LIFE is a feminist issue. Story of growing up girl.

Everytime I speak my mind about things that matter to me I...

always want to win, says my father
am a bit heavy, says my brother.
am the crazy one, says my friend's husband.
am obsessed, says N.

My voice must seem like a thunder on a clear sky, the rumble of the avalanche, the shaking of the earthquake. It is unexpected, sudden, threatening. It is an alarm, loud and piercing: it alerts of a possible attack and danger.

I am only speaking for God's sake!!

It is not my intention to scare anyone.

 I keep talking but I stop saying. And gradually, in all that silence, amidst all that stillness, the most basic opinions start resonating like roars in a valley. Too few voices everywhere. The more quiet I try to be the louder I am, it seems.
And the most destructive.

It is not what I want! It is not how I meant it to be! It is not who I am!

No more pops in the sky. Now the sound is regular. It is the lulling voice of planes on a London sky, of trains running at the edge of a garden, of traffic on a main road. The voice is there, constant and repetitive, present and reliable.

I am here.
I am staying.
My life.
My terms.
My way.
It may take some getting used to.

That is all I am saying. Listening is what is needed.

Or I will say it. And say it. And say it...

The Power of Art, Friendship, Networking, Facebook and Laziness.

A lone-trip to California years ago has hammered in me how much beauty is waiting for you around the corner if only you have the courage to walk through it. At that time I had no choice. I was on holiday on my own aware that had I not taken chances, explored, kept myself open to people and experiences I'd have spent 30 days alone in a hostel common room. And so from the very beginning I seemed to have signed up for a crashtest on my level of acceptance and ability to adapt to new circumstances. It started from the beginning: the flight was delayed and I missed my connection in unknown Atlanta. I shouldn't have worried. I was put up in a fab room at the Hilton. Later, the minute I dropped my bag off at the San Diego Youth Hostel I was offered a lift to the beach by two yankee boys. In my head a soundtrack made up of my mum's warnings and all the movies I had ever watched about silly trusty girls. Yet I went and had a great day. From then on the improbable and the unexpected followed: a spur of the moment night hop over the Mexican border to taste Tijuana's infamous clubs in the company of two funky Americans and two lovely but slightly scaredy-cats Italians, a James Dean type of near-death experience on the CA 101 to San Francisco with an Aussie boy an a rented cabrio, a psychedelic encounter with a generous and sweet marjuana grower and a trip on his van to deliver some to San Francisco's terminally illed, a fun night with a bunch of drunken charming Rhys Meyers-lookalikes Irish lads, dancing at the gay pride are just some of the many I recount.

Indeed I often felt lonely and wondered what I was doing there, why I had chosen to do this, alone. And I'd mop for a while feeling sorry for myself. But then, choiceless, I'd pick myself up and go somewhere, unwittingly toward something. And this something was always a door to something magnificent. Very much like Dorothy opening the door of her gray bedroom onto the colourful Wizard of Oz.
I promised myself to keep all those wise lessons in my head once back in England and back to a relationship that was suffering from fatigue and stagnation. The relationship did not survive but I kept trying living by this matra, with as much force and intention as possible within the restriction of a non-holiday setting. I was helped by my faith in the world and its inhabitants, having being lucky enough to experience the positives that life has to offer far more times than I have done with its opposites. Admittedly it has not always been easy and it has become even harder now with the anchoring that three human attachments provide - their needs, wellbeing, desires not always matching my own, their corners often being not the same as mine. Sometimes pulling my family along with me across my own threshold has worked. More often it seems we each have our own individual corners to find and turn. 
 
And so a heartfelt thank you to Julia who with her artwork today has reminded me once again 'to go with the flow, expect the unexpected, not worry if things don’t turn out as planned, and remain open to all possibilities.'

Here is the blog of her 30 Day challenge http://becreativedaily.com/. It starts today. Hope it has the power to uplift your day too.

A man's perspective.

Tim Lott's new column on The Saturday Guardian shows that you can be a men's man and still believe in equality at the same time. But most af all that we are all in this together, that we do not hold all the answers, that we make mistakes often with the best intention at heart and that every step is often a jump in the dark.

Hurray!!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/14/tim-lott-man-about-house?Tim Lott shows that you can be a men's man and pro-feminism at the same time. hurray!!!INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

Look great when burning the bra!

It still strikes me that one is often asked, 'ARE YOU A FEMINIST THEN?' (picture horrified/pitiful/patronising face to go with it) when pronouncing basic innocent half sentences such as 'I disagree' 'I don't iron' 'My husband does it' 'I have friend of the opposite sex I go for lunch with' etc.

