“Don’t forget to chase the plumber today,” my husband reminds me as he heads out the door to work. He flings it back over his shoulder, casually, as if it were nothing. Nothing at all.
It’s not nothing to me. It is everything. It is, to be slightly more precise, the thing that is going to define my entire day. I only have, you see, a certain amount of courage to expend in any single 24-hour period. And it can’t simply be deployed. It must first be mustered – carefully gathered in, tended to, gently ripened and brought to full potency.
Then the phone must be lifted, or the email/text/WhatsApp message composed or – in worst case scenarios – the face to face meeting engendered. Then there is deployment; the conversation must be had with the person on the other end of the line or – God forbid, in the flesh – or the send button pressed on the correspondence.
And then there is the recovery time, which may last minutes, hours or days. Sometimes weeks, though that generally runs concurrently with basic domestic and work tasks so life doesn’t fall apart entirely, though you will be going to bed early, knackered, and unable to sleep for the duration.
The world is divided into people who understand every word of what I have just said and may even be nodding along in grateful recognition. “Yes!” they will say. “I have to take a dress back to M&S and ask for a refund today! Everything is awful!”. Or “I have to have a new shower fitted and I can’t face it. I’ve been washing with a flannel at the sink for six weeks, and honestly it’s fine.”
And then there are the others who will be shaking their heads in bafflement and wondering what on earth we are talking about. Probably as they head out of the door to work, shouting these instructions over their shoulders as they go, but that’s an issue for another time.
So what’s going on? What are we to make of the people who have to pluck up actual courage to perform what others see as mundane, functional chores – akin, perhaps, to loading the dishwasher or having a shower (if you’ve got one that works)?
I have thought about this long and hard – usually as I stare at the phone, willing myself to pick it up and text our perfectly nice but rather erratic plumber and ask when he might be here – and I think it all comes down to self-esteem.
When I am preparing to call someone for something I need, I feel bad. I feel bad for letting something break, for not being able to fix it myself, or for wanting an upgrade or improvement to something that is working okay but could be better. I feel bad for potentially disturbing them when they are not working or on another, more important job. I feel bad for not buying the right size of item and needing to put someone through the hassle of refunding it.
I am frightened. I am frightened that they are going to say no, I should have not broken the thing; done things right in the first place; not bought a thing I didn’t really need in the first place let alone one I should have known I didn’t look right in. And so on and very much so forth.
Who am I, is the pulse that beats at the back of every instance, to ask something of someone else?
The answer, of course, is that I am someone with money who is offering it to someone in exchange for a service they make their living from willingly providing (you have to expand this a little when it comes to refunds for frocks but you take my point, I’m sure).
People with reasonable self-esteem (not too much – that too is deeply unhealthy and far more unpleasant for those around you, but maybe we’ll come back to that in another column; suffice to say that the team of researchers who posited a few years ago that the problem with teenagers is not that they have low self-esteem but actually esteem themselves far too highly should have been given a hero’s parade) compute this properly and behave accordingly. But for those of us who have been raised or who have otherwise come to believe that we are essentially here on this earth under sufferance, the world looks quite different.
It would be my suspicion that women, who even if they are granted happy, confidence-building childhoods are assailed by social messages telling them how they deviate from various aesthetic and intellectual ideals as soon as they step out of the charming familial haze. But I think it cuts across sex, as a fundamental difference in temperament too. We quail because we are. Whether those who do not can ever be brought to understand their quivering brethren I do not know. I’ll think about it tomorrow. I have to destroy myself chasing a plumber today.
