Soon after my first child was born, I became unexpectedly obsessed with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It was the only story that I could find myself in. Yes, that’s right, the tale about the salesman who awakes one morning to find himself turned into a gigantic insect.
Stay with me. There are actually a lot of similarities between Gregor Samsa’s situation and the postnatal period. Samsa’s body has completely changed (his ‘domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments’; mine was unrecognisable after pregnancy and childbirth). He is isolated in his room, away from society, to work out what is going on. And Samsa struggles to adapt for some time: ‘What has happened to me?’
