The nuclear family is ill suited to effective child-rearing. This should be news to no one. Yet when my mum said it, having taken the baby from me so that I could – finally – shower off myriad effluences, I felt it in my bones. Even though my husband has been at home on shared parental leave and has been doing all the cooking and laundry, and half the feeding (a luxury few can afford), I calculate that each newborn needs at least three, possibly four, adults to bring things up to a level beyond “just about coping”.
And yet the situation if you’re in a heterosexual pairing is that, after two weeks, most men go back to work and their partners are home alone with a baby in an endless cycle of feeding, sleeping and defecating, trying to time it so that they can actually exit the house and see another human being before the next circle of hell begins.
