Читать книгу Stand and Deliver!: And other Brilliant Ways to Give Birth - Emma Mahony - Страница 15

If you have hitherto worn piecrust collar shirts, below-the-knee A-line skirts and sensible shoes, then pregnancy is the time to review your image as a woman. If you have traded on being a sexless sort of person in the workplace or in your domestic persona, a sensible, trustworthy sort who doesn’t sleep around with the boss, then that ain’t gonna work no more. By the very fact of your growing bump you are announcing to the world that YOU HAVE HAD SEX. Or, one hopes, YOU HAVE SEX. Everybody from the sniggering teenager to the vicar at church can now see this for themselves. That hitherto most private and mysterious part of yourself is paraded on view, saying ‘Look everybody, I am a fertile woman who is sexy enough for someone to want to impregnate me!’ You may think that your pregnancy dungarees and Doc Marten boots are saying something else, but this is the message on the most basic level that the world is receiving.

This is no small matter. I can still remember realizing in a Biology class that I was a result of my parents ‘doing it’. I was appalled. I could only compute the idea by believing that they had done it just the two times in the marriage to produce us children. From then on, in my pre-teen state, pregnant women on the street were not gorgeous goddesses but women who had done that unspeakable act – yuk! Put that thought into the mind of teenage boys and you can see why ‘denial’ is not the place you should be right now.