I Was Dilapidated
Émile Bernard, Mother and Child, 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain.
“What did you have?”
“A boy.”
“Congratulations.”
If your first child is a girl I’m told people say: “How nice.” How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also—embarrassingly—slightly proud that he’s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don’t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be “a good mother” according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in
