The Silence

 I only finished reading Marianne Levy's Don't Forget To Scream on Monday so it's too early to say if it's changed my life, but I've definitely learnt something (beyond confirmation of a bias that polite society tragically underestimates how much people need looking after – you know, that bias). Specifically I've learnt that it won't matter if a book has words like "SCREAM" and "UNSPOKEN" on the front; if it also carries the word "MOTHERHOOD" that third will work like an aneasthetic against any content warning. (To try and mitigate this I've photographed the book on my most unpleasant table.) Like shouting for help in a language with no word for help, the very words used to describe "being a mum" have made protest impossible: 

"Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic but it felt like the Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to make wrongthink impossible." 

 Marianne writes this in a chapter called Bumbo. In a later chapter, Some Discomfort, having described what the British Medical Journal terms the "wide range of physical and psychological consequences" of her episiotomy, she concludes:

"I almost hit delete before this made it onto the page." 

 I remember these two chapters as a swift double punch in the gut, but leafing back I find they're nearly a hundred pages apart. Partly that suggests how readable she is, but also it suggests why her cry for help needs to be the size of a book; because what Marianne describes is a living nightmare, and she descibes it over and over again, because she has to, because we're – I can't find another word for it – programmed by mumthink not to listen... Or, if we do listen, to place what we hear on its own separate, cuddlier scale of oppression. Because "being a mum" is clearly the most laughably trivial subject there is.

"Our dining table was designed for four..."

 Who are those Doctor Who monsters you forget as soon as you can't see them?

 Ideally, this is what "red-pilling" should refer to... I'd even read Marianne's interview in The Guardian, from which the photograph below is taken, describing very specifically what the book would contain, but still my mind was going: "Being a mum. Yeah. Crayons on flock wallpaper. Meh." And I know Marianne, a little, which is why I'm calling her Marianne, but look at that photo, look how cosy it is! It was only the interview's closing words which made me realise I might have missed something: “I’m desperate for men to read it; I’m desperate for people without kids to read it.”

 So I did, and I learnt something, and like any other sap who's had a veil lifted, I can't now think of anyone who shouldn't. Thanks therefore, Marianne, and congratulations.