What does being a husband actually mean while your wife is pregnant, recovering, and home with very small children? How do you picture your role?

The short answer is everything I can, and I'll go looking for it rather than waiting to be handed it.

The longer one starts with a distinction I feel strongly about. I am not going to "help you" with our children. Helping is what you do with somebody else's job. If I'm asking you what needs doing, I've already got it wrong — the point is to notice it myself and have it done before it becomes another item on your list.

The birth: obviously I'll be there. I'll have played a decisive and, I'd hope, enthusiastic role in getting them in there in the first place. It would be poor form to be absent for the exit.

The nights are mine, and it barely counts as an offer — I'm awake at three in the morning anyway. So are you. We're unusually well configured for this particular problem.

The rest I'd rather show you than claim. I've done a version of it before. In my second marriage I ended up looking after an eight-year-old who wasn't mine, and the dog, and the cats, most of the time, while her mother drank. The child wet the bed every night, I had no idea what I was doing, and I was trying to work it out in a language I didn't speak. I was not good at it. I did it anyway, for someone else's daughter, in a marriage that was already finished.

Then the part that I think actually matters, and it's the one thing I have that most men don't. I don't have an employer. There's no notice to give, no paternity allowance to negotiate, no boss deciding what I'm permitted. I choose what I take on and when I take it. So the argument about who takes time off — the one most couples have to fight their way through — isn't really an argument on my side. I'm already available. Technically I have the rest of my life off.

Which means the real question isn't what I'd do. It's what you want for your career: how much of it you keep, when you'd come back, whether you come back at all. You've told me part of your answer already. But it's yours to make, and it changes shape once it's actually in front of you, so I'd rather keep asking than hold you to something you said at three in the morning in August.

One last thing you didn't ask. You'd be doing this in a country where you have no family. Your mother is in Johannesburg, your sister can't reliably get a visa, and most women in that stretch have somebody who turns up with food and takes the baby away for an hour.

So: my mother has come and done exactly that for each of her four grandchildren. She'd be on a plane. That isn't a maybe — it's simply what she does, and she's been doing it since she put her own career on hold to teach my brother and me to read in the Nigerian bush. You'd have her, and me, and Georgios, and whatever else we've built by then.

That's the part I'd want us planning properly and early. Not the nappies. The nappies are easy.