What's in a name?

Well quite a lot as it happens, and a recent name-related event has led me to question how far we have come, or rather haven’t come, in the past hundred or so years since the word ‘feminism’ first entered our lexicon. 

My consternation was piqued when two friends recently tied the knot.  They shared over a decade of history and 3 kids, so you could argue that the marriage bit was just a formality. But to them it wasn’t; it meant a heck of a lot, especially as one of them had done it before, only to experience a miserable divorce just a few years later.  So this was the opposite of a rush-job; meticulously planned with every detail given due thought and consideration.

The bride isn’t a Brit so the main ceremony took place in her home town overseas, then they had a wonderful British wedding party so that all their local friends could celebrate with them.  The venue was stunning, the sun shone and the champagne flowed; Reader it was fab and all the guests agreed that everything was pretty perfect.  Until, that is, towards the end of the night when the rumour started circulating that the groom had taken the bride’s surname.

It was a bit like a fart in a lift in that nobody wanted to be the first to mention it.  It fell to a rather inebriated gentleman to bring up the subject which he did in what I thought was a particularly delicate and sensitive manner.  The exchange went something like this:

Pissed bloke: “Oi!  I just heard that you’re changing your name to hers?”

Groom: “That’s right, I am”

PB: “What the **** d’ya want to do something like that for?”

Groom (impressively still sporting an engagingly polite smile): “Well we decided it was easier for one of us to change, ie me, rather than her and all the kids having to change theirs.  It’s no biggie”

PB: “***** me!  Wouldn’t catch me doing something like that – no way!”

Now isn’t that just so supportive?  I must admit we had stolen the march on most of the guests as we'd seen the happy couple just the week before for a pre-wedding celebration (it’s any excuse to pop open a bottle or 3 at our gaff) and they’d told us about the surname decision then.   My reaction had been to say well done, open another bottle of fizz and congratulate them on putting the flagstones on yet another step towards true equality. And I meant every word.

When I got married it didn’t even occur to me to change my surname.  Why would I?  It was part of me, no, not just part of me, it WAS me.  Why would I want to suddenly, at the age of 29, acquire a new identity?  I generously offered to share my surname with my husband-to-be, but he had similar views to mine where his identity was concerned so we just stayed as we were.  We were married, we knew it and all our friends and family knew it.  I viewed it as a simple, personal choice that would be respected by all who knew me, at that time and in the future.

Now I happen to loudly and proudly refer to myself as a feminist and I always have done.  I consider it to be neither a dirty word nor a complicated one.  I believe men and women are equal and should therefore be treated as such. Neither gender should dominate the other, and from the moment of birth, the same opportunities should be open to all including later on, the choice of which name to adopt upon marriage.  My kids will parrot “there’s no such thing as boys’ toys or girls’ colours” because I’ve taught them they can wear what they like and play with what they like.  I’ve never understood why a parent would automatically bar their child from fifty per cent of experiences anyway. Bonkers.

If you struggle with the concept of feminism, then the journalist and author Caitlin Moran neatly sums it up by posing the question: ‘do you have a vagina?’ and ‘do you want to be in control of it?’ and apparently if the answer to both questions is ‘yes’ then congratulations, you are a feminist. Simple huh?  Only it’s not apparently.

My first Christmas as a married woman was a revelation when cards from all our dear friends, many of whom had been at our wedding, began to plop onto the doormat.  Despite everyone being made aware of the fact that I hadn’t changed my name, I would say that about seventy per cent of the cards were stubbornly addressed to Mr & Mrs D.....  Some of them were old fashioned enough to write to Mr & Mrs P D....., thus not only stripping me of my surname, but of my own initial too.  And as we all know, generally speaking who is it that writes most of the Christmas cards?  Yes, the women. 

My new in-laws committed the faux pas too, but somehow I can forgive more easily the older generation their outdated views, but my peers who themselves claimed to be believers in equality?  Much harder to accept, especially when I was happy to respect their choices to take their husband’s surname.  I didn’t feel the need to continually address them by their maiden name just to prove my point. 

At the time I felt irrationally upset by what I saw as our friends’ obstinate reversion to a bygone age where women ‘knew their place’. ‘I’m different! ‘I wanted to shout and yell ‘I make my own rules!  I have my own name!  But I calmed down and came to realise it’s not me, it’s them.  It’s other people who are most disturbed when a woman makes a stand, however small.  And I have some experience of making a stand and refusing to let other people tell me what is and isn’t possible purely because of my gender.

