What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.''Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.''But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
growing-up, phases, women