Ladyball. Or, why aren’t traditionally female skills more celebrated?

I was going to post drunk on social media last night, as my husband watched the Lionesses not exactly storm to victory in last night’s Euros. I thought better of it. I know this one requires tact and nuance, something I lack at 10 pm on a Tuesday after an early week lash-up following a meet-up with my husband’s Aussie family at Pizza Pilgrims in Canary Wharf.

I was feeling reckless, when I came home, and washed the bubbly and pizza down with two large glasses of red. Bear with me. There’s a reason for this rant.

During the evening, my lovely sis-in-law and I had discussed the women’s football and I said the following controversial thing: it’s a bit shit though, isn’t it?

There followed the usual platitudes about: isn’t it great though that women’s sport is being so celebrated?

I said, well it would be nice if traditionally female sports were more celebrated.

And there was a pause as we tried to think of some traditionally female sports. Tennis? Nope. (I think the Wimbledon women’s final sums that one up.) Gymnastics? (maaaaybe?) Dance?….hmmm…

I said this in front of my gender dysphoric teen, Ava, who rolled her eyes at me as I added fuel to her estimation of me as a rather pointless and bigoted trans-exclusionary radical unfeminist.

Ava’s right of course. I am a bit pointless. Except for my biology. Which, in the words of the now departed Sarah Harding, off of Girls Aloud, who tragically dies of breast cancer after Covid, I can’t escape. I always have been a bit of a sexy, underconfident chocolate teapot. We were high street Honeys in the same issues of FHM, dontcha know.

Anyway, what I rather clumsily articulated over pizza and fizzy wine is this: Why are women only celebrated when they do things that men typically excel at?

At Lana, my youngest daughter’s school, there is a whole wall mural to an allumni who now plays football for her country. All well and good. But my youngest daughter does dance, not football, and has no inclinations in that direction. I appreciate that, for the minority of girls who do wish to play football at national level, this is a wonderful source of inspiration. For the overwhelming majority of girls who don’t, what is theirs?

I’m not trying to undo 150 years of feminism here, and OF COURSE I think it’s great that women who love football should play football and be celebrated for it. Even if, compared the the men’s game, it is actually a little bit crap (Don’t try to tell me that I’m wrong here. Even Reprobate Tom, who insisted on watching all 120 minutes of the women’s game, last night, jokingly referring to it as ‘ladyball’, says so.) But what about the women that don’t excel at (traditionally more valued) “men’s” things?

I am one such woman. When I was younger, I loved getting involved in the boy’s games at school, mostly so I could tackle said boys, but a combination of dyspraxia and oestrogen combined to make me pretty awful at anything requiring hand to eye coordination. I’d long given up on sport before I discovered the art of pole dancing – something at which I actually excelled). But no one, and I mean no one, except my eventual husband, was cheering me on. Did alright out of it though 😉

This balletic strength, determination and dyspraxic inability at team games I passed onto my son, which, with the addition of testosterone, turned him in to a GB climber (so far, no mural at his school).

My middle daughter has the dyspraxia and engineering mind of my father, but no balls skills to speak of. She notably lacks another traditionally female skill: caring. I know this because she rankled about having to look after her younger sister on scout camp last weekend. She has baldly stated that I can expect zero grandchildren from her. Fair enough, I guess. She seems to lack the gene for that – or maybe it’s the hormones. Who knows? Perhaps she just doesn’t have the balls… (something the transwashing she’s been exposed to online is at pains to pretend otherwise.)

Yesterday, and the reason for me throwing alcoholic caution to the wind in the evening, I spent at Jane, my poorly step-mother’s bedside, feeding her, washing her, cleaning her teeth and brushing her hair. She may or may not have encephalitis. Either way, she is immobile, unable to speak and requires round the clock nursing care; something she will not get on the NHS, as they simply do not have the resources to look after her as she needs.

Thinking about the people who are now caring for her on top of the nursing staff- her sister, mine, and Jane’s partner, I raked my memory for people I could call on to support me to look after Jane in this emergency. My father? No. it would be inappropriate, given how he’d discarded Jane – the woman who raised us after our own mother left – for a more nubile women as soon as my sister and I had gone to university. My own mother (bless her), not noted for her maternal instinct, would be a better choice. In the end, I thought of my old childminder, Claire, who’d been a third mum to us and friendly with Jane for years. I messaged her and of course, she immediately agreed to go and do a shift or two, despite her own advancing years.

On the ward, where old people slumped in beds like so much rubble, the millennial nurse met me with a blank stare when I pled with her to take good care of Jane; that Jane isn’t old, that she needs perseverance with feeding and hydrating (derspite the drip). That she will tell you (because of how she was raised to put her own needs last), that she doesn’t want or need anything, but who was so thirsty she drank whole glass of coconut water I’d brought in for the electrolytes, homemade chicken stock to help the infection, cranberry juice too.

I dipped a digestive biscuit into tea and fed her as tenderly as if I was feeding a baby – she drank the tea and a second biscuit, nibbling it like a lamb. The whole operation took two hours. Who’s got time for that? Not I, who should be working except I got so burned out by the corporate world that I was let go to tend my garden.

For this woman who spent 25 years working for the state, raising, with kindness and patience, hoards of kids as a nursery nurse on the impoverished Isle of Sheppey, giving them skills and futures they would never have attained at home, for a pittance wage.

This woman who spent her own youth bringing up two girls who were not her own, unable to have her own children because of her endometriosis, simply left to expire on a ward because there is not enough resources to take proper care of her in her hour of need. I’m not angry. I’M FUCKING FURIOUS.

So, it’s not that I malign the women who are succeeding at things that have traditionally been the remit of men. Christ knows we needed a shift. But what about the women who are good a traditionally female things – nurses, midwives, nursery staff, mothers, care workers – the people who do the hard and dirty job of loving, who are so routinely ill-valued their skills are now demoted to the lowest tranche of society to perform for the poorest wages. As a nursery teacher in the 70s and 80s, Jane was middle-class. I’d argue that many who work in nurseries now are not, which says all you need to know about the drop in the value of caring. You simply can’t put a price on it, It’s no wonder they’re all going on strike.

That’s why I got so angry at the ladyball. They *were* pretty crap (sorry!) even if they won. Where’s the mural for my stepmother and the people who care for her? Where is the denigration of those who are neglecting to recognise her value in society? There is none. There is money in football because people will pay to go and watch it, although why they do, I’m afraid, I’m at a total loss. But no money in caring for the women who cared for the rest of us, when they have the indignity to get old.

The prosocial skills of oestrogen, which should be in such high demand, in this aging society where no one is replacing the babies becasue it’s so cost ineffective to actually care for somebody else, are needed. As a society, we’d rather look the other way, away from the grey roots and stray hairs because what’s worse that an oldish women who’s gone gah gah?

Do we need to run out of people to actually sit up and do something? To my father, who exploited Jane’s love for him to have her raise his daughters before discarding her, aged 50, so he could have a life and new family with a woman 15 years younger; who could afford to string along a woman in her twenties in Thailand when he was in his fucking sixties, I say this. If you’re rich enough to do all that (even though I had to fucking lap dance to pay my own way through university!!) then pay for a private nurse for Jane. If the state that she served for so long cannot give her the care she needs, then you owe it to her, Dad. It would cost less than a fucking Sky subscription.