It's the end of August 2023 and I’m sitting in my kitchen with Yvonne and Bree, making polite conversation while the kettle boils. Papers lie strewn across the table beside a plate of biscuits. Upstairs, my housemate is snoring, exhausted after her day at work. Outside, children are playing, kicking a ball against a sign that reads “No ball games”.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing and rewriting passages from this book, nervous about the encroaching deadline and the fact that, no matter how hard I try, there will always be more to write and better ways to write it. Like most people trained in the academy, I have spent restless hours contending with imagined critics who dispute my methodology, my facts, my experience, my intentions. I’ve spent even more time worrying about the effect any disclosures may have on my family, my friends, my colleagues, the students I have worked with. With a pang, I wonder if Yvonne and Bree will read my book. Will it affect their view of me too? My glasses steam up as I pour boiling water into the waiting mugs. I regret not having written a more sensible book, or at least a more guarded one.

Perhaps, I think, I should have stuck to analytic metaphysics. Metaphysics is supposedly “harder”, more abstract, a serious sub-field of academic philosophy. Therein, questions about parenthood are often pushed to the peripheries (so says the philosopher of pregnancy, Elselijn Kingma) because they are “softer”, “women's issues”, and marginalized within a subject that privileges the male voice and male perspective. I suspect these questions about parenthood would have snuck in anyway. In writing this book I have been repeatedly struck by the feeling (nothing more than this) that birth, children and childcare are in some ways a central, if unconscious preoccupation of academic philosophy and its writings.