2026-05-16
43 分钟I remember the scene very distinctly.
I was sitting
with a group of women I didn't know in a large white room with strip lights
and a few tables.
A woman talked to us from the front while something was being passed round, person to person.
When that thing reached me, it turned out to be a knitted breast.
It was really weird and completely ridiculous.
Then we were each given a doll and the woman explained to us how to hold it,
where to hold it and how everything was going to work.
That scene sticks in my mind because it's juxtaposed with another one a few weeks later.
A scrunched up, floppy, starving, screaming baby who behaved nothing like the tranquil, rigid plastic doll.
I had one job to feed her.
Nothing had ever mattered quite this much and it was bloody hard.
Before you move on, thinking that you have no wish to have a baby,
or even if you do,
you lack the requisite anatomy to feed one, please stay with me.
Because if you're listening to this, logic suggests that someone once fed you, and everyone you know.
That's so obviously true that most of us don't even think about it.
Yet it was almost certainly bloody hard for them too.
That will have been partly because, like me, they had no idea what they were doing.