For years – because of my work and my children – I have been pondering the possible impacts of climate change, and what they might mean for motherhood, for the adults my children will become.

I turn the situation obsessively, calculating routes and modes and travel times, but the result is always the same. I’m spending almost as long travelling to work as actually working. I’ve heard it said that Melbourne is a most liveable city, but how can that be? Travel between regional towns and centres, and the city, has stretched to unbelievable lengths for what is a twenty-first century, first-world context. The median cost of rent has jumped to over $400 a week in Melbourne.

Incredibly and against all odds, my modest writerly dreams, for what they were, came true. But culminating in my early thirties, prime child-bearing age, they coincided with the births of two children, complicating things in the way that parenthood has been complicating the lives of men and women forever.