the women in my life

It feels like a perennial effort (note: not hardship) coming to terms with the women in my life. That is perhaps because I always held a fantasy at times of me as the romantic loner and acted that out in my relationships with women more that the lads. Sadly I have never mustered the creative intelligence to be complicated enough to pull it off! Nor have I had the self discipline to keep to that aesthetic. Human contact is intoxicating at any level but powerful as the camaraderie and friendship that exists between men, even the most Ernest Hemingway of (anti)heroes is undone or made through his contact with women. By that I don't mean solely sexual/romantic.

I am lucky. I am surrounded by inspiring women despite the fact that I was educated in a male only environment (might as well include university there) and now work in one too.

Both of my grandmothers where beautiful and gracious women. They didn't have the same economic opportunities women have today but on my Dad's side she ran a large household and a busy medical practice, on my Mum's she read Baudelaire and Victor Hugo and filled her house with weird art.

My sister is that modern mix of commercial consumer and bohemian. She is beautiful, incredible with people and better at my old job than I ever was.

My mum grew up on Kafka, Satre, De Beauvior, secretly dated a Jesuit philosophy lecturer and then became a nurse who married a doctor(?). Perhaps her experience of being one of five girls in that house led my mum to be defined by a tom-boy feisty independence to this day.

My girlfriend is truly the most incredible woman I will ever know, she is disarmingly beautiful, sexy, passionate, intelligent and makes me want to better myself almost every time a get up. She, more than anyone has made me look for what a man is/should be. Her five year old daughter is the image of her mother. If one thing makes me sensitive to those important aspects of feminism that remain relevant its that she should get a better deal than perhaps my grandmothers did, but on the basis that she's like her mum she won't need any help with that.

I live with three of my best mates and have other incredible (male) friends from artists, gardeners, corporate behemoths, guys who started their own charities or competed in the ironman world championships. My dad has done things I can't aspire to (including shipping baby me and my non-english speaking mum to the crocodile-dundee country to practice and do doctoral research!). My maternal grandfather was to be made an Officier de la Legion D'Honneur for his efforts in the Resistance (only he was too proud/stubborn to go in for that). My paternal grandfather, as an Irishman, volunteered to join the Army out of choice, served as a medic and officer and carried on in medicine with some professional repute and huge affection from the communities he served. I have incredible respect/admiration/hero worship for those men.

There is though an important otherness to the mark that those women I love have made on my life of which I am increasingly aware and for which I am increasingly grateful.

Grâce à vous une robe a passé dans ma vie