And I want to put down precisely what the humiliation was made of, because it was not about Kevin at all for those few minutes.

It was about a thing I had never once considered in ten years of wanting this.

I had thought about labour.

I had thought about feeding and about sleep and about the two cribs.

I had read a great deal about all of that.

I had never once thought about the forty-eight hours in the middle, in which a person who has just become a mother is less physically capable than she has been at any point since she was a toddler.

Nobody puts that in the books in a way you can feel in advance.