I Feel Better
Do you remember the scene in Mary Poppins when the children come in and bring flowers to their mother and interject cheer into Mr. Banks' breakfast? He's curmudgeonly about it all and Mrs. Banks' reproves him, "The children are only trying to make you feel better."
He says, "I am in a perfectly equitable disposition, I do not require being made to feel better."
I have not been in an equitable disposition of late (past three days or so). There's been a definite deficiency in my outlook. And I'm tired of that nonsense. I've had a nasty headache that won't quit. And for several nights in a row I was working off about 4 hours of sleep a night.
I talked to Tucker last night. He had a fun day fishing with his grandfather. I'm not sure what Michael's day was like, he didn't have anything to say. But I'm assured that they are alive and well.
After that conversation and another with my best friend I toddled off to bed in a happy and relaxed state of mind. Slept EIGHT and a HALF hours. Shocking.
But today, I feel better.
I hate that I'm so at the mercy of my body. My state of rest, nutrition, mood, and so forth just have way more influence over me than I would care to admit. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. When Cool Mary visited me in January, she brought a book called "Spinning Straw Into Gold" that takes a look at te transformations of a woman's life through the lens of the fairy tale women we grew up with. What can Snow White and Rapunzel, evil stepmothers, ugly sisters, passive fathers, and birds reveal to us about the lives that real women live today? Quite a bit as it turns out.
I work in an office with two men at the top of the food chain. Steve and Matt are quintessential men. They do man things and they think in man ways. (Well, every now and then they lapse into being girly men ...) But you understand what I'm saying, they never do and never will be able to "get" things that are understood intuitively by women because of the way we live our lives and because of the common experiences we share.
I came into the world riding just behind the wave of feminism that swept through and forced a new way of thinking that opened up opportunities and areas of influence to women. I'm grateful to those women who push the envelope so that I can take for granted that I am free to work and to choose and to have access to institutions that would have been a laughable dream to those of my grandmother's generation.
But, I think that as women we need to do a bit more pushing and reorganizing yet. In the office where I work, and in almost every other organization I see we still have masculine structures and manly ways of thinking that dominate our processes. I know that it is more or less against the rules to admit that there are differences between men and women, but okay folks here is the honest truth.
Men and women are different.
Men aren't the devil, but they don't have all the bases covered on their own. Women don't have all the answers, but we have some answers that men will never intuitively get. And if we want to have strong organizations, good solid working ideas, and relationships that benefit all our clients and not just the men - then we as women need to stop pretending that we're just men in skirts.
Part of the knowledge that women have than men don't comes from differences in biology.
I'm sorry to be pushing against the rules again, but it's just the truth. Men don't get it. Often times they seem to be uncomfortable with, annoyed by, or dismissive of the fact that women have different biological needs and experiences. But that's a mistake on their part. We can't pretend to be men and we shouldn't be treated like men. We aren't men. We're women.
And it dawns on me that I can't expect other people to treat me like a woman until I start treating myself that way. I'm not talking about getting a regular manicure or squealing over shoes. I'm talking about owning the reality of my life and experience and behaving as though I understand that it's legitimate. Because it is.
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