‘You are like my cat.’
So I was told when eight-and-a-half months pregnant, just before going on maternity leave from the bookshop. I had hauled myself up from putting a book away on the bottom shelf — no mean feat when one is quite so heavily spherical — and this cat-loving young woman had caught me exhaling a little too vociferously. I certainly didn’t feel especially feline, but as it transpired her cat had just had kittens, and I looked just like the cat had looked before giving birth. The lady giggled.
Working in the bookshop while visibly pregnant has made me aware how touchingly awestruck we all still are by the miracle of childbirth. Once my belly had protruded past the awkward stage of being mistaken for too big a lunch, I found that conversations about having a baby rose to over ten a day.
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