Category Archives: Women who’ve carried the day

Situations pertaining to leaders #1

Posted by —

12

There is an extended family: husband and wife, two small children and another on the way, grandparents, aunts and uncles. The husband has had some difficulties with alcohol and gambling. He is highly-strung, a perfectionist; things around the home have to be ship-shape all of the time. He is irritated if the childrens’ toys are lying around, if dinner is not ready when he’s used to it being ready.

His wife works hard to ensure he is not upset. She cleans diligently but sometimes her husband still finds something wrong. The couple has experienced a deep sorrow with the loss of a stillborn child some years earlier. Being pregnant again fills the wife with joy and fear in equal parts.

One of the grandparents, the wife’s mother, is fearful too. Most weeks, she spends time with the couple and frequently minds her grandchildren. She has noticed her son-in-law’s behaviour and is uncertain and fearful. She is uncertain whether her son-in-law’s behaviour towards her daughter could be characterised as abuse, and she fears what might be happening behind closed doors.

She is caught between feeling something’s wrong and not knowing how to proceed. She feels intimidated by her son-in-law’s mood swings, and also by the shadow of the loss he and her daughter have suffered. She feels called on to intervene in some way – sometimes she has to cut short her visits because the protests are there in her mouth – but she dreads the potential repercussions. She fears if she says something to her son-in-law or daughter her access to her beloved grandchildren might be revoked. She also fears it would cause fresh suffering.

One day, nothing much happens except for one thing. The grandmother chooses to act. She looks at the fear and then picks up the phone anyway.

***

Personal archaeology

Posted by —

2

Remember I wrote a letter from six months in the future? It was addressed to Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, and of course, myself.

In the letter I described a version of myself I’m inventing during these six months: self as a conduit for expression and creativity to pour through, just as the famous cellist, Jacqueline Du Pre, with whom Ben played Schubert, was a conduit for music.

He tells this story of her.

When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to perform!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!”

“Even at six,” Ben notes, “Jackie was a conduit for music to pour through.”

***

A week or so after I wrote the letter I came across an old photo of myself. That’s it above. I think I must be about three years old.

Looking at it, I’m struck by my freedom and delight. I have the same joy Ben describes in Jackie at age six, and it’s the exact expression of self I was groping towards in my letter.

So I see this new self I’m inventing is a revealing or reclamation of a previous self.

***

When I found this photo I looked more closely at other photos that were lying around from when I was about ten years old.

These are a whole other matter.

In photo after photo, the freedom and delight has been replaced by something else, something cautious and watchful.

I’ve previously mentioned the fact of the ruthless conditioning girls receive. It was the subject of the “Beyond Wanting to be Wanted” series. It’s a conditioning that suppresses and seeks to obliterate what a girl feels, what a girl thinks, what she looks like, her very being. It colonises her soul.

Now this is not a matter of blame. I’m not blaming my parents or my society or my culture. My parents loved me dearly and always wanted the best for me.

It’s just the way it was, the way it probably still is.

And by acknowledging that I also had a choice in the matter – the choice of not submitting, of rejecting the conditioning, of keeping my soul alight – I’m not blaming myself either. I was a child, dependent on my parents and my society, and I didn’t even see the possibility anyway.

No, I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in reclaiming that earlier free and delighted self, that unabashed, untrammelled young girl and letting her roam.

It’s her time again.

Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.*

***

* Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

With the cops, Sunday, 8am

Posted by —

0

My friend, A, recently did The Landmark Forum and we’ve been having lots of fun discussing how its effects are showing up in our lives.

One of the ways it’s showing up for her was demonstrated in an incident that occurred yesterday morning (Sunday here), all before 8am.

***

A had to drive her husband to an appointment in the city. It being early, and she being six and a half months pregnant and at the stage of letting it all hang out, which stage she’d tell you she’s been in since the month dot, she threw on the first thing that came to hand, a dress one rung above a nightie, and headed off in the car.

She dropped off her husband and turned for home. About 5km away, some police at the side of the road signalled her to pull over. She got out of the car, a bit nervous, and asked them what the matter was. The policeman said her car’s registration number had set off an alarm in their scanner. Turned out her car’s registration had been cancelled.

“Cancelled?” she said.

“Yes,” said the policeman, “if the car’s registration is not renewed, after a certain time, it’s cancelled.”

“And your registration …” the policeman went on, walking around to check the registration sticker on the window,

… expired in March 2010.

All of a sudden it occurred to A that that was when she and her husband had moved from another state. The registration must have got overlooked during the moving. Not only had she overlooked it then, she’d overlooked the out of date sticker on the front window for almost two years.

She explained what had happened to the policeman and apologised.

