Mantrapped by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780802142177
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A gynaecological history

Lord, what women will do to avoid such a history. All this fecundity and bleeding and womb-centrist behaviour! It's a thing of the past, thank God. I wrote a short story about it once, back in the early-Nineties, called A Libation of Blood. Those were the days, when a woman's love life was dictated by her physiology. No longer. You don't have period pains, you carry Nurofen. You don't have premenstrual symptoms, depression, anxiety and black violent rage unless you're up for murder and the defence wants to enter it as a plea - you have counselling and decline to believe it emanates from you. That the pre-menstrual you is the real you, and the sweet syrupy non-menstrual you just an overlay to help you get and keep your man and keep your children cosy is not easy to accept. Then the real you is too like the cat that kills the bird for comfort, and so best not incorporated into the scheme of things.

Surely, surely, thinks Doralee, in the last week of her hormonal cycle, my own cycle of self-assessment is nothing to do with the time of the month. High self-esteem three weeks of a monthly, moon-dictated cycle? Savage, vengeful, low self-esteem the last? How can it be? Just coincidence. The sanitary pad in the TV ads has wings and seems to fly elegantly through air.

Yet I'll swear that Doralee's basic self, what continues to link us to one another over decades, is not Heather's baby shower, not the baby moving beneath the skin, it is the dream of blood. I am no one to talk - having had an abortion once, between the third and fourth child, wedged between natural miscarriages. I think about the lost child murdered and thrown away - from time to time, not too often. A girl, perhaps, an ally in a family overwhelmed by males? I will never know. There seemed no other option at the time, nor was there. You destroy another or are yourself destroyed. Nature's way. Cats kill birds, so don't keep a cat, or don't look. We love the cat, we stroke the cat, we feed the cat on anonymous chunks of boiled-up, all-purpose animal flesh from a can with a pretty kitten on it. I know someone who has a vegetarian dog but if you deprive cats they just go and live next door. And you don't want that.

What else could I do? Well? The year, 1971, high summer, pregnant, six months after the last birth, an immediate family of six largely dependent upon my earnings, the new baby due to be born on my sister's birthday, her death still new in my head, her three orphaned children also my responsibility - my mother as well now, she now in her sixties and having no income of her own? As Doralee would say, 'It just wouldn't have worked.'' Sixteen years earlier the first baby had brought its own strength, will, energy and faith with it. This, the fourth, brought doubt and panic.

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