I got up early this morning. In fact I almost didn’t get up early. Having adjusted the time setting on my alarm, I forgot to activate it and it was only by the sheerest of coincidence that I woke up and wondered what time it was!
As it turned out I didn’t need to get up early at all but by the time I found that out I was up and about.
My daughter had planned to go into her school and do some preparation work for next year. This is what teachers do in their holidays. It helps make the rest of the year manageable. Normally she would have left until some later point in the summer break but as they are soon setting off for a week or so in Spain, she decided to get ahead of herself. She was going to deposit the small people at my house for the morning. I was going to get the paints out and propose a morning of painting rainbows and such as the weather is so foul today.
In the event, she called me at about 8.00 to tell me of a change of plan. The older of the small people had been sick and nobody was going anywhere. These things happen.
According to a study done recently, mothers who have three daughters and no sons suffer from a drop in wellbeing, whatever that really is. Couples who have two children of the same sex are more likely to have a third child quickly, perhaps in the hope of producing a child of the other gender. If child number three is of the same sex as the older siblings, the mother suffers a drop in self esteem. This effect is worse if she has three daughters rather than three sons. It’s amazing what psychologists spend their time studying, presumably in the hopes of producing a book and becoming an acknowledged expert and making loads of money.
When I was a child there was a family in our neighbourhood who had six daughters, almost one every eighteen months or so, and eventually had a seventh child … a son. They had no more after that! When my first child was born, a boy, one of the nurses at the hospital congratulated me on having a son at the first try. It was at that point that my mother revealed that I was supposed to be a boy - she wanted a son “for her husband” - and how she had thanked the doctor who delivered my brother some four years later.
All that was years ago, but it seems that for some people having a son is still a matter of some importance. However, some of the letters in this selection from the weekend’s newspaper demonstrate that some mothers of girls are extremely happy with their lot.
Fortunately nobody had made me feel inferior for being a girl rather than a boy and my parents never expressed disappointment … not to me anyway!
On the gender question and the problems of being a woman, here’s an article about an app that has been introduced in Marseilles to make women feel safer on the beach - “saferplage”. Interestingly the writer says she feels more aware of being observed and assesses as a woman on then streets of France than in Britain:-
“It isn’t always creepy or threatening, at least in my case – perhaps I’ve been lucky so far. Men whistle as you walk past and look you up and down and maybe shout something that they wouldn’t want their mother hearing. You keep walking, they keep walking, life goes on.
Still, it makes it very hard to exist in the world without constantly thinking about your own legs, and chest, and hair, and whatever you happen to be wearing that day. It may not be threatening but it is tiring. You don’t always want to have the outside world in your head, telling you repeatedly that you are a woman, existing in a woman’s body.”
Apparently she has observed that the number of women who comfortably sunbather topless (a practice that has always struck me as rather foolish - there are parts of me I don’t want to burn but then I burn easily!) on French beaches has gone down in recent years possibly because women feel they are being judged. (I can’t say I have noticed a similar phenomenon on Spanish beaches where women of all shales and sizes go topless.) However if the “saferplage” app makes women feel more secure on the beach, it’s all to the good, after all, as the journalist writes, “Swimming in the sea is something anyone should be able to do, without as much as a second thought. It is the most fun a person can have with only some of their clothes on.”
Meanwhile in Catalonia it seems that nudists are complaining about non-nudists invading “their” beaches.
Its a funny old world!
Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!
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