I’ve spent most of my professional life operating in a man’s world, first at Halfords, then inside the Ministry of Defence, then as Defence and Security Producer for the BBC and latterly as a property developer sporting (pink) steel toe capped boots and hardhat, bossing builders around.  At each juncture I’ve had to stand tall and prove my worth and knowledge as men (and occasionally a few women) tried their best to talk over me and ignore what I’ve had to say.  I guess I must be drawn to the challenge but I’ve never yearned to be a man, I love being a woman but being able to choose how I work it.

I’m sure that the less charitable among you are now concluding that I was probably born with a tad too much testosterone or something, but let me assure you that I can rock a skirt/blouse/heels combo and talk kids and home with the best of them.  And no, I don’t shave my face or arms.

Life should be about having the freedom to choose and being true to who you are and I take my hat off to my newly married friends with their new (for him anyway) joint surname and I wish them every happiness.  After all, he’s only doing what women have done for millennia and if we’re all truly equal then where is the quandary?  I don’t see one and neither should you.

Baby Bumps

Remember that feeling of amazement when the Duchess of Cambridge appeared from the innards of the Lindo Wing, proudly clutching her new little baby and looking, to be frank, still pregnant?  I could swear that there was a collective gasp from all of us mothers watching when we clocked that even Kate, perfect, gorgeous, never-puts-a-foot-wrong, fashionista babe with her ever glossy mane and sylph-like figure, was a bit like the rest of us after all.  I bet if she’d been standing at a bus stop, some dopey but well meaning fellow traveller would have offered her a seat.

My own post-partum humiliation was visited upon me as I stood in a queue in Boots buying nipple cream or something just as ghastly.  Husband stood to one side with 5-day-old Son in the pram as I suffered the indignity of the woman at the till asking me when my due date was.  I just remember blurting out “I had it, it’s over there” and pointing numbly at the pushchair.  I don’t really recall much else of that episode but I quite possibly burst into tears.  Up until that point I’d probably been feeling that I was holding it all together remarkably well, having managed to get up, shower, dress and make it out of the house, but that one misguided comment pierced my fragile sense of self like an arrow, such was the overwhelming feeling of failure at my early attempts at motherhood.

Any fears about how Kate might be coping were safely laid to rest when she stepped out for her first royal engagement the other night.  ‘My flippin’ God’ I breathed as I took in her silver, shimmering column dress, high sparkling heels, relatively normal sized boobs and TOTALLY FLAT STOMACH.  She looked, to be frank, like the perfect MILF (look it up) and behaved like a normal, smiley, contented person, not someone who had given birth just 6 weeks previously.  There’s no way on earth that someone would mistakenly offer up their seat on the tube for that!

Which brings me nicely to my second post-partum moment of humiliation (yes you’ve probably guessed that I was on such good terms with my baby-weight that we couldn’t bear to be parted for quite some time), which took place some months after the birth of Daughter.  Son was safely at nursery so I succumbed to requests from my work colleagues to bring the new baby into the office so they could all have a cuddle.

I duly arrived at Television Centre and found my car parking space that a kind friend had organised.  Bundling up Daughter in her pushchair I wound my way down the familiar corridors, past the beloved but grotty tea-bars, feeling the slight apprehension that comes when you haven’t been somewhere for a long time.  I did a quick tour of the vast, open plan BBC newsroom while the going was good, but when feeding time approached I retreated to my old office of the world affairs unit where if she started yelling I knew there was a sound-proof radio booth into which I could scurry.

Daughter was delightedly passed around the world affairs correspondents and producers who all cooed and fussed in the appropriate manner, and to my relief, she managed not to be sick on any of them.  I wondered what I had been so worried about.  I was just getting ready to leave when another, esteemed correspondent who despite being a household name shall, for the purposes of this post, remain anonymous, swept in, fresh from the set of the One o’clock news.  After a quick ‘how are things’ chat, they gestured towards my stomach and coyly (but loudly) asked “so is that baby number 3 in there then?”

Reader, the silence was deafening.  Never have so many computer screens and documents been examined so forensically by so many people, all of whom longing to snigger, all of whom admirably managing not to. But did I crumble?  Did I burst into tears?  Did I heck.  By this time I was quite resigned to the fact that yes, to some I probably did still look a bit pregnant, but with a baby and a toddler to look after, quite frankly it was the least of my worries.  I finished tucking Daughter in and turned to face my accuser. “What, this?” I asked, staring them coolly straight in the eyes “no, I’m just a bit fat”.  And with that I swept out, wearing my dignity like a (maternity sized) cloak.  Reader, even though I say it myself, I was magnificent.

