "But..."

And when there wasn't a "But...", just praise and congratulations, we felt oddly disorientated. After years of conditioning we were incapable of relaxing on Parents' Night. It wasn't right.

And I'd counted them down. As prisoners count the days to their freedom and children to the holidays, I counted off the Parents' Nights still hanging over me.

"Only one more to go." I'd sung out to the headmaster this time last year.

But there wasn't. That was the last. Never again.

Believe me, it's a wonderful feeling.