Further Under the Duvet (15 page)

What’s that all about?

While we’re on the subject, the tension created by disproportionate female success goes into overdrive when children appear. I know a couple where the woman is a hugely successful lawyer and her partner installs kitchens. Recently their baby was hospitalized and the man point-blank refused to take time off work. He actually said – can you believe this? – ‘I can’t let my boss down.’ A bizarre conviction persists that sick children are the responsibility of women. Even when both partners work it’s nearly always the women who get up in the middle of the night when the children puke all over their Beatrix Potter pyjamas.

Despite our best efforts, Himself and myself don’t have children and at this stage it doesn’t look too likely that we
will. But in the early halcyon days of our ‘trying’ we entertained wild notions of having at least five. Three girls, two boys. I accepted that I would have to be the one to be pregnant for nine months – that this was one thing he couldn’t do for me – but the plan was that he’d take up the reins of childcare as soon as the head was engaged.

I would return to work immediately, operating out of some far-flung – or sound-proofed, if the house wasn’t big enough to have far-flung bits – corner of the house, while he got on with being a mum. We joked that I would appear only occasionally, when all five of my offspring would be cleaned up and presented for inspection, and I would walk among them, like Prince Charles meeting and greeting the staff at a ball-bearings factory. Now and then I would stoop graciously and enquire, ‘And which one of my issue are you?’ When I had swanned away, one of the children would enquire plaintively, ‘Daddy, who was that funny lady?’ And he would reply, ‘That was your mummy.
You
remember, you met her that other time.’

Anyway, the babies never arrived but I’m sure that no matter how sound-proofed the room, I would sense if my children were crying and would be unable to stop myself rushing to them. Another writer I know is in exactly that situation. She works at home and her husband takes care of the children, but she can’t stop herself from interfering whenever they’re in distress. Maternal instinct or control freakery? Either way it’s an issue.

So there we are. Recently a (female) journalist described Himself as ‘the perfect man’ and it’s not because she slept with him – at least I don’t think it’s that – but because he
has so graciously assumed the supportive role in our set-up. I can’t deny that I’m deeply grateful and full of admiration for him but – and all due respect to him – women have been doing this sort of thing for ever. Clearly, men who are willing to play second fiddle to their more successful female partners are still regarded as exciting novelties – and here’s the tricky bit – by women as much as by men.

I know it’s still in its early days but women are never going to convince men that the situation is no big deal if they persist in metaphorically carrying men on their shoulders through the cheering streets every time they earn less than their partners and don’t sulk or become impotent because of it. If we act like it’s the norm, perhaps it’ll become the norm…

First published in the
Guardian,
September 2002
.

All I’m saying is, it made sense at the time. Getting married on 29 December mightn’t strike everyone as the smartest move, but hear me out. I was living in London but getting married in Ireland; lots of my Irish guests were also living in London but would be in Dublin for Christmas. I’d be saving them an extra trip.

And being Ireland, the chances were that the weather would be as nice in December as it would be in August. Unfortunately, however, that was not to be and two days before the wedding, the day most of the British guests (including my husband-to-be, i.e. Himself) were flying in, the weather took a turn for the very ferocious. All flights from the UK were delayed and the first little seedlings of fear sprouted in my stomach: It’s a sign. He won’t be coming. I’ll be jilted at the altar.

I’d never been one of those women who’d hankered after a white wedding, planning the dress, the bridesmaids, the ring, etc. If ever I thought of a traditional wedding the only image that came to mind was of me and my father in a white Rolls-Royce, circling the block again and again as we waited for a groom who was already halfway to Rio. Every time we neared the church, some usher would yell, ‘Go round again! Give it one more go!’

Then Himself rang to say that his flight had landed in Dublin but he was going to wait at the airport for his best man, Guy, who was due in shortly on another flight. But time passed and he didn’t appear and I couldn’t ring him because nine years ago only gobshites had a mobile. My hysteria built and gathered momentum, especially as we were having the church rehearsal that evening.

‘It’s a sign,’ I announced. ‘He’s not going to marry me.’

