Overcome by the strangeness of it all, I began to fall silent. Barely any of my peer group had children. I had friends around for a birthday cake and a cup of tea and I barely said a word. At my baby shower, I felt behind a pane of glass. I couldn’t convey what was happening to me. “She feels herself vast as this world; but this very opulence annihilates her, she feels that she herself is no longer anything,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir of pregnancy, managing to describe the experience with uncanny precision.[3]
