The Buggy and the Finance Bro
Mary Woodard
I stood at the bottom of a long flight of stairs in Monument Station. My six month old was in her buggy, and Monument has no step free access. This important fact had slipped my mind.
Finance Bros jogged past, gym bags slung over their shoulders, taking efficient advantage of their lunch hour. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that their workout could include helping me carry a buggy. I wasn’t even sure I could stop a Finance Bro without causing some kind of muscled pile up. They were moving so quickly, so intent on keeping to their tight schedules, that diverting any of them seemed tantamount to needing a transport truck to brake suddenly on the highway.
As I worked through possibilities, another mother appeared at the top of the stairs. She registered the steps, her buggy, and the need for help. Waving to her, I put the brakes on my own buggy, and jogged up. We could help each other. Upon reaching her, I realised she was heavily pregnant. There was no way she should be hauling buggies up and down stairs.
Increasingly angry at the inhospitable world around us, I was propelled to uncharacteristic boldness and approached the only stationary people I could see: a group of construction workers, leaning against a wall, eating sandwiches. Hearing my predicament, two of them accompanied me into the station, carried one buggy down, and one buggy up. We were on our way.
My recent pregnancy, and all the small moments where I had felt something I had never really felt before—vulnerable, in need of help, and unsure of whom to turn to—flooded my mind. Severe hyperemesis at the start, high risk throughout; my pregnancy was difficult. It was the first time I felt fearful, protective of myself, and clearly aware of all the ways in which I was weaker than I wanted to be. I was a body inhabited, in the service of another who needed me in such a complete way that all my ingrained habits of self-sufficiency were no longer enough.
Through the months of pregnancy I travelled on the Tube, nauseous, dizzy, exhausted, weighted down. I was never once offered a seat. If, finally desperate, I asked for one, I was met with anything from mild inconvenience to eye rolling disdain.
Through these months, a long lost memory continuously flashed through my mind’s eye. Ten years previously, I was walking to one of the classroom buildings of my University, chatting to a friend. As we approached the double doors, I leapt forward to open one. My friend shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t do that, you know. It’s good for you, and it’s good for me if you let me open the door.’
I stared at him in non comprehension. It’s not like I needed his help to open the door. I had absorbed what was floating in the ether—a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. I could open my own doors, thank you very much.
It was only when I became pregnant that I began to make sense of what he had said. It was only with the acceptance of motherhood that I felt throughout my body, in an undeniable way, the reality of the differences between the sexes. Until that point, basically anything I wanted to do I could do as well as any man in my orbit.
In theory, there were some things that men could do better than I, like be in combat and lift weights. In reality, ninety eight percent of the men I knew were indistinguishable from me. Our parts were different, but our day to day lives were the same. We crammed for the same classes, typed on computers, talked on phones, rushed through cities, and hung out in the same restaurants and bars. Why would I need a man to open a door for me?
Motherhood woke me up. The difference between the sexes, so easily glossed over or denied completely in our office-job, sterile world laid me flat. The embodied experience of motherhood was an experience of being grounded in undeniable, unshifting reality, but a reality grossly at odds with the world around me. And there lay the rub.
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