– and why would he pick me when he could pick her?
You went on reality TV and got eliminated on the first night,Jac would say.You can’t even do that right.
‘Yeah,’ I replied, making myself smile and taking the glass she held out to me. ‘He is.’
4
On the very first day of my mechanic apprenticeship, aged eighteen, I walked into a garage full of men. Every single one of them possessed at least six different calendars featuring blondes in bikinis draped over cars.
Obviously, I did not wear a bikini to work, but it didn’t take a genius to notice basically every one of my co-workers look at me, look at their calendars, look back at me, look at one of the many cars in the garage, and mentally drape me over the hood.
I tried so many things to get them to stop. So many. For example:
Ignoring all the comments and looks (You know how they tell you in school that if you ignore bullies they go away? Not true, at least in my experience.);
Calling them out when I heard the comments or saw thelooks, even though I am extremely bad at standing up for myself (‘Can’t you take a joke?’);
Complaining to my boss (‘Just ignore them; anyway, can’t you take a joke?’);
Being so much better at my job than they were that theyhadto respect me (turns out men hate it when you’re better at things than them);
Getting my boyfriend at the time to pick me up and drop me off from work (mildly effective for a while, but…);
After we broke up, getting my new girlfriend to pick me up and drop me off (extreme opposite effect); and
Joining in with their gross sexist banter (made me feel like I was selling my soul to the devil).
It took years before I hit on the only tactic that seemed to work, at least a reasonable percentage of the time: make them see me as their mum.
It was not easy. I’ve never wanted to be one of those women who complains about being pretty and blonde and how it makes their life sooooo haaaaaard, but it is not easy to put yourself in the mum zone when you look like I do, even if the only thing you ever wear is boxy coveralls. Plus, the line between ‘mum zone’ and ‘wife zone’ is distressingly thin, as I found out when I went a bit too hard in the ‘mum who bakes for you’ direction.
It was also not fun. Turns out being a mum involves a lot of work. I had to listen to a lot of men tell me about very trivial problems, and give very sensible, very obvious advice. Then there was my long lecture series about Cleaning Up AroundHere, which didn’t achieve much other than changing the conversation from ‘I’d do her’ to ‘what a nagging bitch’.
But at least it meant that they stopped seeing me as a sex object and started seeing me as a person (at least seventy per cent of the time, anyway). When other men came into the garage and made gross comments about me, they got ‘How dare you talk like that about Our Mandie!’ rather than ‘I know, right?’
It might not have been progress. Jac had been very clear that it was not progress. But it made things survivable, so now whenever I was in a situation where I felt uncomfortable, out of place or threatened, my instinct was to go Full Mum.
My First Night Party victim was my limo neighbour Cece, who’d stumbled into the mansion looking like she’d seen a ghost, turned around to run, and seen yet more ghosts. The leg-jiggling in the limo had clearly only been the start of it. She hadn’t stopped shaking the whole time we were here, and now she seemed to be trying to disappear into the corner of one of the couches.
‘Hey you,’ I said, sitting down on the other end of the couch. ‘How’s things? You looked all lonely over here.’
The look she gave me was somewhere between ‘please don’t talk to me’ and ‘please don’t leave me’. ‘I’m okay,’ she managed, her knuckles white around her champagne flute. ‘I’m just… this is so weird.’
‘So weird,’ I said, putting on my best comforting voice. ‘It’s such a surreal situation, you know?’
As I was wondering if I should try and extricate the champagne flute from her hand before she crushed it andblood got everywhere, one of the crew appeared. ‘Amanda, I want you to say that again, but sit closer,’ she said. ‘We can’t get you both in frame.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, moving so I was sitting right next to Cece. ‘I’m just so used to social distancing. It’s instinct now.’
‘Yes! Great! Say that!’ the AD said. ‘That’ll make a great grab for the ads. Rolling. In three—’
‘Wait!’ Cece exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what to say. What were we talking about?’
‘I’ve got it,’ I said, reaching out and patting her hand gently, one of my favourite Mum Manoeuvres™. ‘Just follow my lead, okay?’
She nodded, looking like she wanted to throw up.
I felt like I was on much steadier ground after I mothered Cece through a little conversation about social distancing, so when they summoned all fifteen of us over to a different collection of couches and sat me beside Dylan, I was able to be all, ‘Oh, I was just talking to people’ when she asked me where I disappeared to.
