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I realised then that it was I who was shaking, involuntarily, uncontrollably, from head to toe. Absurdly, at the same moment, I looked up at the wall-clock, because there was a radio programme which I had wanted to hear, and the surgeon had chosen the wrong time to break the news.It was unlikely, then, that I could ever bear children. I was a mess inside as much as out. Marriage and, perhaps, existence, were purposeless and barren, figuratively and literally. I could not cry for three days because they had cut so many of my stomach muscles in their burrowing that I could neither crinkle up my face nor permit a sob to bubble up inside me. I just had to lie there like a corpse, desperate for distraction whenever I closed my eyes, desperate for darkness whenever I looked about me at the rest of the world about its business. Of course, to depend on the prospect of childbearing may seem pathetic to the unforgiving feminists, but, right or wrong, it had always been another inextricable part of my perception of myself, my self-worth, my vision of the future. |
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I might myself have scoffed at such desolation in one who, after all, had no right to assume that she would be able to have children and had worked hard at school and elsewhere to provide herself with an independent life of the mind.
When it came down to it, however, I was devastated. Right or wrong, children had been the means whereby I could have justified and escaped the loneliness of marriage. Now the whole edifice of my life, such as it was, proved without foundations. I went back to work just eight days after leaving hospital. I still could not stand upright but I just had to be out of the house. I no longer derived any joy from the job, but it then seemed that that was all I had.All I had – and I no longer even had that to myself. It was suggested that I should have an assistant. Only it was not really a suggestion, because, by the time I responded – crossly, resentfully – it turned out that a girl had already been chosen for the job.
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