MOTHERS DAY in 2022: WOMEN’S ISSUES

We move from INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY to MOTHERS DAY… a seamless transfer of one ideal to another but always with the focus on women. We are all international but we are not all mothers; however, we stand united as women and on Sunday with mothers. Some of us chose not to have children, some of us lost children, and some wanted children but did not have them in today’s world, there would be trans women who have become parents.

We live in a large and confusing world where old-fashioned principles of parenthood are generally preferred but we speak a language that few Victorian children would have understood… Most of us had a mother… there is no doubt a womb was involved for any of us to be here! And that is my answer to the biological question, what is a woman? It seems to have flummoxed most men and politicians, but I declare my womb is integral to being born a woman. It led me into terrible grief trying to make it work the way God intended. In having a womb it was my intention to breed from it with as many babies as I could manage… four or six?

I claim my womb and give a clarion call for it being all my own and my right to call myself a woman. It wasn’t a very effective womb, letting me down at critical moments in a very unproductive way. But it is mine and its very existence in my body has had a centrality to so much of who I am and what I have become. That I was given two fabulous children is still incredible….you might be given one lovely baby but never the jackpot of two. Piers is forty-seven and Adelicia forty-two and to be called Mummy by my great big son when he gives me a hug is my gift of love.

Define a Woman?

The world is whirring at an increasingly fast rate, ideas are flung into the mix, as sugar to batter baking soon after the fact into a new reality cake. New expressions filter through for the older person and by the time they have grasped a meaning of sorts it has flitted off into another reality.

Confusion reigns except for the young, old realities merge and distort confusing all but the young. Politicians cannot keep up with the dogma and often flail amongst mountains of politically correct usages. Who would have thought politicians are now stumped by the question, what is a woman. Who thought we would stumble around looking for an acceptable definition so as not to offend the ravening crowd.

Once more, as women, we are fighting for identity in a period of Western social history that could be described as a massive upheaval of beliefs.

Over decades we have chained ourselves to railings of buildings, we have nursed wounded soldiers in the Crimea and on the Western front, (my great Aunty Fan), we have rescued unwanted children and pioneered orphanages (Sister Kate), we have played cricket and football and boxed and held our hands high in triumph but now we do no longer know who or what we are.

Define a woman?

This question has male politicians flummoxed for any answer is sure to offend one or more biological, cis, queer, or trans women plus plus.

Without this vital piece of equipment, none of us would exist.

Thoughts on INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY

INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY should be a cause for celebration amongst all women but increasingly I am concerned this celebration is reserved for the young and the woke. Perhaps it has been ever thus; we become sidelined as we grow older, just as powerful men can search fruitlessly for meaning in their retirement.

The sisterhood stands strong, as I believed in the sixties, but over time powerful clever women forged ahead with little consideration for the realities of their lesser sisters. Today our spokeswomen are the intellectual left or young ‘very driven’ noisy women.

Again the average sisters are left behind; if we are not part of a marginalised group we have little relevance.

An ordinary woman of the vast middle class is of no interest to the sisterhood…she is, in effect, boring. Her small tragedies are irrelevant in the big battle for the spotlight of media attention. Seminars of women speakers are run by the intelligentsia of the left, woke to their core. Some are quite old, my age, but have been playing the spokeswoman game for so long their views can be delivered sleepwalking.

These older women mix it up with the young strident female voices of today to give themselves a sense of relevant modernity when all the time they hide behind their old grievance stereotypes of condemnation of others not so tough as themselves.

Similar to the overturning and chipping away of concrete forms such as statues, ideas are being thrown around, indeed forced down our collective throats that are repugnant to vast silent majorities.

Why is it older women are increasingly feeling the least-valued group on the planet? Where once the term ‘invisible’ was thrown around, now it is more that of being an irrelevance that has crept into the dialogue of nations.

Yet we are the wise old team who have gone through the hazards of living lives incorporating most of the values of our parents. That we are the last of the descendants of a war-torn era of suffering both in the world arena and economic. Our parents lived through a world war and a depression.

This week I celebrated my birthday…double seven and as I looked around the table of guests, sixteen of us, I thought we could rule the world! Every talent was sitting there, politicians, lawyers, professors, artists, arts and fashion entrepreneurs, gardeners, writers, women who were grandmothers, women who had never had children, women who had adopted children (me), women who had gone through divorces, women who had lost money or made money. We were all there with our truths and our secrets and we shared, as good women will, many of those with our friends that night. We could do this because none of my friends has a mean heart, they all share in common, compassion for their fellow women. Some enjoy gossip but all have a sense of humour and a group of us decided that humour is, probably, the most important attribute a human being can have. I recently spent an evening sitting opposite one of our great prime ministers, John Howard, who told of the experience of meeting Vladimir Putin and one impression gained…… he had no sense of humour.

I worry about young Western women today, living in the ‘wash’ of turmoil from male-bashing. Where do they stand before many become mothers and where will they stand as mothers of sons? Where, indeed, are the nervous fathers of those putative sons?

Women’s Day is a topic close to my heart.

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