‘He’s in the country,’ everyone kept saying loudly at me. ‘Of course he’s going to marry you.’

‘Right now,’ I said, ‘he’s probably buying a one-way ticket to Rio.’

Himself rang again to say that Guy’s flight had been badly delayed but was expected to land any minute and they’d both see us soon. But they still hadn’t arrived by the time we were leaving for the rehearsal. Then the doorbell rang and I nearly puked with relief. But it wasn’t him, it was my friends Laura and Bruce who, when they saw the tearful, highly strung state of me, decided to come along to the church with us.

In the car, in a thin hysterical voice, I outlined my position. ‘It was stupid me thinking I’d ever land a lovely man like Himself. All my relationships are disasters and, with my history, I’m the ideal person to be jilted. I have “jiltee” written all over me. Of course, we’ll laugh about it one day, it’ll make a great story: two days before my wedding my fiancé ran away to Rio.’

‘What’s this obsession with Rio?’ I heard someone mutter.

‘I bet right now,’ I continued, ‘he’s boarding the flight to Rio.’

‘There are no direct flights to Rio from Dublin,’ my dad said, like this was a comfort.

In the church my mother gave me a small yellow and blue capsule – some member of the Valium family – and I ‘married’ Bruce.

Right at the end of the ‘ceremony’, Himself strode into the church like a movie star, his hair all windswept, his coat covered with hail, and took me in his arms.

‘You didn’t go to Rio,’ I said, in wonder.

‘The flights were full,’ he said.

However, the great thing about having a meltdown two days before my wedding meant that on the day itself, I was astonishingly calm; I’d got it all out of my system. I went to my local hairdresser’s to have my complicated flower-woven updo done. (I know that nowadays make-up artists and manicurists come to the bride’s home to beautify her, but nine years ago it was more of a DIY job.)

My hair took a very long time, longer than I’d expected and yet I was serenity itself. Even when Mrs Benson, mother of my friend Suzanne, and guest at my wedding, stuck her head under my dryer and said, in confusion, ‘It
is
today, isn’t it? Because if it is, you’re getting married in an hour.’

When I emerged from the hairdresser’s I was all set to get a taxi but, like a magical coach, my local bus, the 46A, drew up right in front of me. I boarded it, was let off my fare and alighted at my home stop ten minutes later, the congratulations of the other passengers still ringing in my ears.

I got home at 1.50, I was getting married at 2.30, I was still calm. My sisters – my two bridesmaids – were hysterical, fighting for mirror space. Quietly, without bothering anyone, I got myself dressed, and did my make-up. I helped my sister with her zip, then, after much thundering up and down the
stairs, suddenly everyone was gone from the house and it was quiet and calm and it was just me and Dad, and the fancy car was waiting outside and one of us said, ‘We might as well go, so.’

The ceremony and the getting married and all that was lovely. It was only afterwards, when we had to go outside for photos, that the weather, once again, became an issue. It was indescribably cold, so cold that I wondered if it might snow – which would look lovely in the photos – but a friend of my father said, ‘It’s too cold to snow.’ Then several other men joined in, looking at the sky and opining, ‘Ah, too cold to snow, I’d say.’ Which strikes me as one of the most bizarre statements I’ve ever heard.

My dress was made of thin satin and, months earlier, when I’d been getting it designed, I had toyed vaguely with getting a white fur-like capelet and muff, then decided not to bother, certain that love would keep me warm. But I was wrong. I’ve never been so cold in my life. In the end I had to beg the photographer to call a halt to the outdoor pictures of Himself and myself.

And the group shot on the steps of the church shows an incomplete line-up of our guests because the photographer took so long fiddling with light and perspective that several of them went back into the church to warm up and missed it all.

After the wedding, when several of the guests had to return to the UK, the weather – already atrocious – took a turn for the worse. The car ferry was able to leave Duún Laoghaire but was unable to dock at Holyhead and several of our guests, including my parents-in-law, had to spend twenty-four hours
trapped on the high seas. Finally they were permitted onto dry land, and my exhausted parents-in-law got into their car and made for home. However, less than a mile from their village, their car skidded on a patch of ice and they ended up in a ditch, lucky to be alive.

