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And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began —a moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.
既已跪在地上祈禱，讓我保持這個姿勢，回溯到三年前，這整則故事開始的時刻——那時的我也一樣跪在地上祈禱。
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I'd recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o'clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and con-fusion and grief.
然而在三年前的場景中，一切大不相同。當時的我不在羅馬 ，而是在紐約郊區那棟跟我先生才買下不久的大房子的樓上浴室里。寒冷的十一月，凌晨三點。我先生睡在我們的床上，我躲在浴室內。大約 持續了四十七個晚上，就像之前的那些夜晚， 我在啜泣。痛苦的嗚咽，使得一汪眼淚、鼻涕在我眼前的浴室地板上蔓延開來，形成一小灘羞愧、恐懼、困惑與哀傷的湖水。
I don't want to be married anymore.
我不想再待在婚姻中。
I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.
我拼命讓自己漠視此事，然而實情卻不斷地向我逼來。
I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to have a baby.
我不想再待在婚姻中。我不想住在這棟大房子里。我不想生孩子。
But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and I—who had been together for eight years, married for six—had built our entire life around the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of thirty, I would want to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown weary of trav-eling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop. (The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me.) But I didn't—as I was appalled to be finding out—want any of these things. Instead, as my twenties had come to a close, that deadline of THIRTY had loomed over me like a death sentence, and I discovered that I did not want to be pregnant. I kept waiting to want to have a baby, but it didn't happen. And I know what it feels like to want something, believe me. I well know what desire feels like. But it wasn't there. Moreover, I couldn't stop thinking about what my sister had said to me once, as she was breastfeeding her firstborn: "Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you com-mit."
但是照說我應當想生孩子的。我三十一歲。我先生和我——我們在一起的時間已八年，結婚已六年——一生的共同期望是，在過了“老態龍鐘”的三十歲后，我愿意定下心來養兒育女。我們雙方都預料，到時候我開始厭倦旅行，樂于住在一個忙碌的大家庭里，家里塞滿孩子和自制拼被，后院有花園，爐子上燉著一鍋溫馨的食物。（這一幅對我母親的準確寫照，是一個生動的指標；它指出要在我自己 和撫養我的女強人之間作出區分，對我而言是多么困難。）然而我震驚地發現，自己一點都不想要這些東西。反而，在我的二十幾歲年代要走入尾聲，將面臨死刑般的“三十”大限時，我發現自己不想 懷孕。我一直等著想生孩子，卻沒有發生。相信我，我知道想要一樣東西的感覺；我深知渴望是什么感受。但我感受不到。再說，我不斷想起我姐姐在哺育第一胎時告訴過我的話“生小孩就像在你臉上 刺青。做之前一定得確定你想這么做。”
How could I turn back now, though? Everything was in place. This was supposed to be the year. In fact, we'd been trying to get pregnant for a few months already. But nothing had happened (aside from the fact that—in an almost sarcastic mockery of pregnancy—I was ex-periencing psychosomatic morning sickness, nervously throwing up my breakfast every day). And every month when I got my period I would find myself whispering furtively in the bath-room: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me one more month to live . . .
但現在我怎能挽回？一切都已定案。照說這就是那一年。事實上，我們嘗試懷孕已有好幾個月。然而什么事也沒發生（除了——像是對懷孕的反諷——我經歷到心理因素影響的害喜，每天都神經質地把 早餐吐出來）。每個月大姨媽來的時候，我都在浴室里暗自低語：謝天謝地，謝天謝地 ，讓我多活一個月……
