Before Per and I had the girls, we travelled a lot together and had a bunch of fun doing it. We’re perfect travel companions – I talk incessantly and he doesn’t utter a word, and while I have extremely fixed ideas about what I want to see, eat and drink, he doesn’t care and is happy to go with the flow. It’s a travel match made in heaven. But when you have kids, the stuff you like doing together and the things you enjoy most about each other get buried under the morass of things you HAVE to do and ways you HAVE to be to get your children through childhood without anybody dying or getting arrested along the way.

And children, let’s be honest, can be self-centred little bastards who will watch you in the death throes of exhaustion and tactile sensory overload and ask for a glass of juice. They’re sweet as pie and they write you adorable notes but until they reach 35 they simply don’t have the cognitive skills to understand how desperately hard the job is of raising them. And that’s not their fault, they’ll get it eventually, but in the interim, it’s you guys against them and you have to save yourselves.

I have to disagree when people say having a career and raising kids is a balancing act. Balancing act? That sounds like carrying a tray of tequila shots from the bar to your table in stripper heels. This is juggling, people, of the kind that would get you a job with Cirque du Soleil. That guy who balances a thin girl on his feet while handling twenty burning spears? He’s got nothing on you. It’s demented, what we’re expected to accomplish on a daily basis – and, by the by, look amazing while we do it.

And it’s only natural – I mean, this is a battle, mothers of the world – that you and your life partner, The Dude, the one you dug above all others and still (hopefully) would rather collapse into bed with after another day in the trenches will start taking all of these frustrations out on each other, and that your conversations will be about whose turn it is to do stuff and why the other one didn’t do that other stuff they were supposed to do. It’s boring, relentless and it murders the love.

Here’s the thing: before you can say varsity fees, these kids are going to be off on gap years, living in digs, finding weird friends and avoiding you as much as they can get away with. And when this happens all you’re going to have is each other. But it’s really difficult, if not impossible, relating to one another like before because the second you walk through the door of your home you enter parenting mode – it’s the new, default way of being, and there’s nothing you can do to escape it.

Except, that is, to go away for a while. Drag him by the short and curlies if you have to. Get as far away from home and your children as you can manage and you know what? Without even realising it you’ll find yourselves slowly reverting back to the way you were when you were best buddies and in love. You’ll talk about different things, have real conversations again and be reminded of why, amongst all those other people, you chose each other. And at the end of the day the best thing you guys can ever do for your kids is be happy, and together. Try it – you’ll see.