The Acorn Does Not Fall Far From The Oak

Recently a friend (male) sent me the following email:

Subject: What A Beautiful Story...

 This story brought tears to my eyes, and what a beautiful ending

Once upon a time, a guy asked a beautiful girl 'Will you marry me?' The girl said, 'NO!' And the guy lived happily ever after and rode motorcycles and went fishing and hunting and played golf and drank beer and scotch and had tons of money in the bank and left the toilet seat up and farted whenever he wanted.  The End

I was compelled to reply as follows:

What a load of w%#k. He was lonely, did not know how to style himself. He consistently wore clothing which clashed. The more fashion conscious folk learned to avoid him at the bar, not only because he was a fashion mistake but because he often forgot to take the clothes from the machine where they languished, acquiring  that sour smell which afterwards wafted in his immediate vicinity. He lived on a diet of tinned tuna and baked beans which exacerbated his halitosis and caused him to fart rather a lot, further isolating him from his peers at the golf club who grew sick and tired of his repetitive ramblings about his solitary fishing expeditions.  He died prematurely, alone and unlamented by all.

I was mildly amused by myself until I realised my response had merely confirmed the sexual stereotype of women as cooks, cleaners and guardians of all things domestic .

But then I got over myself and regained my sense of humour.

 Most recently our Book Club has read Dear Life by Alice Munro.

  This fabulous collection includes stories about ordinary people, the poignant consequences of their choices and the random life events which confront them. Towards the end the stories are acknowledged by the author to be the closest to autobiographical that she has ever written.  She describes her relationship with her mother, a woman who aspired to lead a different sort of life than the one she ended up with, as difficult.  Her mother's desire to move in higher social circles and whose manner of speech isolated her from her own family were difficult for her daughter to understand.  The mother's illness and subsequent death meant that their relationship was never really resolved.  Nevertheless the mother was her earliest role model and example and one wonders whether Munro would have pursued the education which led to her becoming such a well known writer if her mother had not been a teacher who valued education.


Other stories in the collection shed light on how women's roles have changed in the years since the
Second World War and the social mores by which they are judged.  In Gravel, for example,  the
mother leaves her husband for another man which causes a degree of scandal.

How lucky we are to live in this day and age and have the freedoms and access to opportunities women born in previous generations could only dream about.  There are still frontiers and prejudice to be overcome.  In her wonderful Tedx talk Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie implores us to all be feminists.  Beyoncé heard the call to arms and used part of the talk in  a song from her most recent album

Mostly though I think it is a battle being fought in the ordinary lives and homes of ordinary people.  Consider the wise words of Amy Tan.

“A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. ”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club