One does not, it is true, often hear a woman observe with incredulity that her baby won’t seem to go away, not even for a night so that she can get some sleep, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think it, hasn’t always thought it. I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like, and I wonder whether as a gender we contain a Darwinian stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of this subject. People without children certainly don’t seem very interested in anything that people with have to say about it: they approach parenthood blithely, as
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