Bend, compromise, try not to break
A feeling slams into me every now and again. Usually when I am walking home from the office on a Friday evening, my arms and shoulders heavy with bags toting the week’s detritus of rinsed lunch containers, shoes, damp yoga clothes. notebooks. “Forever schlepping”, I think. No different than my grandmother and her sisters, who carried bundles down steep paths to the village wash basin and bales up even steeper paths to the grazing pastures. “How did I inherit this,” I wonder as the handles of one bag begin to roll down my arm.
Because despite my best efforts, I am still not all-that-far from the women who came before me.
It was my mother who taught me, from a very young age, to be nice, to compromise and to please. To put the needs of others first, always. My mother, aunts, cousins, grandmothers and every woman before that were given that same message. After all, the responsibility was all on them to make a home and to raise children, to save money and keep nosy neighbours at bay. There was no room for inconvenient personal desires. The last to sit down to dinner, only once the rest of the family had been served, her plate a composition of what everyone else didn’t want. Eating the over-ripe fruit, so that we could eat the fresh fruit. Waking up before everyone else to get the laundry folded and staying up late to make pasta, the reh-reh-reh of the roller…
