Author Gigi Eligoloff is a former TV Producer (credits include Big Brother, but don’t hold that against her!). Gigi now runs the ethical online glossy MumsRock.com. And in between raising her two year old son, Kit (along with husband Honest John) and running MumsRock, the family are also in the process of adopting while practising patience, and maintaining that all-important sense of humour.

(The following article “10 Things I Hate About the Word ‘Mom’” recently got quite a bit of national press coverage and has been altered a bit for reprinting.)

It goes without saying that we love lots of things about being a mother. Otherwise we would have cleared off by now and rented a condo next door to Jake Gyllenhall.But back to the ‘M’ word – let’s be honest, you spend maternity leave trying to coax your baby to say the word and it’s downhill from then. Once they’re past age five they make the transition to calling you “mom” in an “I want something” whine, eventually petering out to a grunt in their teenage years.

But it’s not the use of the ‘M’ word by our children that I’m talking about. It’s when it’s used to group us into one big happy army of shabby knitwear, sticky tissues and Tupperware. Here, the 10 most irritating uses of the ‘M’ word:

1. When couples start to call each other “mom” and “dad”, their sex life is now demonstrably a thing of the past.

2. Doctors, nurses, and midwives call you ‘mom’ when you take your kids for appointments. Obviously it’s so they don’t have to bother finding out your name.

3. It makes you feel like your mother. And not in a good way.

4. If you’re hitting the dating scene again, Mom joins up with that other word to become…Single Mom. On dates you’ll soon learn that you must use the ‘M’ word with care. If your date starts fiddling with his mobile, go ahead and pay the bill – the date’s finished. If his eyes mist up and he wants to put his coat around your shoulders, run.

5. It’s part of one of the most annoying ad campaigns that propagates the ‘homogenous Mom’ school of thought. “Moms go to Iceland” (A UK frozen food supermarket) not only implies that we all share the same fashion-sense, shoe-size and postcodes but also assumes that as Moms we actually think it a good idea to feed our children a £3 frozen chocolate gateau. It’s as if Jamie Oliver had never existed.

6. When you become a mom, your Google ads on Facebook suddenly change. You now find you’re invited to enjoy ‘free samples for women over 35″ or urged to embrace the Oprah diet. Welcome to your new demographic.

7. Once your kids start bonding with their peers, you will spend at least a decade with your child’s name as a prefix to your title – e.g. Josh’s mom. That’s now two steps away from who you were, and only a whisker away from becoming Granny.

8. Pre-kids, you would look at a teacher and think – low pay, low prestige, low aspirations. Now those same teachers have the upper hand – long paid holidays, final salary pension and a big say in your beloved child’s future. Come parents evening, even the way they use the ‘M’ word ensures you’ll spend the next six months worrying that the only thing your child will ever amount to is a starring role on the Ricki Lake Show.

9. When your children are screaming “Mom” up the stairs at you, it’s really hard to put on stockings for date night and not feel like a suburban hooker.

10. Aerobics instructors, gym trainers and Pilates teachers automatically assume you want to focus on something called “bums and tums”. After further consultation, it turns out they are right.