My life as the mother of Michael Jackson's children, by Debbie Rowe

Pictures of her beloved 'babies' cover the yellowing walls of Debbie Rowe's remote home. There are favourite snapshots, framed portraits and even paintings which perfectly capture their expressions of innocence.

Rowe studies the faces looking down at her and says fiercely: "I am possessive and protective of my babies. Their happiness means more to me than anything else on this world. I love them more than I would ever have thought was possible."

It is, one might think, perfectly normal for a mother to feel this way about her children. But the portraits adorning Rowe's walls show her menagerie of animals - not the two children she produced with, and then handed over to, Michael Jackson.

Indeed, there is not even a single, grainy snapshot of either Prince Michael, now ten, or Paris, nine, the children taken from her arms in the maternity ward in exchange for a multi-million-pound pay-off.

More than a decade after this plain dental nurse first joined the bizarre Michael Jackson roadshow, she lives alone breeding horses and dogs. There is little evidence in this impoverished and dusty backwater of the small fortune she is reputed to have received for effectively becoming America's most famous surrogate mother.

Her 'babies' now include 11 dogs, including one half-wolf, a parrot who shares her bedroom and drinks from her coffee cup, a pair of parakeets and 30 horses - many of them pregnant mares. She says, with no trace of irony, that she finds it hard to give away her foals. "I have to send them to a trainer so I can detach myself from them. It stops me becoming too involved."

Rowe worries more, it seems, about a young animal being led away from its mother than she does about the infants who were taken from her by the reclusive superstar. (Jackson later claimed that he was in such a rush to leave the hospital with daughter Paris in 1998 that he cut the cord and left with the baby covered in blood, taking the placenta with him in his haste.)

Since her second child by Jackson was removed, Rowe appears to have had scant dealings with her offspring - although she claims to see them sometimes. Certainly, though, the photograph of the children which made headline news this week - for once their faces not covered by the customary veils - offered Rowe a tantalising glimpse of the children she gave away.

This week, she invited the Mail into her home for an extraordinary, unsettling interview in which she broke the silence she has maintained for years about her infamous children. When asked about their appearance this week, she reacts with the grunt of a satisfied breeder, rather than a sigh of loss. "I turned out two pretty good-looking kids. For that I am proud."

Debbie Rowe blasts Michael Jackson for unmasking their kids

Debbie Rowe, the mother of Michael Jackson's two older children, tells Britain's Daily Mail she's upset the kids were recently photographed without their "veils."

"The veils were my idea, not Michael's," she says in an extensive interview in which she details her sex-free marriage to Jackson (thank goodness for small miracles), her two pregnancies, and her struggles with notoriety. "I had kidnap threats when they were babies. I did not want them to be recognized."

Yes, because when they've got schmattes draped over their heads, they blend.