MOTHERHOOD is the one career which calls for no aptitude tests, no compulsory training courses and no job interviews, but it's just about the steepest learning curve known to woman.

The lucky ones with nephews and nieces, or friends with babies, have got a bit of work experience under their belts before those belts become too tight for comfort.

In the days when we had grammar schools, girls at the secondary modern described lessons where they learned how to run a house and look after babies. No-one thought it sensible to sit such classes alongside trigonometry and Latin, but it would have beaten double hockey on a freezing afternoon and been a sight more useful to inexperienced souls like me.

So there I was, 30-something, with no small babies in the family and, though I hadn't realised until it was too late, a raft of childless friends. I turned to baby books and learned to bath a baby with an oddly-weighted doll in parentcraft classes. But nothing could prepare anyone for the 24-hour, seven days a week shifts imposed by the new, very small boss. Until now.

I've just read of an interactive model baby which women thinking about whether to start a family or not can acquire for a bit of practice.

In schools, teenagers - boys and girls - have been given dolls or eggs or even bags of flour to look after to impress on them the constant care demanded by a baby. That, however, is designed to put them off becoming parents before they've taken their GCSEs, not to help them discover whether they want to be parents when they grow up.

If grown ups need a couple of weeks with a doll which "interacts" with them "24-seven" to decide if they want a baby, maybe they should stick with the day job.

With a fortnight like that, I might have discovered how bone selfish I am when it comes to time to myself and some sleep, and a baby would have been crossed off the agenda without me knowing that it does eventually get better - or different, anyway.

But how interactive is interactive? Presumably this doll-baby is programmed to behave like a "normal" baby - i.e. one who's read the baby manuals and sleeps for four hours between feeds, takes the feed, burps, goes back to sleep and cries only in unsatisfied hunger or to demand a clean nappy.

Dream on; or invent the advanced model incorporating the raving insomniac, the colicky type, or the constant grizzler. That way prospective mothers will know why sleep deprivation is one of the best weapons in the torturer's armoury and be prepared (the other torture is listening to the boasts of mothers whose babies "go through the night" from leaving hospital).

I got so tired I fell asleep walking from one room to another; luckily I was carrying a bowl of soup, not the baby.

Even the advanced model would have one insurmountable design fault. It wouldn't really be hurt if you dropped it. I was terrified I'd drop the offspring or that my hand would slip on her tiny, soapy self. Admittedly, she was tiny, and three months old before first size all-in-ones ceased to swamp her, but I expect I'd have been as scared with a standard-size model.

Sorry, there's just nothing to prepare you for the real experience.