Ruby on women in business

I went to Coventry today, not the expression. I went to the town to speak to Women in Business. These hubs of entrepreneurial women are springing up everywhere in the UK to support each other and promote the notion of getting more women in the boardroom and not for serving coffee. Free at last, free at last. We have broken the shackles of our apron strings and only the glass ceiling is the limit. The concept of the working woman is no longer a dirty word, except in London W11. On the women’s lib front we’re back picking cotton in ol’ Notting Hill. There women do not work they are there to squirt out a straight A spawn and return to a size 6 before they leave those stirrups. One sign of a stretch mark or an unsightly bulge and they’ll find they’re replaced by a firmer copy of themselves and flung out like a used serviette.

But back to us, the workers, there are so many things we haven’t figured out yet, the work/life balance for example, I believe we’ll never get right until men can be impregnated. Do we leave those kids in the cribs and go to work or visa versa? No one has the answer. Literally every woman I know feels bad if she stays at home and bad if she goes to work. Guilt comes with motherhood. I was missing in action when my kids were tiny because I loved to work, I remember being nine months pregnant, sitting in a T.V. studio someone went 5-4-3-2-1; they cut the cord and then said, “Action.”

I can’t pass on recipes for cupcakes to my children, but I can tell them where Imelda Marcos stashes her shoes and what it’s like to spend three days with O.J. Simpson. I believe I make a better role model than a woman who actually knows what goes in a party bag.

Some of the mommies who chose to stay home are now in inconsolable despair as their kids leave for college. Did they not think that this day wouldn’t come? They made sure from the moment their kids exited the womb they had hot and cold running tutors to hot-house those little brains. Now that they finally got them into the best of the best of schools, they’re running for the Xanax, spending their empty days extending and re-modelling their kitchens for a now defunct family. Women have to be in business it’s the only way we can stay sane.  We will never be truly free until men can carry their own seed.