"And what do you do?"

In Buenos Aires, 2016, if I wanted, inexplicably, to dance in non-traditional roles which is to say “lead” as a woman I was told dismissively, and as if I had revealed, in extremely poor taste, an STD,  to go to  La Marshall. It's where all the gays go.

But… 

But there was no debate. In the intensely traditional milonga culture in which I had indeed chosen to move while in the Argentinian capital, where most people were 10 if not 20, 30 or forty years older than me, it was inexplicable that women would lead unless they were gay. It followed that there was only one place for “us”. If your life was rather more complicated, no one wanted to know. It was enough that you liked to lead so off to the gay club with you and however you presented yourself there was somebody else's problem. 

I was introduced to a married couple: successful, globetrotting, career women both, as I had been until I decided that, for me, being there for my children and not being controlled by one of the corporate world's natural piranhas was more important than earning money and artificially pumping up my ego with a well-padded monthly pay cheque 

When one raises children largely alone, everything has to be done sequentially.  There is no You take the bags, I'll take the kids; or even You take the toddler, I'll take the baby; no You get the ice cream, I'll do the sun cream; no You get the supper on, I'll do the baths; no I'll clear up, you do bedtime. At 3AM, with a sick child's temperature insistently nudging 40 degrees,  there is no You take him to A&E, I'll watch the other one. And one of us did always seem to be ill.  The next morning, sleepless  you're doing it all again, added to which the constant, sole responsibility, for thought, planning, decisions, actions. By the time I went to Buenos Aires, with hindsight, it is no surprise I was suffering from a yet to be diagnosed, chronic autoimmune disease.

It might be as exhausting and thankless as it sounds were it not for those trusting little fingers, that sweet breath, those giggly voices asking gentle, innocent questions, the smiles with tiny white teeth, the soft and flawless skin. 

I didn't feel coherent enough to put together a job application, never mind work and juggle the logistics of childcare, though, ironically, if trust in strangers had been less of an issue, had I done so I might have retrieved some of that coherence.  

The result of that experience is that there is no-one I respect more than the single working mother.  The same mother who gets none of the: Wow! You do it on your own? that the odd, single working dad might hear.

So I opted  - though it never really felt like a choice - for being there for the children. We did have a lot of fun in the short window between five, when they start to remember and thirteen when you become somewhere between embarrassing and annoying, often both.

I seem to have managed the load when they were little and I was younger - autoimmune disease aside. Still, home-schooling my two boys aged 8 and 10 for a year in 2017-2018, despite loving the adventure of all the things we did, left me with a, fortunately temporary, quasimodal twitch in one eye and so collapsing from exhaustion that, by the summer, pushing the pedals of my bike was an inordinate effort. It is as well to write these things down at the time. Years later I had forgotten this reason. The story became, or perhaps it was also true that they missed their friends. Besides, age 11 maths was my limit. 

I think in fact those earlier years were not dissimilar in the level of fatigue, one just doesn't like to dwell on what the years of five hours sleep or less were like and the many happy photos fortunately distort the perspective.  It wasn't until I had children that I learnt the true meaning of both “bone tired” and, one terrible night, “blind drunk”. But I look back and think:  How did I do eight years solo until both were in school?   “Only just”, I think, is perhaps the answer. 

By the time I went to Buenos Aires I'd been doing it for nine. It was my first big trip away. On day two I had collapsed in helpless tears when my alarm rang to tell me that my 7-year-old was out of school. And what do you do? one of the gay women asked.  She was new to dancing tango and evidently unfamiliar with the etiquette about personal questions in the milonga; or out of it for that matter. 

One can of course ask direct personal questions, the way a surgeon slips in a scalpel as though slicing into somebody’s innards, metaphorically or not is perfectly workaday.

There is a pause, among the discomfitted at these times. “The sound of someone else's ego licking their chops” said a new friend with whom I had enjoyed learning who he was more than what he did.  Still, with an ability to pull lines like that out of thin air, I hoped he wrote. So while  some might, on the strength of no acquaintance at all demand answers to personal questions with all the sensitivity of a charging rhino, I prefer the nuanced art of tactful conversation, the revelation of personality slowly, through stories offered and received. 

In La Marshall I braced myself again to the incongruous acceptability of that intrusive demand and tried to think about dancing. But the couple had been pleasant, friendly, enthusiastic about tango, a little brittle perhaps but then they were brand new to the milongas. Predictably I was both too polite and too honest. 

I'm just a mum. 

And so, being so devastatingly dull and certainly so self-deprecatingly English, perhaps I completely deserved,

Oh, is that all?  She said it with a directness which, even with much experience of hearing answers to this statement, surprised me; though not quite as much as when she thereupon turned away as if on a daggered, corporate, insouciant heel and began chatting to someone more worthwhile.

I tried not to put it down to her sexual orientation, breathed in and went to dance with a German girl in her first ever milonga tanda.  I had met her at the house I was staying in and suggested she come out.  She was brand new that week to dancing tango and to the milongas.  When I met her a year later in Barcelona, I was delighted she was still dancing tango now in her new home. You dance very well, said an experienced dancer as I was leaving.  Such compliments glow in environments of better dancing, which is usually the case among queer dancers dancing both roles. Thanking them, I could feel my ego reinflate on the outbreath.

At a milonga in Edinburgh before Christmas, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, chipper young man with an American accent struck up frank and friendly conversation.  He had studied philosophy, was studying psychology, had travelled and came from an interesting family.  In five minutes he had covered Victor Frankl, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Schopenhauer and corrected me on both the dates and the politics of Hegel and Heidegger. Politics came up.  I asked him where he 'stood' on Trump, cringing, feeling old, thinking I should get out more to save my dancing and my small talk.

On my own two feet, he shot back.

I shrank, deservedly even as I was delighted for him.  Thanks for the conversation he said ambiguously over his shoulder and with youth's insouciance as he went off to dance.