The Feminist Pub - come in and chat.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

This is something like the fourth pub chat thread - please pull up a chair at the bar. Everyone welcome.

Old thread is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1920422-The-Feminist-Pub-continued?

But it's pretty much full so welcome in.

Dd2 has this jungle set. I decorated her bedroom in the summer and did it green with blue sky, animal stickers, trees, animal curtains and bedding. She loves it!! Her friends have been amazed by it seeing as all of them have very girly pink rooms.

Argos can sometimes be surprising too, DS has an "underwater" set from there which is 100% cotton with applique seahorses, submarines etc. It's really cute, even though it does get really creased without ironing which is why I usually prefer polycotton.

Oh wow - look at this! Science museum space set

Very unisex too.

Oh my goodness. Love both of those! Thank you. Knew the pub would help me out.

Weirdly I love looking for bed clothes! I had pages and pages of ones I designed as a kid (was obsessed with boarding school). Good job I have a massive complex about spending money or we'd not be able to move for bed sheets, and I'd be doing endless laundry to rotate them all...

I really love the space one though. They are really awesome. Good price too.

That site AntiJam linked to has some great stuff too. Think yhe science museum one might be a winner though. Will have to see what DD1 thinks. She wants to be an astronaut so it has a lot going for it. ..

Missed the beginning of the bridge due to having friends. Should I watch now half way in or should I wait to see the whole thing from beginning?

I like Ikea for kids beddings. Nice bright colours and designs and all cotton.

If you watch it I'm gonna have to hide the thread as I don't think I can watch till sometime i. The week!

I think you should leave it and watch the whole thing. I won't talk about it. (have seen it)

ikea bed linen can be very nice - a lot of it is very colourful which gets away from the whole drippy dreariness of girl-silo and boy-silo palettes

like this which may perhaps be a bit much? I kind of like it

or this

Evening all. Can I have a triple brandy please, barperson?

This is going to be really incoherent, hope you don't mind if I sit in a corner and weep quietly into my drink.

My lovely bright once-feisty DD is 15 and I feel I have let her down so horribly. She is struggling with being a teenager and the pressures on/expectations of girls and I don't know how to help. I have set such a horrible example. She is getting more and more quiet and withdrawn and defeated.

Her father is EA and can't be bothered with her much now that she is a teen and "difficult"—I am in two minds about whether it's good he's not bullying her or worse that he is neglecting her.
My parents were/are EA, and my not at all D M lives overseas thank God. She and I had a terrible relationship when I was growing up and I simply have no idea how to mother a daughter. Thanks to my M I struggle to maintain relationships with anyone at all but perhaps especially female friends, so there are no other mother figures in her life.

How do you explain to a girl that you have brought her into a world where she can't just be herself? That is weighted against her? How do you teach her how to cope with things that you can't do yourself? How do you help her feel she matters, that she belongs, when you yourself are like a stranger in the world?

So sorry you are so sad, Lesser.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Girls have a hard time. It's not all your fault.
Not being in the swim can be a good thing long term. Uncomfortable, yes, but not just accepting the narrow cookie cutter girlhood that is on offer is a kind of stroke for freedom, even if it takes years to get there.
Sorry about all the EA. Can you get help for you?

Good morning.

I never fitted in with anybody when growing up. Only when talking to people I know now do I realise what my peers went through. But I have supportive family who let me be. I think that's more important than I knew at the time. But I'm sorry I can't help, Lesser. :(

Did watch the bridge after all. Well!

We have a wolves-and-sheep set, a numbers set, a cars set, and a couple of stripy sets of duvet covers from ikea for the kids. Why don't they do the same type of thing for grown-ups?

God it's painful posting from the phone!

I know, it is painful posting from the phone, I didn't want to let Weevil go unanswered so I posted but now I am back to see if I said anything really trite because I couldn't type / think properly.

Weevil I do think you are being very hard on yourself and I think you should think about whether you can deal with any of your own relationship stuff for your own good. Sounds like you need a friend for you, as much as anything. It is hard to maintain friendships when you are busy and an introvert. But if your partner isn't good for you then you need someone. Where are you?

