-- a therapeutic model that involves standing firmly in the present and looking back to the past for clarification of how you got to this place so that a healthier and more productive future might be envisioned. An ordering of experience through utterance and interpretation.

I don't believe I was setting out to find a unifying theme of family constraints and shared characteristics. But I was certainly not ever imagining this string, a thread, as loose and as elemental as this: that the only constant, enacted in all of its daily and ordinary horror, was to be the potential that female fertility offers up. That each generation of women would be hurt by this, despite everything: an increased awareness by advanced western society; a relaxation of moral codes; what the second wave of feminism was promising.

Bleak and shocking,

this awakening.

But how am I to say that the pain was contained only in the lives of the women? I cannot, because the unspoken and unwritten stories of the men remain locked up. The women's stories are only revealed as illegitimacies, as discoveries, disclosed secrets, buried goods.

So, where do I start with my saga of family, of blood relatives? With blood, with the life force that gets the whole business going: blood and sperm and eggs and sex, the incontrovertible truth of fertility. Warmth and compassion and comfort: the centrepiece of the family.