When I attended antenatal classes, I had no partner around and so I had to go alone. It was 1978, when single parents were not admired, women were still sinners, men were fun-loving chaps, double standards were flying high and there was no male version of a slut. What rubbish, I thought. Sod it, and off I went, dutifully, to the classes.
It is odd what makes one cry. One class was all about how to wash nappies. For a whole turgid hour. In what detergent/container, for how long, what brand of nappies/liners … I blubbed through most of it. Is this what life would be like, I wondered. Mainly nappy thoughts? But I plodded on, learning how to breathe and which two songs I would sing to myself while giving birth.
But at least things were beginning to change for the better. Men were encouraged to be present at births and people were daring to say “vagina” out loud, without shame. I visited a young woman at the forefront of change. Her toddler daughter was on the potty. She rose from it, calling out: “Mummy! Wipe my bagina!”
Personally, I thought “front bottom” more appropriate, a useful, catch-all term for the collection of parts that she was about to wipe – which didn’t, after all, include the bagina, which was interior and not wipeable. But perhaps the beginnings of change are tricky. You can easily push it too far. Which is what the lecturer at the final antenatal talk did.
She was trying to be kind, in a rather sickening way. “And you who are on your own,” she called out emotionally from the stage, “we love you, too!” Help! How much of her pity could I stand? But then my saviour arrived. The doors at the back of the hall flew open and in burst Carol, a potter and acquaintance of mine, her clothes thrillingly patterned, her hair striped and awry, in a cloud of pottery dust, and sat beside me.
On went the lecturer, exhorting us to do this and that, and then she asked too much of us. “I want you to make friends with your vaginas.”
Enough. We stood up together, ran for the door, into the refreshing street and leapt on to a bus, screaming and free at last. The brave new strategies might not have suited everyone, but they did help us to bond. Our friendship, cemented on the day of the vagina lecture, has lasted.
And the improvements continue. Men’s behaviour is under closer scrutiny and public censure, single parents are nothing out of the ordinary, we’ve had The Vagina Monologues, women are free-bleeding and drawing clitorises in colour on pavements all over the world. Progress? Is it? I’m not always sure which way we’re going.
