To say that an affinity for the domestic helps when you start a family is like suggesting that perhaps Donald Trump lacks the gravitas required for the presidency. And yet it is only when your diary stretches ahead of you as empty as a Johnson/Gove NHS spending promise that that you truly realise that home is not just where the heart is but body and soul too.
That being said there has been something intensely liberating about legitimately refusing everything in sight. Once you are married party going is not, or is certainly not meant to be, about sexual opportunity. Instead all kinds of other calculations are brought to bear. How long, how far, how fun, how beholden, how shattered? A baby cuts through all that because you just ain't going.
And so it is that I have spent a very great deal of time at home over the last five months. Time at home with my baby and time at home with my wife. And while it has not always been a bed of roses it has been hugely affecting to see how completely my wife has taken to mothering.
Truth be told I have felt at times that what I assumed would be an instinctive capacity for fathering has not been as forthcoming as I would have hoped. The baby roars twice as loud and twice as long when in my arms in circumstances where more is most certainly not better. Fairly my wife sometimes wonders whether she is wisely entrusting her firstborn to someone with the nurturing skills of a drunken bear.
It is with an immense feeling of relief and gratitude that the reverse is most certainly not true. This hit home hard for me when a few weeks ago I dragged myself over the threshold after a particularly bruising day in court. As I paused in the hall I could hear my wife singing a German nursery rhyme The Cuckoo & The Donkey to the baby and experienced a moment of the most contented serenity I have known. Moments like that are balm to those who feel, as I sometimes do, that life is constituted of restless searching
The nest is no nightclub nor the home a hotbed of high minded disputation but, if you are fortunate, it can be sanctuary. And for that I have my wife to thank.
