International Women's Day

Willow Blooms #006 Dressing up

Welcome to Willow Blooms! I’m away for a couple of days, so leaving my account in the trusty hands of the auto-post. You’ll get the post that I planned for this week in your emails on Sunday morning, and this one is an unexpected extra!

After Monday’s storms, spring has really sprung this week in my part of the UK. The colours of the crocuses, daffodils and narcissi, bring a smile to my face, a salve to the fatigue that seems so pervasive. All of the women that I spoke to yesterday spoke of the tiredness that they felt. I wondered if there was any connection to the date…

7th March is World Book Day, and a day for children to dress up as a favourite book character. I am free of the responsibility and potential judgement of publicly displaying my creative talents every year, and typically I only get to see the costumes of my nieces and nephews, or a few children walking past my window in the early hours of the day. However, yesterday my route involved walking past a school in the morning and the afternoon, and I got to see the brilliant results of the creative efforts of parents and carers, and in some case it seemed, the children themselves.

I do not want to make assumptions, but going off the n=10 informal ‘study’ I did not intend to do yesterday, it seems fitting that International Women’s day follows World Book Day. All of the women I spoke to had been responsible for producing the costumes for their children. I assume this may be reasonably representative of the world picture- with this task typically (not exclusively) falling to mums and female carers rather than dads and male carers. I am prepared to be shot down on this, but I would put a tenner on it.

One mum was finishing her child’s costume until 10pm the night before, another was up early to squeeze in French braids and face painting before a day’s work. The smiles I saw on the children’s faces in the morning and in the evening are proof of how much this means to the littlies in your lives. I followed a child who looked too young for school up the hill. As she and the male carer accompanying her walked past a primary school, there was conversation. I didn’t hear it all, but the little girl must’ve said how much she loved the costume she’d just seen, as I heard the man laughing that she’d said this for almost every child they’d passed. Unable to stop myself, I suggested she had a lot of World Book Days to come, and it was good to be thinking already what she might like to dress up as! The man’s response was quick, expressing pride, or relief that he had managed to avoid a costume every year so far. I suspect that little girl will be making sure that doesn’t happen next year!

Whilst this is an additional burden for parents, it seems such a brilliant way of engaging children in the characters in books, and creativity, and a potential source of connection, both between the carer and child, and children at school as they compare costumes and try to figure out the characters. Is this true? Does it make a difference to book sales, to engagement in reading, to feeling seen, to joy?

It is of course important to remember that International Women’s Day is for celebrating all women, not just those who are, or were, mums. An idea came to me this morning. What if grown ups gave ourselves the permission to do the same for International Women’s Day?! What if we went to work dressed in the outfit or costume of a woman who has inspired us?

Who would you dress up as? What conversations might this spark?! What hidden parts of yourself might it inspire? What might it give you the confidence to do that you might not otherwise brave?! It could be fun…

Me, I think I’d start with Virginia Woolf.

Have a great day!