Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Wondering if you're good enough

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

A tale of three women in recent news is a puzzle, also dismaying.

Michelle Obama hates how she looks "all the time and no matter what". Every morning after seeing herself in the bathroom mirror she wants to turn out the light.

And as throughout her life, she still feels that she ‘does not belong’, wonders if she is ‘good enough’.

As she did when she was one of the few black female students in snooty Princeton and then a lawyer in an expensive Chicago firm.

The racist abuse directed at her president husband and even more crudely at her landed on top of already painful self-doubt.

Yet Obama wrote a huge best-seller, has just published again, and has been seen as a role model by black women.

Emma Thompson is an activist on environmental and economic issues, a versatile and skilled actor, writes screenplays, directs.

Their self-doubt, revealed by their own honesty, is even more perplexing set against the success of campaigner Vicky Phelan, who died aged 48 a week ago.

As most readers will know, the state CervicalCheck service, its tests outsourced, failed to find an issue and when they discovered that failure failed to tell her, like many others. Many were terminally ill by the time they found out.

When Phelan was offered a huge settlement on condition she kept quiet about it, she went public.

And when her fellow-sufferer and campaigner Ruth Morrissey died, she said that when she died she wanted no apologies, broken promises, tributes, aide-de-camps at her funeral. She wanted the system fixed.

She had time to shame politicians into more promises, only because she searched for possible treatments almost to the end, trying to live longer, as she said, for her family and for a campaign that might help others.

In the week that Phelan died it was distressing to hear Obama and Thompson, also formidable women, doubt themselves, criticise their own looks.

They run themselves down, a measure of the damage racism does, and the belittlement of women.

Decades back Emma Thompson was blatantly cheated on by her then husband Kenneth Branagh, an experience that famously undermines people.

Actors may have the reservations of most people about appearance, multiplied by making a living out of self-presentation. A double-Oscar winner like Thompson, though, once each for acting and screenplay as nobody else has managed, is still insecure. What hope for the less successful?

And Michelle Obama, a high-flying lawyer before Mr Cool arrived, assured enough to keep him initially at a distance?

But having your looks derided takes it out of people, and the harshest and most publicised judgments are on women.

Obama circles back repeatedly to her height, her commanding and visually-striking 5' 1l''. I can’t bear to go back and check in Book 1 whether either parent teased her about it as a teenager.

Photographs from the new book of the Obamas hugging, very photogenically, is a reminder that being loved – openly, proudly – by a man fancied by women worldwide and envied by other men, cannot erase or even mitigate some forms of self-abasement. You need to do that yourself. This is easier to write than do.

Publicising this book may have highlighted the most negative thoughts. Obama after all had no doubts about the school careers counsellor who said she was ‘not Princeton material’ in a 10-minute meeting. "My life became a kind of reply: 'Your limits aren’t mine'."

And this book urges readers to "work through fear, find strength in community and live with boldness".

It is entirely appreciative of her mother’s willingness, after some coaxing, to move into the White House. One of her most touching reassurances to the younger Michelle was that whatever happened elsewhere, "You can come home to be liked. We will always like you here."

That might be the best friends and parents can offer young women in a judgmental world.