If the battle is still on, as these comments highlight, I see no reasons why a girl (or anybody - boy, man or woman - for that matter!) should not look her magnificent best even whilst burning the feminist bra or when chained at the gates of patriarchy.
Here is a great blog to learn invaluable lessons on how to look effortlessly great. This is crucial for someone like me who too often makes the mistake of neglecting one side of herself in favour of another. For example, when I feed the mind I am not able to do anything else but also feed the body with rubbish aplenty whilst altogether forgetting to look in the mirror; then when I concentrate on my abs all I do is burn calories by constantly roaming the local TK-Max for lycras; and when I decide to be careful about what I eat my daily cultural intake consist in swallowing an episode of The Apprentice! Why oh why can't I have it all? (Another reasons to blame my parents for trying to raise me as a boy - I don't seem to be able to multitask where a beauty regime is concerned.)

And so I put all my faith in Kelly, I am sure she can make miracles. Here is her fantastic Blog:  http://www.lookgreateverydayuk.com/

Oh, if you happen to be looking out for me at the next Race for Life I will be the one that having just passed the finishing line looks like she has just woken up and threw something on.

'Your Voice in my Head' by Emma Forrest.

Another book I stumbled upon in my local charity shop. 

I loved it and could not stop thinking about it for days (and not just because of the celebrity gossip element of GH). It made Amy Winehouse's death even sadder in my eyes and made me even more determined to seek help for whetever it is that troubles my head.

At the moment I feel that tools may help us make sense of what we feel and that as for anything else differet tools fit different people and different situations. It may take a while to find the spanner that fits. And so from tomorrow I am trying a new, for me, approach. Could CBT mellow me down and stop me from always looking benevolently at myself and accusatorily towards others?
"It is very arrogant to presume you know what someone else is thinking or the reason behind their actions. As you cannot read theirs they cannot read yours. You must understand what you feel and let those close to you know so they can act accordingly!" tells me the therapist. She instructs me to repeat to myself in front of the mirror "When you do x I feel y. I want you to do z" and then I have to try telling someone face to face when their action has created in me a strong emotion.
I have tried it. Cheating slightly as I chickened out and sent a text, but hey it worked!! (Note to self: why chickening out? worth exploring.) Damon Bradley did not get all defensive and verbally aggressive as he usually does, we did not get into a competition but instead, to my utter surprise, he got it and did exactly what I wanted from him and, most importantly he did it lovingly.
Too true that my original plan (involving sulk all week, attack DB for something he was now too late to do anything about it) would have hardly been a success story. It was a nonsensical plan, yet one that I have found myself adopting often. I thought it a righteous way to behave - if one has done something wrong, one will have to be punished for it, unless one admits so and apologises. No wonder we always ended up arguing and saying unpleasant things to eachother!
Instead we had a brilliant week, and felt closer than we've had in a while.

And so I have since been doing my homework: recount my feelings daily and connect them to an event; try setting boundaries - finding those boundaries proved harder than imagined.

Tomorrow my first official session. Feel very apprehensive as this is going to push me out of my confort zone - if I like talking about myself I may not like to DO things differently. I fear it will try to change the way I think of myself.

http://www.emmaforrest.com/

"... it's a much harder job for a man,

... that's why male escorts charge a lot more than women do." tells an interviewed Kevin to Katie Glass in her article on male prostitutes (published in the Sunday Times Magazine on the 10/7/11 - cannot provide a link as The Sunday Times requests a subscription).
The comment enraged me and I want to reflect on why it has striken a cord. Has it upset me because is based on old assumptions and works at reinforces them? Did I want to reflect on why it is harder for a man? (Is it because of the performance? or because men do it better or they treat it as a job rather than pleasure?)  All the above certainly apply but it was the shockingly tone of absolute that surrounded such statement that astounded me and the fact that Glass did not pick up on that. I wondered if from her pat it could have been a well thought stratagem to make the wrongness the whole more obvious to the reader. I am not convinced but can only hope.
Because that is the issue here. Somehow we were all, men and females, led to believe that, to various degrees, what men do is harder than what women do. Even when what we do is exactly the same.
The tacticts used fall into two categories. The first puts women down: we are unable do it as well because of our nature, etc. The other puts elevates us: we are far more advanced that can do it better and in less time. The former uses policies, biology, science etc whereas the latter uses our pride. Both are leavers to contain, construct and imprison.

