I like driving in my car (but my baby don't care for cars and races. Luckily my toddler do).
Things that have recently made me feel competent, empowered and like A Good Feminist:
- Doing the lion's (and the tiger's and the giraffe's) share of the driving back from Pembrokeshire today. Especially since I felt the fear and did anyway some motorway driving. I am scared of motorway driving, specifically the business about having to be aware of what's behind you to the left as well as to the right. Observation of what's actually going on, rather than what I intuit to be going on, is not my strong point (I'm very 'N' and very not 'S' on the Myers-Briggs scale) and that seems like a very dangerous way to approach the world at 70 miles an hour. But I did it, albeit on relatively quiet Welsh motorways, not the M1 at rushhour, and I did fine. Because driving is a hard-won skill for me, it makes me feel empowered to be doing it. I learned to drive when I was 17 but because I lived in a very rural area and then didn't own a car for the next 15 or so years, I never got the hang of driving in traffic and pretty much had to learn to drive a car again from scratch when we did finally succumb to car ownership. These days I think I'm a pretty good driver and town traffic rarely bothers me (and, for some reason, I'm very good at roundabouts...) but until today I would have said I still find motorways terrifying. I think I can now downgrade that to 'I still find motorways scary and intimidating' but I am more confident that I can learn to get over that, and that makes me feel much less pathetic and feeble.
- Driving while everyone else in the car was asleep. I felt all The Great Provider for my family as they snoozed away and I listened to The House At Pooh Corner (because I couldn't safely reach the iPod to turn off PB's choice of listening matter).
- And there was something about the fact that my arms and legs ached a bit but I still carried on driving anyway, because clearly D was in a worse state (and PB, much to his woe, still cannot reach the pedals). I think I expect myself to be bodily a bit feeble and to give up when I reach physical limits (which is nonsense on stilts when I think about my two experiences of giving birth, and also about how I keep going with really very severe long-term sleep deprivation). I don't expect myself to carry on in the face of physical adversity, but I did.
- Realising I have entirely got over my previous fear of filling a car up with petrol.
- Being able to produce a memory stick when one was suddenly needed and far geekier people were without (I carry one in the inner recesses of my purse).
- Someone being slightly horrified at how physical I am with PB, as I slung him upside down over my shoulder. I am sure I have got stronger through lifting and playing with him (and LB to a lesser extent). I have visible biceps, which I'm sure I've never had before (possibly other muscles too, but I don't know the names of those).
- PB wanting some thing that was physically impossible done, me saying 'it can't be done' and him replying 'Daddy will fix it when he comes home'. Realising how many things there are around the house that D does and I have no idea how to do, from putting up shelves, to fixing the computer, adding salt to the dishwasher and changing the vacuum cleaner bag. I feel awful that PB already knows that Daddy is so much more physically competent than Mummy. And I don't think I can take that much comfort from the fact that there isn't a corresponding set of skills which Mummy has and Daddy can't do (well, there are but, apart from breastfeeding, they're a bit non-essential and nebulous to a toddler - it's nice to be able to do the little tweaks to a room which make it all come together but a) the house is too chaotic these days for it to show and b) it's not half as useful or interesting as installing the babygates). That just makes D super-Daddy and me patheto-Mummy.
- Shaving my legs (only a bit. Feeling a traitor I mean, I did shave them thoroughly. But now the damn things need doing again. Stupid business. Roll on winter).
- Leaving car-fixing and dealing with garages to D. I am unduly haunted by a Which? report ages ago which showed that garages do indeed overcharge and mess around women. I make that my excuse for not dealing with car-fixing, instead of arming myself with that knowledge, doing a car-maintenance evening class, and Challenging the Patriarchy. (Car-maintenance sounds like the most tedious awful evening class I could possibly take. Even if I had any spare time or energy for evening classes).
- Realising that we have somehow slipped to a situation where D deals with the utility bills and the Inland Revenue, from our previous reasonably equal sharing.