Then, when everyone’s clothes are covered in white fluff, you regret your haste and carelessness and wish you had taken your time to do it properly.

Or, what about when you pop your bag of groceries on the front seat of the car, vaguely feeling uneasy and knowing there must be a good reason you usually stash the goods in the boot for the trip home? 

Not until you enter the roundabout and the bag tips over, hurling the strawberries out of their plastic capsule all over the floor and launching the tins of red kidney beans at them like missiles, do you acknowledge that you should always listen to that still small voice guiding you. 

At present, the still small voice guiding me is saying that I need to speak up about changing the meaning of the word “marriage”.   

Marriage is a sociological institution with a biological foundation, and it always has been. 

Male-female marriage has been around for thousands of years and has provided the children who are born into it with a mother-relationship and a father-relationship, an ancestry and a biological identity.

Determined not to rush into this decision and live to regret it, I’ve checked carefully. 

I’m glad all same sex couples in Australia now have 100 per cent the same legal status and benefits as any other couple in Australia as they should. 

My concern is for the children created in these relationships who miss out on having a mum and a dad, not through a tragic circumstance, but in order to validate the emotions of two adults. 

“The reality is that anybody that’s talked to a child who has lost a parent, whether through divorce, abandonment, third-party reproduction or death, kids absolutely care.  Family structure matters to children,” said Katy Faust, the daughter of two incredible mothers. 

My own three daughters may well be a mess at times, but they need only look to my husband and I to join the dots.

Hopefully not following a trail of tissue fluff.