A Life's Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

magazine. He does that on Saturday mornings, to give her a break. Together they decorate the nursery and buy baby clothes. Emma’s parents come to stay for the weekend and do DIY around the house. Her father tells her she is ‘blooming’. Emma is fastidious on points of health and safety. Unpasteurised cheese and alcohol do not pass her lips. Even one cigarette a day, she reflects, would be harmful for the baby, and we are amazed the thought has even crossed her mind. She supports and promotes the existence of baby-exploiting multinational companies and their environmentally unfriendly products, of which each pregnant woman is promised an introductory pack courtesy of Emma on arrival of their baby. She is, confusingly, passionate on the subject of breastfeeding. She hopes to endure labour without the aid of drugs, and expects the baby to be a boy. I turn to the end immediately. The baby is a girl. She calls it Jane. She did manage to get through labour without drugs. It was bad, she says, but not as bad as I expected. This expectation has been well concealed by Emma from her diary. What form, I wish to know, did it take? I myself have no happier or more rational expectation of labour than I have of being murdered. And yet the suggestion must surely be that labour is not so bad after all, for I cannot believe that Emma possesses a particularly lively imagination. I think of the women I know who have had children, none of whom has remarked of birth that it wasn’t nearly as bad as they were expecting. Most appear unable to speak about the subject at all, except one, who told me that at one point she begged the midwife to shoot her.
    Preparation, I am repeatedly told in my leaflets, is the pregnant woman’s defence against pain. People who are tense and out of touch with their bodies, people who resist labour, above all people who are afraid of pain feel more pain. If this sort of statement is a threat, its objective appears to be the encouragement of a curious communality. Joining groups, attending classes and courses, enlisting the help of your partner or a friend in the business of preparation are all recommended means of curing yourself of the faults of hubris, terror and independence of mind before labour commences. The literature tactfully tones down references to the ultimately solitary nature of childbirth, and to the fact that attending classes for it is like attending classes for death: indeed, every effort is made to strip the process of any personal significance at all, so that having read a certain number of these leaflets I am no longer sure whether it is I who will be going through labour or the woman in the orange tracksuit demonstrating with a grapefruit. Although it is not stated as such, as I understand it, by making yourself into a different person – one who breathes deeply, one who does exercises, one whose partner is willing to massage you with oil at all times of day and night – you give yourself a chance if not of lessening the rigours of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, then at least of believing that it is happening to someone else.
    Books about pregnancy go into this process of transformation, or sublimation, in sinister detail. You are offered a list of foods to eat, recipes for how to combine them, and occasionally photographs of the finished result, with captions such as
Salad
or
Bowl of Granola.
You are told, with the help of illustrations, how to get into bed, how to lie in it, and how to get up again. You are told, again with illustrations, how to make love. Possible conversations you might have with your partner concerning the impending birth and parenthood are detailed. You can conduct these over a cocktail if you like; non-alcoholic for you, of course! Find recipes for non-alcoholic cocktails on page 73. A section on antenatal appointments advises you to take a book or magazine, or perhaps some knitting, in case you have to wait. When you go to have your