June for the next one, definitely.

First published in
Brides Magazine,
December 2004
.

The ‘F’ word. The bad ‘F’ word. I don’t mean ‘feck’. I don’t even mean ‘fuck’. I mean ‘feminism.’

I came of age just after the so-called sexual revolution and the message I picked up was that all the hard work had been done and that now everyone was lovely and equal. The world belonged to women. Men would be our lackeys and provide zipless fucks on demand and we would stalk through the boardrooms of the land in our sheer tights and red lipstick. (Well, actually, I never thought
I
could, but I thought other women could if they wanted.)

But funnily enough, the last thing I wanted to be called was a feminist: feminists were shrill, hairy-legged harridans who couldn’t get a boyfriend. And they were buzz-wreckers. I felt guilty for wearing high shoes – a tiny invisible feminist sat on my shoulder, mocking, ‘Look at you, pandering to men; see how your high heels make you walk with a wiggle’ – when actually it was only because I was five foot one and wanted to see the number of my bus over people’s heads.

My relationship with men, fraught at the best of times, was further complicated because I half-expected to be investigated by the Boyfriend Police, in order to check I was treating myself with enough respect. Whenever I was heartbroken over a man, I was braced against the Wicked Feminist Witch
of the West bursting into my tear-sodden bedroom in her dungarees and Doc Martens and saying, ‘Hah! That’s what you get for hanging around with men. You should have joined the women’s collective and none of this would have happened. No more than you deserve,
girlie
.’

The enemy had been reconfigured – no longer men, but the women who’d fought for us. Obviously, a certain amount of revisionism happens after every revolution, but how could I have been so naïve? The only thing that stops me from dying of shame is that I wasn’t the only woman who ever said, ‘Of course I believe in equality for women but, like, I wouldn’t call myself a
feminist
.’

It took a mortifyingly long time for it to dawn on me that actually all the hard work had
not
been done and that now everyone was
not
lovely and equal. Not even slightly. It happened one afternoon when I was fighting through a throng of grey suits in the business-class section of a plane. Suddenly I wondered: where are all the women in their red lipstick and sheer tights? Nowhere to be seen. (Because they were stuck in the office, providing secretarial back-up, drinking cup-a-soup, painting the run in their sheer tights with nail varnish because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones.)

In the meantime a new word had been invented for women like me – ‘post-feminists’. I wasn’t really sure what it meant but when I looked around I saw that we went to the gym a lot, we bought plenty of shoes and most of us still had crappy, badly paid jobs – but apparently it was our fault now, not the system’s.

Not true, of course: the glass ceiling really exists. And as well as equality in the workplace, we’re still waiting for affordable childcare, recognition of the value of work done
by home-makers, humane treatment by the courts of rape victims (why are so many judges such senile old misogynists?), a focus on domestic violence… the list goes on.

But most of us haven’t the energy to be active feminists: we’re knackered, holding down demanding jobs, getting our roots done, fighting low-level depression, trying to do Pilates, doing school runs if we have children or agonizing about when the best time to have a baby would be, if we haven’t.

We don’t have it all. We’re too busy doing it all, to have it all.

Meanwhile, on the feminist frontlines, not only has the war not been won, but our gains are at risk. For example, that God-botherer George Bush is committed to working towards making abortion illegal again in the US. And where Dubya leads (actually I shouldn’t even call him that; calling him by his nickname is only encouraging him) his mate Holy Tone mightn’t be far behind.

What feminism needs is a make-over, along the lines of the New Labour one (but without losing the core ideology, of course).

For example, did you know you can be a feminist and

a) wear pink,

b) have sex with men,

c) enjoy a good laugh?

Amazing, no? As long as you believe you’re entitled to the same rights as everyone else (i.e. men) you’re a feminist. See, that’s not so bad, is it? In the words of that bard and visionary, Adam Ant: There’s nothing to be scared of.

First published in
Marie Claire,
April 2005
.