My daughter has just finished school. I contest this fact most days, driving her to distraction. I keep prosecuting the point—darling, it can’t be over—because I’m almost certain that in her private life, in the life she enjoys precisely because it exists outside the orbit of my benign parental suffocation, there are practical tasks she may have neglected. I also keep prosecuting the point because there is no other avenue for me to articulate my own incredulity. I’m not sure how we got here. I find rage brimming in me as I contemplate the finality of the milestone. For some reason our local preschool cops the weight of my animus. I drive past it most days, conveying my teenagers to school, driving with heart pounding to work, to get to that radio interview, to that panel I’m supposedly hosting, to get in to work before the car park at Parliament House reaches capacity, to run upstairs to be at my desk in time for a news conference; or driving in less harried fashion in the direction of Civic in times of leisure, crawling mulishly past this totem of our collective past, this prosaic suburban sacred site, which is profoundly indifferent to my current pulses of irrationality.

When I have passengers in the car I manage not to be furious at the preschool, but when I’m alone it’s a different story. I slow the car in meek compliance with the 40-kph school zone, all the better to glower at the squat building and the brightly coloured cubby house. Three mornings a week, when she was three and a half, I walked through the gates of this preschool with my small blonde daughter and her brother, our deeply chilled side kick, then and still, strapped conclusively into a cheap BigW stroller, taking in the world with his large, steady eyes.