Finders Keepers

In a heated argument with her brother about the most appropriate distribution of an excellent batch of double chocolate muffins, my daughter pushes back until it becomes a bit too much, at which point she reluctantly retreats, tearful.

She goes upstairs into the bathroom pursued shortly afterwards by her mother.

Later in the week, I find a note scribbled on the back of a bank statement envelope which, I imagine, must have been slid under or left outside the bathroom door.

It reads, “Are you OK?”

After I’ve finished the washing up I go upstairs. My daughter is in her room surrounded by my trays of seedlings where they enjoy the southerly aspect and warmth of her radiator.

I give her a hug and point at all of the thin spindly shoots describing the burgeoning heritage tomatoes and sweet peas. Then we talk about chocolate cake.

Later in the week, I’m watching a documentary called “Finders Keepers” about a man who gets involved in a custody battle for the leg he lost in a plane crash.

The two main characters, both men, spend the entire narrative avoiding an ironically similar issue, the relationship they had with their fathers. The women remain strong and resolute, nailing the truth but unable to change anything because the only people who can are in a TV court haggling over the ownership of a severed limb.

Then, at the end of the week, I had to write an answer to a question from a young woman who was asking me how to deal with sexism in the workplace.

In it, she wrote, “how can I speak up about inequality in a way that enables men to understand?”

I told her that if I was to answer her question literally I would be making myself part of the problem she was seeking to address.

After I’d finished drafting my reply I called my daughter and read it to her to make sure I was hitting the right notes.

There are many times I work with people who sit and tell me they are too weak.

They are undermined, disrespected, abused, ignored, overlooked and they say, “I wish I was stronger.”

I tell them that that the problem is they have too much strength. The seemingly inexhaustible ability to keep going long after it is reasonable to be expected to do so.

The people with whom I have this conversation are almost exclusively women.

The women in my life and, in truth, probably the vast majority of those I have ever known, tend to walk straight into the eye of the storm rather than trying various ways of diverting around the side.

When I think about my own mother today I recognise that much of our conflict came from her insistence that I stand and face something I would rather not have tackled.

If there is a problem with men and masculinity, and there most certainly is, I shudder to think just how bad it would be if we didn’t have strong independent women in our lives.

At best we’d spend all of our time fighting over metaphors and growing vegetables in our daughters’ bedrooms.