Or at least that is what web sites and publications are telling me. I find this funny. In the world I live in every year is the year of the women. Let try a little background here and what I hope is a happy story for the future.
My brother is almost 10 years younger than myself. I thought I’d be a only male child. Just as my father, grandfather, and great grandfather. The last women born in my family was 1887.
Somewhere along the lines it was impressed upon the men in my family to marry strong women, at least their equal if not more.
Of the three generation of women I know they were all college educated. All had careers BEFORE they got married. They didn’t get married at 16. More like mid-20s. Although they would all do the “traditional” stay at home mom thing in the end, there was clearly no doubt who ran things.
Who paid the bills. Managed the finances. Made sure the trains ran on time. Heck I am 49 and my mother still scares me. She is the person that played catch with me in the backyard since my dad worked all the time. Wrote me a letter a week when I went away at college. Never missed a t-ball games or tennis match. Mom is a fucking force of nature!
Well I’ve never married. No kids. More than a decade ago my brother got married. His wife Sara was around my age, a number of years older than him. She made a ton more money. He moved into the house she owned.
They decided to have one child, but didn’t want to know the sex until birth.
Well they birthed a girl. Catherine (Katie). There were happy dances in the hospital.
I’ve always paid a lot of attention to women’s issues. Did I mention the 5 ad agencies I worked at before working for myself in 4 of them my boss was a lady. By boss I mean the person that owned said ad agency. The last one I was at, and spent many years working there we had 60 or so employees. Close to 70% female.
I’m just not used to not being around strong women. And I listen when they talk about what they have to confront on a daily or by minute basis being said strong women. Most times I can’t compute.
Why people want to control their bodies. They get paid less for equal work. Heck opiates are a huge problem, but I’d rank the number of ladies sexual assaulted in their lifetime way above that as a national emergency.
But back to Katie, who is 9. She seems to take after her uncle (that would be me) and is very good at sports. Tennis and soccer. In both instances she is in leagues were she plays with “boys.” She is kicking their asses, but several in tennis are much better.
When she was over for X-mas Eve I asked if her father had ever mentioned I might have played some tennis. She said nope (this kind of pissed me off BTW). I explained that every summer and X-mas break, when I was just a little older than her, I started going to tennis camps. My senior year of high school I beat every single player from the University of Illinois Chicago.
I was feeling pretty full of myself and the owner of the camp saw it.
She put me on the court with a 14 year old girl. She literally ran me off the court. Worse loss I’d ever had. 0 and 1. Many years later I still think she gave me that one game out of pity.
Told Katie not only she just as good she can be better.
From the look on her face it was clear I was not the first person to tell her this. Her parents had as well.
It is why about every other present each X-mas is Disney princess stuff (she is 9) and then a Star Wars LEGO kit. Or robot building kit. An app to teach her to program, which her father and me both do for a living.
Finding it hard to figure out how to finish this, but nobody finds it strange she plays sports with boys. And not only does she want to beat them, she expects to.
Or when we are at Katie’s mother huge family, who wish America was back to the 1950s (Trump voters I might add, or not need to add) they are stunned we are not playing Candy Crush, but Cut the Rope on my tablet. A game that if it isn’t at least a basic intro to physics, it is an intro to motion.
Katie has NEVER been told she can’t do something because she is a girl and not a boy. Heck one of Sara’s brother is the “black sheep” of the family. His son a Marine for about two years.
After spending a ton of time with him X-Mas day Katie said when she grows up she wants to be a Marine like Paul. You could see the horrified look on that other side of the family and smiles on her parents faces and that of my parents and me.
I just said, “Katie, if you want you can do that!”