One of my favourite moments from my favourite comedy special, Nanette by Hannah Gadsby, is when she puts her art history degree to perfect use and dispels the myth of tortured genius artist. She tells the story of being berated by a fan for taking anti-depressants. This fan insisted that without the willingness of the great minds of our time to feel the depths of their very souls, and all its aches, we would not have great art. He tells Hannah: "If Vincent Van Gogh had taken medication, we wouldn't have had The Sunflowers." She rapidly deconstructs this dangerous myth, explaining that Van Gogh did medicate, and painted many portraits of the psychiatrists who were treating—and medicating—him, and that a slight overdose of the foxglove plant, from which his medications were derived, can make the patient experience the colour yellow "a little too intensely". But, more importantly—most importantly—Vincent Van Gogh had a brother who loved him, a brother who supported him both emotionally and financially throughout the artist's difficult career and painful existence in the world. Hannah calls this Van Gogh's "tether", his connection to the world that made being in it possible, and made his art possible, and made all our wonderment at what he produced possible. The Van Gogh works we know and cherish grew from his brother's labour and love.

Somewhere in my first trimester of pregnancy, I decided—on no research—that I wanted us to use reusable nappies for our child. I was directly warned against this by some, whilst others offered a more subtle rebuttal: "I'll let you find out on your own." Wondrously naive about the requisite labour of baby toileting, I persevered with my insistence and, once I completed my research, believed I had made the right choice. The simple fact is that, in a cultural and economic system of convenience, speed and profit-maximisation, fulfilling good intentions often demands more labour. This, I am willing to take on; frankly, this is the labour of parenting under that very system.

This budding personal concept of my little labours of love, to prepare for our child's arrival, has extended to making my own natural ingredient cleaning supplies, hours spent online looking for second-hand cotton clothes, and replacing all the plastic in our kitchen with glass. My partner, Robert, and I visited every single charity shop in the area a few weeks back and came home with a life's supply of mason jars and an armful of children's books. We have also split the research requirements of pregnancy and birth between us, selecting the topics and titles together before swapping notes afterwards. We share the intention of being very deliberate guardians and advocates for our daughter. That includes how we advocate for one another and for her before she arrives.

In one of the more recent moments that someone giggled at my commitment to reusable nappies, and the endless cycle of washing and drying which accompanies that decision, a look was thrown across to Robert who, being the eldest of many, knows far better than I do how much work having a baby in the house truly is. He offered a conciliatory smile, but said that, in fact, it is his job to help facilitate this thing I want us to succeed at. Even though I know him to be this man already, I was still moved by the steadfastness of his support. His praxis is not to meet my every whim, but to throw the enormity of what he has to offer at the things I truly believe are important. This is why he was willing to hit the ground running with me in South America and learn how to be a filmmaker on the job, and why he is settling in my home country for the first year of our child's life. While the standards we hold one another to create an atmosphere of curiosity and questioning (and while he is indeed often forced to talk me out of my spontaneous hyper-fixations), he backs me to the hilt when it matters. In this way, my decisions are no longer my own; decisions are always ours, even if they originate from one of us.

In the days since that conciliatory smile, I've been mulling over this alternative labour he performs, and how it absolutely undergirds the more obvious forms. What I mean by this is that without his willingness to facilitate this decision of ours that I insisted was important, my workload would have increased massively. Our dissonance would have bridled my ability to succeed. Either I would have been forced to labour alone or I would have had to give up my good intentions. The fact of the matter is that, particularly in a world which maximises profit and convenience above all else, our good intentions mean very little without the wider web of community around us to facilitate, nurture and manifest those good intentions. That web is like the humus of soil, filled with billions of creatures who create the conditions for a seed to germinate and sprout; it is invisible to the naked eye, but an absolute requisite for goodness to grow.

A feminist recently pointed out online that the one thing most of history's "great minds" shared was that each of these men had a wife who laboured, invisibly. Her commitment to raising the children and taking care of the home facilitated his quest for greatness. Her hours spent producing the conditions of their family's reproduction allowed him to squirrel away his own time in an office behind a locked door. This was also how I wrote my own manuscript. Every day, for months, Robert pushed three home-cooked meals in front of my face, and edited the podcast, and made the films and read each draft—just so I could focus on this thing that felt most pressing, most important. I met every tight deadline because he met my every need during that time, his labour unknown to my global audience, my editor and my agent, but absolutely essential. He has been my humus. He will be a wonderful father to our daughter.

I suppose I am left thinking about how two-dimensional my previous understanding of reproductive labour truly was. I was still caught in a neoliberal worldview, whereby I viewed each woman as labouring individually to produce the conditions for life to thrive in her private environment. Now, thanks to Robert, I understand how absolutely necessary it is that each individual be supported by the web of wider work if her good intentions are to manifest. Better yet: we must all be intimately supported by the web of life's labour throughout the ages so that our collective intentions may manifest. The work we do to survive together can never be done in isolation from each other, just as the work any organism does to survive cannot be achieved in a vacuum. Every commitment I make to doing things the harder way because it is ethically sound is a demand upon my web of support to work with me to achieve this. These demands of mine were previously silent. Now I know to vocalise them and to express deep gratitude for the willingness of those who hold me to also share my load.

Conceiving our daughter was the promise to be what she needs for the rest of time. But, at the eleventh hour, with her arrival imminent, I wonder how I could have been so shallow as to fail to grasp that there is a world of good intentions beyond my own; that, before being a parent, all this time I could have been humus.