 

Secrets, lies and war

Watching David Cameron trying to whip up support for the possibility of bombing Syria gives me a strong and uncomfortable sense of deja vu.  During the Afghan and Iraq conflicts I was the BBC's Defence Producer, a role which gave me a ringside seat to the political storm and military intervention and aftermath of the two conflicts. Cameron's early recall of Parliament and impassioned speeches, detailing President Assad's many and varied abuses of the Syrian people had more than an echo of Blair 10 years ago, confidently denouncing Saddam and his infamous (and as it so miserably turned out, completely invisible) weapons of mass destruction.

The MPs' rebellion left Cameron defeated and politically impotent, but it made me wonder if our PM wasn't playing a rather clever, longer game.  It was kind of obvious, even to the casual observer, that the UK was not going to be heading into military action in the middle east, to use that phrase so beloved of news correspondents "any time soon".  After the 12 gory years fighting in Afghanistan and the shorter, but no less blood-stained invasion of Iraq, the public is war-weary.  As a nation we simply don't have the stomach for yet another C-17 discharging its cargo of flag-draped coffins at RAF Brize Norton and more recently, RAF Lyneham.

Surely Cameron must have foreseen this?  The fact that he appeared to be working to Obama's timetable would have been doubly off-putting for MPs.  We like America and the cachet that comes from being a friend, we just don't want to be THE friend anymore. Remember those Blair/Bush love-ins?  The back slapping, the lingering looks, the shared belief that God was guiding them personally - pure car-crash TV; nauseating but compulsive viewing.

Whatever your opinions on Cameron, he is not a stupid man.  He does not lack judgement, he knows how to read people and situations.  So why did he rush the whole vote?  I rather wonder whether he actively wanted a way out.  By going to the Commons with some intelligence material but not all of it (funny how US Secretary of State John Kerry provided a whole lot more just 2 days later) and lots of tactics but no clear strategy, he was almost inviting a rejection of his motion.  Perhaps he wanted to be seen to be doing and saying all the right things to keep Obama onside, while actually maintaining a stance of non-intervention by proxy.

Obama's premise is that military intervention would comprise a few quick surgical strikes to serve as a "shot across the bows" and show Assad that the use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated.  Great, but then what? The trouble is with launching any kind of strike is that it doesn't end there and there is no such thing as limited military intervention.  That's a bit like saying someone is a 'little bit pregnant'.  War, like pregnancy demands to have a beginning, middle and an end.  And there will always, always be a lasting legacy to be taken care of.

Rather hilariously it's now the French who are rushing forward to be America's BFF.  Anyone remember those 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' jibes from 2003?  Or the 'freedom fries' that took the place of French fries in US eateries?  How quickly we forget.  I don't get the impression that Cameron is feeling remotely threatened by the French and American presidents' sudden closeness, or by Russia's alleged assertion that Britain is a small island that no-one pays any attention to.  I reckon that he's (probably rightly) predicting that Syria will go belly up and the further away he is from it, the better to enter the pre-election period of 2014/15.

It's all a gamble.  Would military action force the Syrian government to negotiate?  Or would it effectively topple Assad thus creating a vacuum and lighting the fuse to the bone-dry tinderbox that is the Sunni, Shi ite, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, jihadist cocktail just waiting for the opportunity to control Syria's future?  Obama's hope that any attack would form part of a broader strategy to "support rebel forces" and ultimately "allow Syria to free itself", does sound somewhat naïve.

Syria has no credible opposition, there simply isn't an organised, democratic faction ready to step in and take control if Assad goes.  That is both the harsh truth and the main stumbling block to any kind of intervention in the murderous, miserable hell-hole that is now Syria.

The Super Summer

The other day, Son sidled up to me, "er, Mum, I'm not being funny or anything.." I inwardly sighed, as he often begins conversations in this slightly abstract fashion.  Mistaking my silence for rapt attention he continued, "...or trying to be nice on purpose" (eh??), "but this summer has been the best, BEST summer holiday ever.  In the world."  That nugget safely off his 9 year old chest, he hugged me and wandered off to annoy his sister.

Reader, for once I had to agree, and I was surprised because being stuck at home with the children for six long weeks doesn't always fill me with unbridled joy.  In fact in previous years I've looked forward to September with the enthusiasm of a starving person presented with a groaning buffet table; a sort of 'let me at it' mentality.  On the first day of term while other mums stand around the playground dabbing their eyes and waving, I can normally be spotted half a mile down the road kicking up my heels and yelling "FREEEEDOM!" at the top of my voice.  Because let's face it, six hours of free childcare, five days a week is not to be sniffed at.

