ramblings from the edge

Quests worth questing October 23, 2006

This is a post from my ex’s blog 3½ years ago. He’s lovely and I see where he’s coming from, but I can’t help but take the “four years later” reference personally:

Women who won’t…

And the husbands, lovers, bosses sort of suck their teeth and say, a little ruefully, ‘Um, me too, now you come to mention it. Chance would be a fine thing,’ and so on. And then they accede, usually. And the women disappear, maybe to the gym or the wine bar or Selfridges, their brains having lapsed into happy desuetude.

Check around your office for a few minutes (if you’re deluded enough still to be working in one). How many women there have gone part-time, recently? How many women have given up work altogether? How many women went part-time because they were having a baby but now, four years later, just look — they’re still part-time? What’s happening to them? Where’s that vaulting ambition to break through the infamous and repellent glass ceiling? Where’s the bloody work ethic? And how should the men respond?

Maybe the bloody layabouts could try taking their own bloody kids for more than one night in 8½ years and see what happens to his priorities, his ambition and his bloody work ethic. WHO THE **** HAS TIME FOR THE BLOODY GYM OR WINE BAR?!?! Way too busy avoiding attention labels and disorders and drugs, speeding traffic and nosey neighbours and DoCS, developing a love of learning and language and meaning and emotions, a sense of spirit and service and community, manners (my kid must be one in a million – no-one teaches manners anymore) and food and exercise and housework, tv and computer games and the curse of media advertising, and the right balance of family, friends and alone time so you don’t end up raising a psychopath. At the very least get them to eat their dinner and brush their teeth!

You know how self-centred your little world must be when the schmoozing at the office and tackling petty little glass ceilings is top of your mind. When you’re part of raising the next generation, you start to actually pay attention to what kind of planet and culture they’re going to inherit, and start doing things about making it a worthy legacy.

Mum’s have the ultimate work ethic, and a healthy intolerance of useless people and tasks. Any energy that’s left after a mum’s day’s work would never be wasted on office politics when essential questions remain unaddressed:

• Will there be enough oxygen left on this planet for your son to blow out the candles on his 50^th birthday cake?
• When school expulsions and suspensions have gone up from 30 – 30,000 per year in each state in this country since the boy was born, what kind of emotional and social world will he be living and working in by his 30^th?
  
• How does one teach chivalry honour compassion and respect in a world where the last remnants of such things exist only in myths and fairy tales, where the current world allows 20-50,000 child molestations a day, where 35,000 children a day are dying of starvation, and where no true safety for women has existed ever in history?
  

The ambition and work ethic you speak of is a quest for money and power alone, and I’ll have none of it. Teach the children to know love and give all the power they have in them, rather than fear they have none hence try in vain to take it from others.

Universally across all cultures LOVING is stated as the #1 most important thing in life. But who takes their eyes off their ambitions long enough to quest for love? Mothers do. If there’s ANYTHING on this earth I can do to improve the way we love ourselves, each other and our world, I’m gonna do it, and no measly ambition or useless little glass ceiling is EVER gonna distract me from my quest for a loving world.