I’m so sorry, I completed overlooked it.

She also explained she’d lived in Australia for four years, after emigrating from the UK, and she was not clear about the registration process and the registration stickers.

She apologised again and asked,

What happens now?

“Well,” said the policeman, “we have to seize your car immediately, and normally, we’d issue you a $600 fine. However, your driving record is good, you’ve had no other fines or offences so this time we’re not going to fine you. We’ll just take the car to the depot and drop you at home.”

Now avoiding the fine was one thing, but here’s where A’s new training really kicked in.

She proposed an alternative plan to the police. She proposed that she drive her car to a mechanic near her home where the police could remove the registration plates. The police could take the plates away as proof of effective seizure, and she could just walk home from there.

And would you believe it? The police agreed and they all did exactly as she proposed.

As the police were about to drive away from the mechanic’s with her registration plates, she thought again about walking home and decided to put to them one last request.

Actually, it’s really hot, so I’m wondering if you could drop me at home. It’s just around the corner …

The policeman looked at her funny, and said “yes, but …” And then she realised it meant she would have to ride in the back of the police van.

Not deterred she duly climbed into the back of the van, the province of the crims, and a short time later emerged again, nightie-like dress hoisted up, waved nonchalantly to the neighbours who just happened to be in their front garden at the ungodly hour, and opened her front door with her watch showing 8am.

***

After a very good laugh, we contemplated how at each point after getting pulled over she had had things go her way. At each point she had had a choice about getting annoyed or resentful, a choice about making the police wrong for the inconvenience or humiliation she might have felt she’d suffered, and at each point she had chosen otherwise.

She fully acknowledged her mistake, apologised and then kept creating new alternatives with people – officers of the law – who can’t have been used to having others propose alternatives to them. What’s more, they can’t have been used to carrying them out, and yet they did.

Magic.

***

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

 

Cafe Scheherazade

Posted by —

0

Café Scheherazade operated in Melbourne, Australia for 40 years, from its opening in 1958 to its closure in 2008.

Its proprietors, Avram and Masha Zeleznikov, refugees from post-War Europe, created the famous café as a place for local residents, Jewish and Gentile, to remember and share stories. Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 4

Posted by —

4

The book is Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted by Polly Young-Eisendrath.

The hypothesis is as follows:

 In her book Polly Young-Eisendrath hypothesises that Lacan was right after all: women want to be wanted, not to be loved.

Women’s compulsion to be desired and desirable persists into old age, wreaking havoc on their “self-direction, self-confidence and self determination.”

The compulsion infects every sphere of life, showing up as the desire to always appear in a positive light, the “perfect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover … the kind neighbour, the competent boss.” Women are trapped in images, not wanting to be known for who they really are.

This final post is about getting out of the trap.

Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 3

Posted by —

4

The hypothesis so far.

In her book – Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted – Polly Young-Eisendrath hypothesises that Lacan was right after all: women want to be wanted, not to be loved.

Women’s compulsion to be desired and desirable persists into old age, wreaking havoc on their “self-direction, self-confidence and self determination.”

The compulsion infects every sphere of life, showing up as the desire to always appear in a positive light, the “perfect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover … the kind neighbour, the competent boss.” Women are trapped in images, not wanting to be known for who they really are.

This post is about that word “want”, and the factors at play.

Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 2

Posted by —

4

Where were we?

In her book – Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted – Polly Young-Eisendrath hypothesises that Lacan might have been right: women want to be wanted, not to be loved. She also suggests that women’s “compulsion” to be desired and desirable persists throughout life, wreaking havoc on their “self-direction, self-confidence and self determination.”

This post is about outlining the issue and its scale.

Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 1

Posted by —

6

About seven years ago I read a book called Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted whose initial premise rankled so hard I’ve had to keep re-reading it. The premise, attributed to the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, is that women want to be wanted, not to be loved.

Now, starting on it again, I see for the first time that my reaction and its trajectory is exactly the same as the author’s, the psychologist, Polly Young-Eisendrath.

She writes,

About ten years ago, while reading a biography of … Lacan, I came across something he said about women that struck me as uncomfortably true: women want to be wanted, not to be loved … A sometimes brilliant theoretician, Lacan was also terribly sexist and terribly arrogant, so I wondered if I could take his claim seriously. Yet, despite my doubt, the idea stayed with me. Over the ensuing years … I came across nothing quite as bold and blatant as Lacan’s claim …

Continue reading →

The tamale maker

Posted by —

7

We wake up at 4am so that by 11am everything will be ready. Because all the tamales we serve are made fresh daily …

Every day of the week including Sundays, Yolanda Garcia, Mexican immigrant, sells tamales on the streets of New York. “Sometimes,” she says,

if I feel really tired, then I rest for the day but normally I rest just one day a month. But sometimes two months pass without rest because I need to work because often my children need money quickly.

Yolanda is the star of a radio documentary made by Deepa Fernandes, an ex-pat Australian who left Sydney to live in West Harlem 11 years ago. Her documentary about the street vendors of New York – “the smallest of small business” – is enthralling, and was recently broadcast on ABC radio.

*****

Yolanda crossed the border 12 years ago, when she was just 20. She came by herself, and knew no-one when she arrived. She left her children, parents, friends and siblings. “When I arrived,” she says,

I had to live in a subway because I didn’t know anyone. But, soon, I found work cleaning houses, and from there, I started to earn money and could finally rent a room.

Twelve years on, she has a daughter in New York and two cousins, and every morning they make the tamales together.

Well, it is a very long process and elaborate. It is a lot of work, at least 4 or 5 people need to be there to help. First, we need to wash the corn leaf and clean the meat, then we prepare the dough. We also have to make the chilli sauces … We have to do a lot of things. It’s a lot of work.

“If I can make between $50 and $60 every day,” she says, “then I can send it back home to Mexico for my children.” All her children, she tells Fernandes, are studying, including her son, who is in Mexico City.

I have to send money to him because he’s studying business administration and travels to the textile sites and he spends a lot of money on trips. Sometimes a thousand dollars … I work a lot to save the money to send to them.

*****

What makes Yolanda so compelling is not merely her epic courage and drive, but her frankness, her joie de vivre. She talks about her family at home not understanding how hard life is in the US nor what it takes for her to generate the money she sends them, and complaining that she’s too good to talk to them now. The truth is, as she says, she has no time for talking to anyone because of the hours she works. In spite of it all, Yolanda has a secret: the secret to happiness.

Fernandes: “I’m going to tell you something. Every day when I walk by here, I see you with a big smile, I see you happy.”

Yolanda: “Yes, I’m happy! Because I’m here in the United States and, well, because my kids are doing well.”

Fernandes: “But life is not always happy, life can be difficult. But you’re always smiling …”

Yolanda: “The truth is that I’m always happy because God has given me good health to be able to work. From when I wake up at 4am to start making the tamales, I turn on my Mexican music and I cook very happily in the kitchen … “

About sadness she says:

I myself have a big sadness in my life, that my father died in Mexico and I couldn’t go to see him. But I talk to him every day and ask him to help me … I say ‘Papa, I’m here in the street selling, and you have to help me and protect me, Papa.’

*****

Listening to Yolanda and the other star of the show, a man called James Williams (aka “Ladies Man”, a divine flirt, whom Fernandes says, could sell you five of anything you don’t need), is truly enjoyable listening. There’s even a twist of sorts at the end.

For Yolanda, on her $50 or $60 a day, has not only put her children through school, she’s also been building her own future in Mexico.

Eight years ago, I started to build a big salon in Mexico and now it’s all ready. But you see I did most of this work before my kids needed my savings as they grew up. Now, I’m here … waiting till my children finish their studies. And then, I’m outta here! I’ll go back to Mexico where I won’t have to work 14 or 15 hours a day.

*****

To listen to Deepa Fernandes’s wonderful program, click here.

Feel like a woman, wear a dress

Posted by —

9

The tagline, “Feel like a woman, wear a dress”, has got to be one of the best in advertising history.

It helped make the creator of the dresses, the Belgian-born American designer, Diane von Fürstenberg, a fortune in what’s been an extraordinarily enduring career. From the 1970s, when she launched her distinctive wrap-around and shirtwaister dresses, to this very day, her designs have been coveted by women throughout the world.

As a teenager in Sydney in the 1970s, it was my dream to own one of her dresses. Her style was my style, a kind of a white woman version of Diana Ross, and I had the blessing of a classic model’s body for the job. Really, I used to think to myself, she was making those dresses for me. Only trouble was, a dress never actually eventuated. They were only patchily imported into Australia, and they were expensive. And on my one trip to New York many years ago I’d been too mesmerised by the serried rows of shops full of Italian shoes at miniscule prices to switch my mind to dresses.

But today, 26 March 2011, I’ve finally been united with my destiny. I found a secondhand DF in perfect condition in my size for a good price. It had been waiting just for me.

It’s a shirtwaister in a black, cream and charcoal geometric print. It’s made of silk, and looks and feels wonderful.

*****

Apart from that brilliant tagline, Diane von Fürstenberg has always been her own best advertisement. Whether in her 20s or her 60s. Bravo, Ms Fürstenberg!

*****