Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.

Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.