The baby monitors looked mournfully back at me from the bottom of the wheelie bin as I slammed the lid. Then I experienced a series of flashbacks: the crackle of a baby's cry; the whiff of stale vomit on my clothes; pacing the floor at 3 am; the breastfeeding propaganda, and the malign medical insensitivity of the health visitors' “support”—a tick list questionnaire on depression, domestic abuse, and “concerns” about seemingly everything (my wife took to hiding from them in her subsequent pregnancies). Thus we were sucked into the parental collective—mere …