It’s my first general anaesthetic. I’m due to go under in 45 minutes. I’m at the threshold of the hero’s journey into the abyss. In this instance, the eight steps of the hero’s journey go like this:
Step 1. Disrobe and Body Paint.
The surgeon comes in and we shake hands. I pull down my pants, exaggerated ‘low-rider’ style, and hitch up my T-shirt to my chest. He has a green marker pen which he uses to draw arrows and lines to indicate my groin hernias, then three shorter lines where he intends to puncture my abdomen. The first of these goes just under my naval (for the camera), the second directly below that to inflate my abdomen with gas so he can see where he’s going (like using a torch under the blankets), and the third (to insert tools through) below the second.
“See you soon.”
As a child of the 70s and 80s I was raised with the idea that women could (and did) do anything, and always eschewed the ‘traditional’ feminine trappings of makeup, skirts and heels. As I got older I became aware that this slogan was frequently understood to mean that women should do everything, including juggling work and family, but it was not until I started thinking about whether – and if – I wanted children that I fully realised the extent to which social attitudes towards motherhood remain among the most potent and pervasive constraints on female (and male) identity and freedom.
Fischel Schneersohn was born around 1885/88 in Kamianets Podolski under the Russian Empire. He studied medicine in Berlin from 1908. By 1920 he was in Kiev, working as a children’s doctor and co-editing the short-lived Hebrew literary journal Kadima. He then returned to Berlin to direct a Jewish children’s centre. He is variously recorded as having specialised in psychiatry and psychology; the non-fiction books and articles he published in both Yiddish and German certainly belong more to the field of psychology than psychiatry. But he was also interested in non-scientific literature, with many of his Yiddish novels published in the 1920s and 30s, also in German and Hebrew translation.
During her recent trip to the United Nations, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used her speech to recommit the government to making New Zealand the “best place in the world to be a child”, ensuring that: