Over the past week I have been considering the possibilities that I may become a woman who gives in to her wanderlust and disappears in a Shirley Valentine style epiphany of smashed eggs. Not because S has a relentless lust for chips and egg and I am left forced to converse with the wall, but because, although I am often overwhelmed by how happy and content I am, I do sometimes feel I have overlooked my own personal growth.
It is not likely that I am about to set sail to try and find myself, for a start I only have a beginners sailing certificate, which was completed on a waist deep boating lake, and also, not that I needed to be told, as Hans Thomas says in The Solitaire Mystery; if you are going to find yourself “stay exactly where you are. Otherwise you are in great danger of losing yourself for ever.” Although I am sure his mother left for entirely fantastical and philosophical reasons that I do not know because I haven’t finished the book yet.
It is a very excepted condition of women to regret and question her life decisions that she ultimately feels that she has been trapped into. Particularly the stay-at-home-mum debate that is swung around the right and wrong camps all to often on slow news weeks. We are all familiar with the idea of the desperate housewife chained to the kitchen sink with endless laundry, to-do lists longer than the romance her marriage once had, a screaming baby under one arm and a harmless, purely medicinal, glass of gin in the other hand. Women overwhelmed with the amount they are expected to do in a single day or under whelmed by the void left when one has no career, social life or hobbies as demonstrated with Betty Draper in Mad Men. What happens to these women when their children have grown, when the spark in a relationship hasn’t been seen since the Great Toilet Seat Argument of 2001? Where do they go? Physically? Emotionally?
Do they disappear to India, as Ms Gilbert did in ‘Eat, Pray, Love’? Walkout in egg yoked fury of despair? Showing us all what women feel like doing every time they look at another wet towel on the bathroom floor. Or are they role models for women everywhere to make a stand and take timeout for yourself or you will end up feeling duped out of the best years of your life like me The ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ sentiment can obviously seem far off when your knee-deep in dirty nappies with dried porridge on your face and a strange fatty substance on your stomach, your thighs, your bum, your arms. My arms? Not you too!
No I do not think I am a woman who will look back on her life in ten, twenty years and regret my decisions. I don’t think I have the confidence of Elizabeth Gilbert to go out to the big wide world alone; I don’t have the charm and charisma of Shirley Valentine to be able to get along so uninhibitedly with strangers in a foreign land. I do not have the patience of Kate Reddy to allow S all the freedoms of a lone ranger while my attempt of glamorous make-up melts off my face preparing dinner over a hot stove. More importantly I am just not that trapped or exhausted or unappreciated. I feel able to do whatever I wish, everyday is different at my office, museums, art galleries, libraries, tea at a cosy cake shop anyone? I have days where I feel like I am stagnating or when I simply cannot believe that the dishes need to be done, again. But these days are supposed to happen, if I really enjoyed cleaning dried melted cheese off bowls and forks it is because I am in a alternate reality (which, if the Higgs boson has been found, probably cannot happen) or I am in a special place with padded walls. I celebrate little smiles and reward anyone who helps or saves time.
However perhaps I shall just turnout like Emilia from Othello, wise and worldly on the subject of men and her place in the world but wouldn’t turn down an indecent proposal in return for higher positioning. Or maybe I will be a modern day Mary Maloney taking my little lamb S to the slaughter; I don’t have legs of lamb in the freezer only quorn fillets… I maybe here some time…
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