Last week, while driving along a country lane, I listened to the writer Michael Chabon, father of four, describe an encounter he had as a young, newly successful novelist: a famous older writer approached him with advice on how to succeed artistically, “Don’t have children. That’s the whole of the law.”

In one sense, what good advice! Keep your rucksack light, your muse close by. Guard every hour as your own. And yet… in another sense, the way the baby touches your face when you lift her from the crib is everything. Including material.

It dawned on me that I’d never, not once, been warned away from parenthood. Granted, I hadn’t been a literary whiz-kid; no one was paying much attention to my creative trajectory. And also, I’m a woman. Still, you’d think some artistic mentor would have pointed me toward the wide, peaceful meadow that is life without kids.

Well, there was one person. A man I deeply respected. A writer, accomplished and published. When I met him, he was in his early 40s, unmarried, living alone; a man whose first and deepest allegiance was to life on the page. He didn’t offer this advice, so much as live it. This thrilled me, in the beginning – how he channelled the lion’s share of his time and energies to his imagination. Devotion in one direction did not come naturally to me, as a writer and performer. I could be lured away from the desk or rehearsal studio by any slight breeze. I was in awe of the dedication to his craft. Right up to the moment I fell in love with him.

“If I wanted to have children with anyone,” he would say, “it would be with you.” This statement, when pressed through the inventive sieve of my own wishes, became: “When I want to have children, it will be with you.”

“What are you afraid of?” I’d ask. Or, with heartbreaking naivety, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Occasionally he’d recount a recurring dream, in which he was a castle, surrounded by a moat. The purpose of the moat, it was made clear within the dream, was to protect his “fallen self” from destructive proximity to others. Children, apparently, were others.

When our daughter was four months old, Brian flew west to meet her. During that visit, we knit together again

Early in our relationship, Brian had told me a story. In his 30s, he’d been living with a girlfriend. One night, when he got back to their apartment after work, his girlfriend gave him an ultimatum: she wanted to have children, not immediately, but someday soon, and if he didn’t then, reluctantly, unhappily, she thought they should separate. Brian declared his wish to remain childless without ambivalence. She asked him to leave, and whether she meant immediately or not, he left immediately. He packed a bag, took a cab to a friend’s couch, and never slept again in the apartment that had been their home of several years. Poof. In the space of an hour, they permanently dismantled a long-standing partnership.

I’d been astonished and shaken by this story. I didn’t know people could break up this way; but I was not scared. I believed that, in such a contest of desires, I would prove impossible to leave.

Eventually, as anyone could have accurately predicted, I got pregnant. (That is how narrative structure works, if you introduce a gun in act one.) And yet my pregnancy stunned us both. No rational person could be surprised; as we’d grown more serious about each other, we’d become bizarrely less vigilant about preventing an unplanned pregnancy.

It turns out, it is possible to leave me.

“Leaving me” is how I saw Brian’s sustained commitment not to have children when confronted with the news that there was an actual person, under way, within me. This is perhaps unfair. Brian, in fact, would say it’s unfair to us both. In one neat phrase, “leaving me” casts him as villain and strips me of agency. I’m the passive recipient of his decision, rather than a person choosing to carry forward a pregnancy on her own. Rather than a person lucky enough to be able to choose.

Over time, lots and lots of time, I’ve come to see my choice as a choice. And more than this, to acknowledge that a part of me, by spending night after night with a man who’d renounced fatherhood, was flirting mightily with single-motherhood.

Why I would do this, when I emphatically did not want to be a single parent, was a question that kept me tossing, alone in bed, through my last trimester. I’d been raised by a free-spirited single mother with the warmest imaginable heart but an inability to recognise obvious peril; she exposed me to several dangerous men. I was determined never to repeat her patterns. This is what we tell ourselves about parenting: I’ll do it differently! Meanwhile, behind your back, your unconscious merrily maps a course all but identical to the one you travelled as a child.

I propelled myself into a swamp of unhappiness in exactly the same way Brian did: by being a multifaceted human animal with motives hard to make out.

Our daughter kicked down the door and all my love for you came flooding through

And so I was about to have a baby on my own. I was by now living in California, next door to my mother. Brian was in New York. We had not spoken in months. We were not “together”, but he remained someone I could get on the phone at any hour. When I went into labour, I called him.

“Why?” a friend asked recently. “Why call then?” It just seemed like the right thing to do. Or maybe, more honestly, I wanted to hear his voice before delivering our child.

I told him that I was in labour. We exchanged a few words. I don’t know what we said, but I remember the conversation as sober and tender. I’d like to be able to listen to that call now, though it’s likely it would be too sad to bear: no matter what we say, at the end of the call he is still in New York, and I am still in California, about to deliver.

Our daughter was born a little before 7pm. We spoke after her birth, and again the next day. And each day after, until, when she was four months old, Brian flew west to meet her. During that visit, inside the tiny, fecund space of an hour – the same length of time it took Brian and his ex-girlfriend to undo their life as a couple – we knit together again.

Of course, that’s a lie. Partnerships don’t reconstitute in an hour; it takes longer than that for jelly to set. The messy, fitful process of mutual understanding takes virtually all eternity.

On the other hand, when Brian met his daughter for the first time, she did touch his face as he lifted her from the crib. She reached for his glasses, grazing his cheek with her cloud-soft fingertips, each as small as a seed. And Brian smiled in a way totally unfamiliar to me, and to him.

It is hard to anatomise titanic change. I don’t know what allowed him, 17 years ago, to reconfigure his inner compass so quickly, so completely. All I can report is what he told me at the time: “She kicked down the door and all my love for you came flooding through.”

Two years after that, we had a boy. And there we were: four people, under one roof, rife with competing priorities.

I’d like to think that an alternate ending of this story, in which Brian remains loyal to his art to the exclusion of parenthood, might also be appealing. Or that there might be a modern twist in which I leave both babies with Brian and find a cave for my Olivetti. Concurrently, I’d like to think that art and parenthood are not sworn enemies, but mutual accelerants. Parenthood, at least, accelerates art. Who has the time for writer’s block, or a sluggish imagination, when there are but minutes before the baby wakes, or the teen arrives home starving?

What I know is that Brian continues to write novels while parenting with more patience, humour and intense interest in his children than anyone I’ve met. Including me. Would Brian’s books be better if he’d had empty, sparkling childless hours, to devote to them, year after year? Maybe. Maybe not. They would be different. What I can say with total faith is that his children are lucky he had the courage to swim past the moat, and reach them.