“Do you mean I’ll be able to make pastry during the early stages of labour?” I earnestly asked the midwife.
“Oh, yes, it’s quite possible. Just lean against the table as you roll out your pastry, do your special breathing through the contractions and carry on with your baking.”
“That’s amazing!” I exclaimed. “Making pastry in labour! My goodness, I’ll have to make the most of it. I’ve no idea how to make pastry now.”
In the dictionary, acceptance and anger aren’t far apart. When things go wrong, you can accept what’s happened then you are angry. It’s a strange, illogical, embarrassing anger, but it has to be got through. It’s illogical because you’re angry that everyone continues to have what you don’t: two normal breasts. Of course we don’t say anything; it’s just a bad inner resentment we carry around for awhile.
There are many women amongst us who know what it is to be pregnant, feel the joy of the growing child, the nausea and tiredness, the excitement and exhaustion; learn to love the unknown being within. Expectant mothers, expecting pregnancy to be full-term, to finally meet a new son or daughter. Hopeful, waiting.
Then comes a day when that vision of joy cracks like glass and your world collapses. The promised fruit is blighted; there will be no harvest. The child ebbs away, is only a memory, a denied future, a lost family. No matter how much it hurts others, for the mother it is a very physical grief; a feeling of failure to nurture the foetus.
“When you see other pregnant women you feel angry, like you want to kick them.” My counsellor said, and surprisingly, it broke the grief as I admitted the resentment for other women having what I had lost. Once she’d said this it no longer hurt to see pregnant women and better still, I could feel truly happy for them.
So what has all that got to do with anything? No matter how nice we are, there is a part of us that feels angry that we have lost this entirely feminine part of ourselves, a breast, and we cannot suppress this illogical anger that other women continue to have the usual two. Sorry and all that, ladies, but it can’t be helped and it isn’t long before we get over it.
One way of dealing with it is to avoid all possible sources of anger. Don’t go anywhere, don’t look anywhere. This means you become a hermit until the anger passes. No television. No shopping. All those pretty bras just seem to meet you at eye level at the top of every escalator.
This would be fine but you do have to go shopping. You have to confront the source of fear: the lingerie department. Enter this place with eyes averted, quickly pass the pretty pink ones with black lace, the white ones with the satin and silk, the underwired ones, the t-shirt ones, the ‘exaggerate your cleavage’ ones, the ‘uplift and flatter’ ones, uh, flatter, you’re feeling very flat by now.
Keep going – you have some of these at home - but soft and feminine isn’t for you anymore. Think reconstruction, think building, think hard hat. You are looking for scaffolding, hoists and iron girders.
Hah, at last you find them, hidden at floor level, and it hurts to bend. You squat, jeans stereotypically slipping down, and search for your materials. There, we have a choice, in black and white. You can begin to reconstruct with these alright.
Funny that in all these highly active years I scarcely owned a sports’ bra and now that so much as thinking about tennis makes me weak, I have a good collection of them.
Flick the dictionary pages forward now, to half-way through. Humour and irony are just one page apart.
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