I woke up this morning feeling very feminine and very flat. Graham was already up and out of the house, running most probably. He wakes up at seven, gets Theo going with his day, and dashes around the village in brief shorts making hearts go pit-a-pat. I can hear Theo in his room in his playpen. If he needs me he’ll call out, but he’s very self-sufficient. Who knows what imaginary playmates and imaginary responsibilities he has. He’s probably going to grow up to be a banker.
I stretched out flat in the empty bed, the summer wind blowing through the closed green shutters, the room sunk in gloom but cheerful with the sunlight that manages to creep in. My body felt very flat, even if I am pregnant. Flat and a bit as if I had been rolled out by some giant rolling pin. And I felt very female. Not so much that I had a yawning vagina, but that I definitely did not have a penis. There was a definite space between those legs. And I flashed on primitive woman. Even preprimitive woman. Maybe even earlier. Human life just after the fish crawled out of the ocean. The first humans or humanlike things that wandered the planet were like this. Tall and flat and squarish with an opening. Perhaps we reproduced like fish, just laying lots of eggs. Or were we like the seahorse, which takes turns being male and female? And then for some reason our clitoris decided to become a penis on some of us. And our vagina shrunk up into that little seam that men have between their testes and their anus. You’ve never seen that? I assure you I have.
This is probably some scientific concept that has been much written about somewhere and I just missed it. There was one species, and it subdivided so that some of them could hunt and some of them could gather and mother. So men were designed to kill, and women were designed to protect. We seem to have a lot of trouble getting over it. The ritual killing required to become a warrior seems to be imbedded in men pretty deeply, although women seem to be able to get over their nurture programming more easily.
So there you have it. Me in bed, flat and somehow aqueous, just the way we all were before we got those hanging testicles and penis and pendulous bosoms and became forever different.