Sikamikanico Blogs

 I've just gotten over a bout of Covid. After two years of being careful, and being triple vaccinated, here we are. And whilst the world is suffering a dire dearth of hot takes from special snowflakes on their views of the epidemiological management, sociopolitical implications, and personal experiences of the pandemic, Covid isn't the story I'm telling today. Instead I want to talk about what came next. On account of being in mandatory isolation after testing positive for Covid, and also being quite sick, I didn't drive my car for ten days, and when I did take it out again, rather than wisely taking the opportunity to refresh the battery with a nice long drive, I was still a bit ill and only went to the local shops. All of which brings us to yesterday. I get in my car, put the key in the ignition and click-click-click-click-ptooey . The car won't start.  Luckily I already have reason to suspect the battery, because otherwise I would have no idea what is going on. A

If you'd asked me when I was aged 20 about plans for my life, I was a little hazy (I didn't work out what I wanted to do when I grew up until I was 33). But I would have had a visceral, furious reaction at any notion that I should stay at home taking care of the kids and the housework while my husband worked. At that time, my feminism was a lot more strident than it is now. I believed women who stayed at home, taking their husbands' names and care of home and family, were letting all women down. They should be out building careers, tearing down the barricades, glass ceiling and patriarchy, as I planned to do just as soon as I figured out how.  You have to remember this was over two decades ago, and my exposure to feminist theory largely came from what books I could obtain from the local library, and they mostly written by the second wave feminists of the 1970s: Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer. Going back further in time, I'd grown up being told there were