I have a very angsty thread going in relationships at the moment. Tied up with all my stuff is this awful anxiety and sometimes horror and self loathing that I have brought two girls into the world when I never had the slightest clue what to do with one, ie, myself. I wished I hadn't been born often enough and now I have made two more. And my mother wasn't much help so I too have no idea what to do. I'm sorry this isn't helping, I just wanted to say I do really really hear your cri de couer.

come and talk to us more about it. I find it helps to talk, on mn or in real life. People don't have solutions but talking is better than jsut going round and round in your head.

I am sure your daughter knows you are rooting for her and appreciates it even if she can't be as happy as she should be right now. Just tell her that anyway, just in case. Keep reminding her that you love her and you are are on her side.
you sound lovely

Oh, he's not my partner, we split up years ago and I have led a life of unrelieved monastic solitude ever since. Sorry, should have made that clearer while blubbing into my pint last night.

Of course the solitariness of my life is bad for my DD in a different way: among other things, she has no idea what an ok relationship looks like.

It's so painful to see her take all that intelligence and energy and turning it against herself and not being able to show her a way out. And even if I knew what to tell her, I doubt she would listen because my advice so clearly hasn't worked for me.
True, she does know I am on her side, but I don't know if that is of the slightest practical use to her.

Dusk, thanks so much for that, especially as I have now read your other thread and know that you are posting from a very low place too.

I am what you are frightened of becoming. I ended a terrible relationship and while it was a relief to be out of it, I haven't managed to be ok on my own, let alone find another one. It's not that I used to be ok on my own and an EA man dragged me down...I was never OK, despite two decades of ADs and therapy.

My DSes manage life fine and my DD is younger and stuck with me for several years. I was so desperate to be able to make her life better than mine has been.

I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember, but sisterhood is something I have only ever found online, and even then it's something I read about, not something I'm part of.

I think so many mothers go through this - but I would absolutely echo what the others have said - if she feels you're on her side then you're not doing so badly.

I don't have a perfect relationship with my mum, but we are good friends. She has been, in many ways, a very strong feminist influence on me. This is what she taught me about life, from a young age: that I am a worthwhile person, that I can be strong (even if I don't feel it), that I can do anything I set my mind to, that men are not the be-all-and-end-all of life, that no man has the right to control me or make me feel bad.

I also had a very strange time in my teens where I withdrew completely into myself, and into a world of books and music. Had few friends, went out rarely. I'm forever grateful to her that she didn't make a big thing about this, and just let it run it's course - which it did, when I got a weekend job and met some new people, and then when I went onto university. I think this is a very,very common phase in teens.

Have you got anyone at all in real life that you can start to confide in? I suffer terribly from anxiety sometimes, and I would be totally lost without girlfriends to chat to/share problems with. A close female confidant is one of the things that can make all the difference to your mental well-being. I do understand how an abusive relationship can ruin your confidence and trust in others though Who do you think you're closest to irl?

Thanks Buffy.

Growing up, I was the only feminist I knew, apart from my M, who was neither sisterly nor motherly.

When I went up to university, back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I went along to some feminist group meetings where people who were interested put their names down for consciousness-raising groups...somehow my name got left out of all the groups. I did start to make friends with another woman there until she decided she was going to become/was already a radical feminist and wasn't going to talk to or rely on men or have anything to do with them. I liked men and wore makeup. So that was the end of that.

Now I live in a place where until recently the word feminist was practically unknown and there was no mainstream movement. Women got on with things regardless and have done pretty well in terms of doing well in the professions and in public life (we have a woman PM, eg).
There are a lot of strong women's groups and networks...but they're not feminist and a lot of them are centred on faith, or assume that you're a SAHM and will have time for daytime meetings and activities, or that working women work 8-4. And the feminist groups are based in the black working class and I am neither.

I know a lot of my problems are strictly personal in that if I were any good at making friends or belonging to groups I could have overcome all of those hurdles. But I'm not and I didn't.

QED

You haven't killed the thread. It's a pub, sometimes it's busy and sometimes it's quiet .

Not sure I have much I can add as my own girls are still small, but will be back later to catch up.

SO so angry about this thread, can you guys over there and make it all better please?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1985356-To-think-that-this-advice-column-in-todays-Guardian-is-bang-out-of-order?

and especially one particular poster who I want to reach through the commuter and shake some sense in to

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1985356-To-think-that-this-advice-column-in-todays-Guardian-is-bang-out-of-order?