This year was different.  Sure the amazingly hot, sunny UK weather undoubtedly helped by ensuring that the garden was a go-er every day.  But the really big change was that for once, the children's bodyclocks shifted so that when we let them stay up 'til nine or ten o'clock, they actually managed to sleep in until eight or nine the next morning.  This has never happened before and I was always left foaming enviously at the mouth at friends who took their kids out to dinner and had to WAKE THEM UP the next morning for breakfast.  Ha!  Husband and I decided years ago that there was absolutely no upside to keeping two, tired, crotchety kids up for a nice supper en famille because a) they'd give us indigestion and b) stubbornly wake us up at the crack of sparrows for no good reason and then be miserable again all day because they hadn't had enough sleep.

But what a result; halfway through our two weeks in Spain, Husband and I realised that that unfamiliar, wide-eyed feeling we were experiencing each morning was a direct result of having had enough sleep! So for that we were grateful in the extreme and gazed upon our offspring with newly affectionate and appreciative eyes.

Another reason it was a good holiday is that Husband didn't disappoint in his quest to provide at least one, hilarious, never-to-be-forgotten moment for each foreign trip we take.  The kids (with my encouragement) have wised up to this and are alert, spaniel-like, for when daddy does something strange/dangerous/plain daft which will provide us with many hours of glee.

A few holidays ago in Spain, Husband took it upon himself to save the life of a little boy in the local swimming pool.  It was magnificent.  He leaped off the sun lounger with surprising athleticism, peeled off his t-shirt and shouted "don't worry Charlie" (for that was the victim's name) "I'm coming!" thus ensuring that everyone around the pool turned to look.  He executed a racing dive of which Ellie Simmonds would be proud, and determinedly front-crawled to the little chap in the middle of the deep end and heroically dragged him to the side.  Oh bravo, I hear you say.  The only trouble was, the little boy wasn't drowning at all, simply playing a drowning 'game', of which everyone, apart from Husband, had been aware.  Husband became known as The Hoff after that.

The next year, while holidaying in the same part of Spain, we took our visiting friends to the local bull running as it was fiesta week in the village.  It's not quite on the scale of Pamplona but the premise is still the same.  Barriers are erected either side of the main street and the hapless bulls are let out of their trailer to run up and down while 'brave' men leap out in front of them and scurry back behind the barriers for safety. I always feel sorry for the bulls because while they're not actually harmed in any way, only poked and prodded, it still makes me incredulous that this passes for entertainment in modern-day Spain.

Anyway, Husband decided to slip through the railings while the bulls were safely at the far end of the street (or so he thought) to take a photo of the whole spectacle.  Sadly while he was fiddling around with the camera, one of the smaller and more nimble bulls (still sporting a massive pair of horns mind you) made a sudden dash for our end which made all the 'brave men' leap as if one, in the direction of safety.  Husband was caught unawares and came crashing backwards through the barriers and landed, on his back, on top of the camera, our kids and our friends' kids. It provided much amusement for the rest of the holiday as the kids took turns to act out the scene, one playing the part of the bull, one being Husband, or El Matador, as we were now calling him.

This year, just to add variety, all the drama took place out at sea.  "We'll go sailing!" decided Husband, "the kids are both strong swimmers now and I used to love my sailing!".  So this being Spain, we were able to rock up to a marina and hire a Hobie cat (for the uninitiated that's a small twin catamaran with sails) just like that.  No proof was required of address, damage deposit, ability to sail... we just grabbed a few life jackets and off we went.  How refreshing I thought as we bobbed through the harbour.  In the UK you'd be made to go on a course, sign a waiver and watch a 45 minute safety DVD before even being allowed to THINK about renting a boat!

Hanging over the side looking at the pretty fish, my reverie was interrupted by Husband suddenly yelling "Senor! Senor!  Can you help us!!"  Yes, we were still in the harbour and heading merrily towards the rocks.  Turns out there wasn't quite enough wind and Husband hadn't sailed one of these for, oooooh, about 17 years so the finer points of steering the thing had momentarily escaped him.  Thankfully the nice Spanish man paddled over and climbed aboard and somehow got us heading out to sea.

Of course by this time,  Daughter, who was a bit nervous about the whole venture anyway, was sobbing uncontrollably and pleading with Daddy to please take us back.  "Well!"  I said brightly "this is FUN!"  Contrary to all expectations we didn't die a watery death and once Husband's memory had returned we had quite a jolly little sail.  Daughter eventually stopped crying enough to open her eyes and Son had a fine time operating the front sail.  Husband's name after that one was El Capitan.

So now the holiday is over and we're back to the old routine which is both a comfort and a chore.  It's been a revelation to me that being with the kids for so long can actually be a fairly pleasant experience.  I'm now quite looking forward to the October half term.....!