IWD Mummy and Me

I have had mixed feelings about International Women’s Day. I go through the spectrum – pride, celebration, anger, resentment, dismissal, joy.

It is great, but why does it have to be? And really in which case why not IMD. I know why not.
But why not?

At it’s best it is exactly what it is meant to be. A reminder of and a shout out to the best and the great. Bringing the lesser lauded to the very front of the day. A day for the kweens.
At worst it can be smug and whiney.

Some time in the recent 2000’s, early March, I visited Trudy. Full of hot outrage I told her that my cleaner (yes, you got me) had told me that she wasn’t coming in because it was International Women’s Refugee Day. What what?
Had the fancy classes appropriated something so worthy, so important, so relevant and empowering, and turned it into a cheerleading pat-on-the-back day for people who could bake cakes in heels?

I ranted and I ranted to the 90 +year old lady. The woman who, as a teenager had come off a train at Paddington with her auntie, fallen into a strange land, learned a new language, stood up in a class full of strangers and secured for her mum a housekeeper position, thus enabling her a last minute escape from the Nazis. A woman who took on whatever employment presented itself and made it her own, from shop girl to shopkeeper to motherhood to secretary for the clergy. Who was never happier than the day she got her British Citizenship. Who fell in love with a man who was enjoying the benefits of being single and eligible in a world of sports cars and bachelor pads, and married him. Who, rumour has it, had a number of miscarriages, and a stillborn (my twin brother) and never ever spoke of the trauma of those she lost, only the delight of the babies she had.
Who brought up two girls and nurtured them and educated them and feared for them and encouraged them and listened to them and believed in them and laughed with them and loved them fiercely.

She nodded and gasped at my tirade and listened and agreed and commented.
We then moved the conversation on. Probably to The Repair Shop and what the cats had been up to.

Several months later I was off to Montevideo for a big old shampoo shoot.
A couple of days before I left, I received a card in the post. Inside, a £20 note and a card with Trudy’s continental cursive:
“July 7th is World Woman Producer’s Day in Uruguay. Enjoy.”
Having been through nearly 10 decades, heard it all, lived it more, she had the wit and the smarts to listen, consider, store, and use my nonsense posturing to send a slow burning gag of love.

To Trudy. The very best International Woman.

Footnote. Big up on IWD to Victoria Drummond. Not only was she the first woman in the Navy, but it was her great gift, after witnessing Hitler’s arrival in Vienna, using her funds her goodness and her influence, to enable my grandfather to bring his sister and his daughter, our mama, over from Austria in 1938.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Drummond

IWD is a very good thing indeed.