International Women's Day, 8 March 2009
A greeting on a day that arrives in the middle of a hard year, and a note on who has been carrying it.
A happy Women's Day to all the women reading this.
The flowers are smaller this year and there are fewer of them, which is what a difficult winter looks like on a pavement in March. The day is going ahead regardless, and I notice that nobody is treating the smaller bouquet as a failure.
What I want to note is who has absorbed most of this year so far. In a downturn, the household budget gets managed, the meals get stretched, the children get told everything is fine, and the arithmetic gets done late at night by someone who then goes to work in the morning. In most of the households I know here, that someone is a woman.
That work is invisible by design, and it is the reason a bad year is survivable.
Flowers today, and my respect for the rest of it.
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