Originally posted on greenfairydotcom
Too busy coping with having my braces torn off with a pair of pliers and a Dremel and a retainer that makes me sound like Eliza Doolittle with a mouth full of marbles attempting an impression of Janet Street-Porter to remember to blog about the five year anniversary of my sterilisation last week.
In the first six months after the tubal I appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers as the curious girl who has everything going for her so why oh why oh why? The fees from the interviews and pictures paid for the operation nearly three times over. My snip seemed to have coincided with a wave of interest in deliberately childless women, but after a while I got tired of repeating my reasons and rebuffing accsations of selfishness and started to politely decline the requests to explain myself. I still recieve invites a couple of times a year to radio talk shows or to speak to journalists who think they've hit upon a new trend, but these days the questions have changed. They're now interested in whether or not I still back my decision, like my mother asking me every time I visit if I'm *still* vegetarian though I have been since I was fourteen. I was even emailed by one of my original interviewers to ask me if my biological clock had started ticking yet. I wrote back and asked if he was still married, or if he'd grown out of that phase, but got no reply.
Occasionally I wonder whether it's a shame that I will never get to brainwash members of forthcoming generations with the pearls of my accumulated wisdom. I picture myself aged eighty, sitting by the fire in a rocking chair with knitting in one hand a a pipe in the other (the exact gender of this fictional grandparent is always a bit shaky) telling the two adoring, doe-eyed children at my feet why when pole dancing they should under no circumstances attempt the caterpillar manoeuvre if the pole hasn't been properly cleaned first, and how best to deal with the special kind of throwing up that comes after drinking Guinness mixed with vodka. But then one of them wont stop asking why the sky is blue and how trains work and why there's hair coming out of my ears and the other one pees expansively all over my slippers and the scene ends with me being led away in handcuffs to serve out the rest of my days in a correctional facility after having caved in their heads with the poker.
