This post was actually supposed to be posted before the previous one. However, that one needed to be written and published then, so it’s the turn of this one now.
A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to Helen Lewis’ book, Difficult Women, through Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It’s not something I would have ever come across were it not for Charles and his enjoyment of Radio 4 in the mornings. The introduction has been entirely enlightening and, although I knew many of the women she discusses, Helen’s writing brings them alive. It brings them into the 21st century with fine art.
I have never been a feminist
Well, I think it would be more accurate to say that I have never identified myself as a feminist. I don’t believe that women should have to be the fairer sex, while the man is the strong one, the breadwinner, THE man. I’ve realised this is the case even more so since my marriage ended.
As a young child, I was never ‘feminine’… a fact which disappointed my mother much. She’s told me many times she ‘dreamed of us painting our nails together’… well, that was the general gist of it anyway. I wasn’t that girl. I was content with my nose stuck in a book and writing the most excellent novel ever written. Hair, makeup, and other feminine fancies didn’t appeal to me at all. I believe I got told my hair was like witch’s hair too. Isn’t it funny what comes back to you when you aren’t trying to remember?
Throughout my teens, I strayed even further from the path of the picture of a real woman…
Makeup really didn’t interest me, while my hair was bobbed at it’s longest… I had little interest in domestic pastimes. I preferred to be ‘stuck in my head’; academia and life’s unanswerable questions were more likely to really get me going. Motherhood didn’t even appear on my radar.
Desperately, though, I tried to fit in. I wanted to make it with my peers. After a lifetime of always feeling different, and not knowing why I worked so hard. My late teens turned into a drunken blur of one-night-stands and keeping up the pretence of being normal and fitting in. Finding out I was pregnant changed all of that.
Motherhood seemed like the answer to my problems.
I would find a place now, surely every other woman in the world with a child would have something in common with me… A ready-made friend. Perfect, it wouldn’t fail… it couldn’t.
I found I disappeared the other way. I lost the quirks that made me, well, me and threw everything into being a parent. I shoehorned myself into parenthood and domesticity. I had my second child in 2009, got married in 2013, had more children in 2014, 2015 and 2017. I completed the perfect picture of the ideal life – me, a wife, a mother, with my husband, my children. The image of perfection was there… But the result was destructive.
“Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else.”
Helen Lewis quotes Simone de Beauvoir in her book, “Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else.” It’s true, isn’t it? The gender stereotype was already laid out for me, but I was the one who tried to fill it. Well, I did know, but a fish doesn’t see the water it’s swimming in. (That’s a quote from someone, but I can’t remember who, I’ll have to ask Charles and get back to you!)
After three decades of cultural conditioning, I’m finally learning to be comfortable with who I am. Learning to be comfortable with not fitting the perception of the social norm. The conditioning can’t be undone overnight but, I’m making an effort, and I think that counts for more than staying the same.
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