What does your typical morning look like? If you’re anything like me, it starts well before 7am, when I wake up to read the news before starting the unenviable mission of dragging – sometimes literally – two children out of bed.

From there, it’s a chaotic rollercoaster ride of getting everybody breakfast, barking at them to get dressed, making packed lunches and responding to last-minute panics about a project on the Romans they’d forgotten about but which has to be in today – “oh, and I’m meant to be taking in a costume”.

Before you know it, you’re simultaneously ripping a bedsheet to shreds, sewing on a curtain tassel and shoving them out of the door to school, while messaging your boss to make up a white lie about the trains being screwed to buy yourself more time – and it’s only 8am. Rinse and repeat, every single morning, for 18 years.

Unless, that is, you’re Karl Bushby. For Karl Bushby – the man who recently returned home to Hull after an epic, 28-year walk across the globe which started in South America, in 1998 – you haven’t had to worry about any of that “parenting stuff”, actually. You’ve only had to worry about yourself for the best part of 30 years – what you’re eating, where you’re sleeping.

Imagine: spending 28 years being able to go to the toilet completely by yourself? I can’t. I can’t imagine it, because no matter where I am or what I’m doing – to misquote Liam Neeson in the action thriller – my 10-year-old son will look for me, he will find me, and he will ask me for a snack.

And I’m not alone. We already know that women around the world are doing roughly 16 billion hours of unpaid care work – such as cooking, cleaning and caregiving – every day, and that mothers report doing 67 per cent more household management tasks than fathers. In the UK, women are twice as probable as men to reduce work hours for childcare.

Basically, if you’re a mother (especially if you’re a single parent, like me), then you’re already doing the job of about 10 people – and there’s no way we’d be able to (frankly) f**k off on a nice long walk, even if we wanted to. We don’t even get the luxury of drinking a cup of tea in peace, and that only takes 10 minutes.

So, no, the glaring disparity of men vs women’s domestic freedoms has never grated on me quite as profoundly as the moment I saw Karl Bushby being praised and lauded on his return from his epic adventure.

And when I read all the talk about the “dangers” he got into and the emotional “toll” of carrying out this one-man mission, well, the only real “sacrifice” I could see was the one made by the mother of his child, Angela. And the child himself – Adam, now 36 – who lost his dad when he was eight when he left him in Northern Ireland. Bushby also has a 12-year-old granddaughter he’d never met. And we can’t forget his own mum, also named Angela, who having put in the hours of child rearing had to make peace with her son’s disappearance.

To give him credit, Bushby does seem aware of what his obsession has cost him. He admitted in an interview with this week that traipsing 31,000 miles through 31 countries to become the first person to complete an unbroken walk around the world was “purely selfish” and had led to a “disconnect and distance” with family.

“The way I squared the circle with Adam was by thinking that by doing this, maybe I’ll have more meaning in his life, more value doing what I’m doing,” he said. Though he added, notably, that despite hoping his son would come out to join him when he became an adult, it didn’t happen “the way I imagined it would”.

Still, noticeable in its absence is praise in his post-walk interviews for his ex-wife, Angela – who was a single parent for nearly 30 years. And I have to say, I’m not surprised. For behind every great man, as the adage goes, is a very weary wife (or, in Bushby’s case, ex-wife) facilitating their “greatness” and not getting an ounce of credit for it.

Ever heard of the physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić – wife and intellectual sounding board to a certain acclaimed Albert Einstein? Didn’t think so. Or, Sophia Tolstaya, who not only gave birth to 13 of Leo Tolstoy’s children but was her husband’s secretary – famously writing out War and Peace seven times. Yes, all 1,400 pages of it. Ask her what it was like to raise 13 children single-handedly, while her “great” husband locked himself away in a room to write books, and I bet she’d tell an interesting story.

One that would never conceive of walking away from all those endless, wearing, tedious domestic duties – those little lives and loves – to follow a fascinating, but indisputably selfish dream.