A Life's Work Read Online Free PDF

ultrasound scan, leave plenty of time to find the correct hospital department. When you have found it and your name has been called, go into the scanning room. Remove your clothes and lie on the couch while the operator performs the scan. Go shopping for baby clothes before you get too large. Decorate the nursery, preferably in primary colours using lead-free paint. At night, when you can’t sleep and your mind is racing, violently suppress this insurrection of identity and use the time to get in touch with your baby. Afflicted by sleeplessness, I follow this last piece of advice, but my communications with the baby always end up taking the undignified form of my pleading with it not to hurt me. As my stomach grows bigger I realise that getting in touch with it is about as useful as a field getting in touch with the motorway being built through it.
    Like a bad parent, the literature of pregnancy bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal, with ghoulish hints at the consequences of thoughtless actions. Eat pâté and your baby will get liver damage. Eat blue cheese and your baby will get listeria, a silent and symptomless disease that will nonetheless leave your baby hideously deformed. Stroke the cat and your baby will get toxoplasmosis, a silent and symptomless disease that will nonetheless leave your baby hideously deformed. A temperature of more than 104 degrees sustained for several days could damage your baby in the first seven weeks of gestation, so don’t use saunas, have hot baths, or for that matter wear a jersey at any point in pregnancy lest your baby be hideously deformed. Don’t drink or smoke, you murderer. Don’t take aspirin. Wear a seatbelt when you travel in a car; you can loosen the lower strap if you have problems stretching it over your abdomen. Anyone thinking that pregnancy is the one time in their life when they are allowed to be fat can think again. Don’t eat cakes, biscuits, refined white flour, chocolate, sweets, fizzy drinks or chips.
When you raise your fork to your lips
, reads one book on this subject,
look at it and think, Is this the best bite I can give my baby? If the answer is no, put your fork down.
    The baby plays a curious role in the culture of pregnancy. It is at once victim and autocrat. It is a being destined to live only in the moment of perfection that is its birth, after which it degenerates and decays, becomes human and sinful, cries and is returned to the realm of the real. But in pregnancy the baby is a wonder, a miracle, an expiation. The literature dwells upon its formation week by week, the accretion of its tiny fingers and toes, its perfect little nails, its large, lidless, innocent eyes. Commerce with this being is actively sought. Most books claim you can feel its movements in the fourteenth week of pregnancy, little flutters, like the wings of butterflies. (A rather more robust, and hence outdated, volume informs me that this is just wind: proper movements are unlikely to be felt until a month later. Don’t worry about falling over, the book cheerfully adds, or indeed about car accidents or falling down the stairs. The only thing capable of harming the baby is a really forceful blow with a heavy object directly to the abdomen.) In the seventeenth week the baby develops hearing. It can hear your voice, the voice of its mother! It has plenty of time, I feel, to get over and indeed tire of this development. When the baby is being active, I am instructed to smooth my hands over my belly and speak or sing to it. It will quieten. You have soothed your baby.
    Such
faux
motherhood, solitary, perfect and bizarre, is not, I notice, recommended for women who have already had a child, and not only because they are less gullible. In one book, I find a section dedicated to these unfortunates, entitled ‘Pregnant Again’. It is very short. It mentions the reactions you can expect from other people on informing them of your second or subsequent