Sure, I don’t know it all … but what I do know I feel should be shouted from the rooftops and spray-painted on the sides of buses. As women in the work place, we are confident to give our opinion, even wallow in our knowledge – after all, our work is something we are very close to and we can, therefore, tell everyone that we are good at what we do and best they trust and take our advice. The Suffragettes paved a very significant way for us, only for us to be paralysed by fear of judgment when we speak of things we (yes, I am going to say it), as women, are most qualified to know. I’ve put my theories (and a few hand-picked from other qualified parties) into practice, I have got the results I knew I’d get, I have already done a fabulous job and even my son knows this … yet I am gagged. It’s unjust that, in this forum, I am not allowed to gloat a little about my abilities. Self-righteous … perhaps. But when you weigh up the options, why the hell not?
Posts Tagged ‘criticism’
From Self-loathing to Self-righteous
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008The Fridge Rules
Monday, November 12th, 2007They are there, the only rules of the house, stuck on the fridge where no one could miss them. What draws your attention to look closer is the old birthday card stuck with the same magnet: the picture is of a twin-set-clad 50s housewife with a sugar-coated smile and the caption reads ‘I tried to be kind but it was easier to be cruel’. A coincidence? Yes. Fitting? You bet!
But, I digress. There were rules in place; rules that would keep the home and family together; seemingly the only thing I could cling to with that claim. And it seems I was the only one who could cling to The Rules. Granted, I am a process person and my husband, he is not … but, hey, is that any reason to come home every evening and criticize the rules … criticize my job?
Too Posh to Push? (Part 1)
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007One of the reasons I left the UK was because I could no longer deal with the NHS propaganda that made women feel like they were either failures as women or just weren’t particularly interested in breaking
a sweat during the birthing process. The former touches a nerve in even the most non-maternal woman and the latter conjures up images of a woman who hands her baby to a wet nurse as soon as it emerges from the bloody wound.
Not particularly into the whole maternal, mother nature thing (which, one has to admit, is not so much mother nature as total fad these days), I knew I would have a c-section – it’s unnatural to try and get
something that big out of such a small exit. Whether the gynae was looking after his schedule or my continence is irrelevant. When he told me the head of my foetus was too large to exit ‘naturally’, I was relieved to have the medical back-up for my instinctual beliefs – after all who said a small slice across the lower abdomen to extract a living being isn’t natural.
There are revelations that follow. I do, however, have to pre-empt them with a disclaimer: I still believe in the advances of medical science enough to believe that a c-section is the only way and I would never go back and change a thing.
