Both ends of the axis point home
You are fluent at being the reliable one out in the world. With the North Node in Cancer in the 4th house, both ends of the axis point home: to the people there and the version of you that lives with them. You need one evening a week that nothing may move.
The South Node sits in Capricorn in the 10th house, which is why every retreat wears a work badge. A doubled assignment removes the usual excuse: there is no other arena where this can be practised instead.
Defend one evening against something important
Start by protecting time rather than by improving the house. Choose one evening a week, put it in the calendar under a name, and decline something genuinely worthwhile in order to keep it. The rep is the declining. An evening kept only when nothing else was offered has not been kept at all.
The household that has learned not to expect you
After years of your absences being reasonable, the people at home stop planning around you and stop asking. That adjustment is not resentment; it is logistics. Announce that you are available on a specific recurring night and then be there four times running. It takes about a month for a household to update, and it does update.
This is not a demand that you be less ambitious
The fear underneath is that turning toward home means giving something up professionally. In practice the trade is smaller than it looks: a few hours weekly, protected. What changes is not your output but where your last hour of energy goes. Nothing here asks you to want less; it asks you to stop spending the remainder elsewhere.
One more thing that only you can handle
The retreat is indispensability: a situation arises at work that genuinely requires you, and it arises reliably on the evenings you had reserved. Assume the timing is not coincidence and test it once. Hand the urgent thing to somebody else, go home, and observe what actually breaks. The answer is usually nothing.
Make the atmosphere, do not just fix the problems
In your household you handle the problems and somebody else sets the mood. Swap roles for a season: put music on, cook something slowly, keep the evening warm without solving anything in it. Atmosphere is a contribution and it is the one you have never claimed. Notice who relaxes first when you do this; that answer is worth having.
Build the room you both want to come back to
Your instinct is to make the household work: logistics covered, standards kept, everything running. What is missing is the part that makes it somewhere either of you wants to be. Choose one corner and make it comfortable rather than correct. A home that functions perfectly and comforts nobody is the specific failure mode here.
Home is where your recovery happens or does not
If the place you live is a second workplace — admin, standards, things half-finished — your body never gets the signal to stand down, and no holiday makes up the shortfall. Make one room genuinely restful and keep work out of it entirely. This arena responds more to where you rest than to how long you rest.
Friends who have been inside your house
Count the people who have seen where you live. If the number is small, your social life is running entirely on neutral ground, which keeps it pleasant and slightly formal. Invite two people over before you have tidied. Being let into somebody's actual home is the fastest available shortcut to being close to them.
Work that fits around a life, rather than the reverse
The arrangement you have been treating as fixed — the hours, the travel, the availability — is more negotiable than it looks, and you have never tested it because asking felt like a confession. Ask for one structural change this year on domestic grounds and state the reason plainly. Employers refuse less often than the fear predicts.