The point I had when I started this post 7 hours ago and a trip to Ikea in between has vanished but I am sure you got the gist. As you can see I am blaming m-l for shortcomings that may have been there regardless. Something for me to bear in mind.

In relation to this concept of being trapped into and by a construction I will suggest a book:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penelopiad Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad. I loved it.

Beginning...

Some years ago, searching for a house my brand new family could move into, I stumbled upon an interesting book in a charity shop. A sign? It seemed so to me and maybe what its anonymous author, 'A Graduate in the University of Matrimony', had in mind, for he or she dedicates it 'To those brave men and women who have ventured, or who intend to venture, into that state which is "a blessing to a few, a curse to many, and a great uncertainty to us all, [...] in admiration for their courage.'
I felt I had no choice but to buy it!
Since then in similar fashion to the very marriage it was meant to guide, rather than be a source of enrichment, the book sat ignored and forgotten. Do not assume this is due to faults with its prose or content, for I had no idea about either: I had only managed to get to page fifteen and I did not remember when or how. Poor performance one may think but in the current climate it was quite an achievement really, considering that reading, always an activity as fundamental to me as breathing, since marrying and having children, had become an insormountable task.  
Books collecting dust offered a stark reflection of the course my life took since getting married and of course also of the marriage itself.

I have found married life, the hardest thing I have ever done, far more challenging than having children and raising them. When I say 'married life' (or m-l from now on) in my case means the sharing of my life with another human being and our offsprings. For me this is crucial at the moment for I feel (and hope to be proven wrong by those without children and by my own researches) that my m-l without children could have turned out quite different. If this is an illusion that needs to or will be shattered by my voyage rests to be seen.

Some share this feeling, others condemn me or look at me with pity for not feeling the whole package of m-l as one is meant to, as one should: as part of life, or life itself, a skip in the park hand, and so on.

It could be that I have lived had a 'life of Riley' previous to m-l. A life embedded with the luxuries and conforts of independence of thought and judgement, freedom of movement and of choice. A life in which admittedly I had not suffered any real true hardships but more to the point a life where equality between the sexes was the current currency.
As a child I wanted to be like Pippi Longstocking and I wanted to live the way she did: by herself but not alone. I wanted to lead not a solitary life but an independent life, a life where I was in charge, surrounded by plenty of friends and beloved animals, within which I was free to be me. I also spent long Italian summer days reading Scott O'Dell 'The Island of the Blue Dolphin' and re-enacting Karana's survival adventure in my garden, dreaming of an island all for myself. From the library I kept borrowing over and over a novel about the adventure of a wild pony, the title of which I cannot recall. Today I sob inconsolably, to my family amusement, watching Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron galloping freely in his land, his stolen freedom feeling way too close to home.
After a few cagey and rebellious teenager years I managed to break free and moved to London. London has always been my Wild West. Only in London I felt truly free as was able to develop a truly mine sense of self.
I spent 10 years in such blessed state. Even with ups and downs and positive and not so positive adventures and encounters I was living my life and I loved it.
Then one day I met what I never thought it existed: the soulmate, the other half, the one to walk with for the rest of your life.
What I did not know, and still don't know, was how to walk this walk. My lifetime spent perfecting the solitary life meant that m-l felt like being captivity. Here I was saddled and bridled by the person I trusted the most would preserve the essence of ME. This is the story of a once wild horse who tries to make sense and survive in her new stable compounds.
It is not intended as a guide, nor a handbook. I offer no solutions or advice (not directly at least), hardly knowing what I am doing myself. But I will share my experience, my thoughts, my attempts to make it work not just for the children's sake or for the couple, but for my own sake, having recently concluded that ultimately in order to work m-l has to work for me too.

With the book at hand I will write about my attempts to make sense of it; record progresses and failures; point at sources of help; analyse the culture in which my experience live and from which it has grown. In doing so I aim at looking at the position and role that women hold in our times within matrimony, hopefully as cross-culturally as I can. It is my primary interest to assess whether my condition is an isolated case caused by my own personal upbringing and proper to my individual personality or if patterns of similarities can be found when compared wth the story of others. For this reason every comment will be truly appreciated.
Perhaps a global medium such as the internet and a tool such as a blog could allow for the unveiling of an interesting picture of the 21st century woman within marriage.

But enough for now.

This is the beginning... the beginning of the blog, but also the beginning of something I do not yet know. More to come. More about what happend before, more about what is happening now and more about what has yet to come.