Wendy K. Laidlaw

Hey, everyone.

As always, I hope that this podcast finds you well, especially as it's International Women's Day.

Now, as I share this podcast with you, I wrote this earlier when I was on a plane on the way down to London for what I call a self-date.

A self-date is this concept of taking yourself out for a period of time just by yourself.

It's a kind of concept I took from the wonderful Julia Cameron's book, The Artist Way, where she refers to this as an artist date.

But it primarily is just a block of time taken purely by yourself for yourself.

The kind of me, myself and I, I call it.

But how incredibly challenging it is as a concept for women.

I recall my own childhood of watching the women of many generations and their focus and attention and actions throughout my growing up years.

My grandmothers were housewives and spent all of their time fussing and fawning over the various family members and especially their husbands, the men.

My granny Laidlaw was dispatched to boarding school, sadly, the real centrinians, at the tender age of five years old when her parents, my great-grandparents, sailed off to live and work in India.

My heart bleeds for her even now to think of that massive distance all those decades ago with no internet and no mobile phones.

When I first heard about the cruel and unkind Victorian abandonment to a stone cold institution at an age where many are only just starting to make sense of their surroundings, their language and body, let alone the loneliness and abandonment or rejection as she viewed it, I was horrified.

How would or could parents do that to their child?

How did she cope?

Who was there for her when she was sad, down or depressed?

Girls in boarding school taught her about the role of women during her years there.

She would later display proudly on the wall her certificates for home economics, aka how to clean, hoover, wash dishes and care for her husband and all the children.

But let's not forget that even as recent as the 1960s and 1970s, women were expected to give up their jobs.

work and fully attend to their home and their husbands after marriage.