Rebecca Moore meets up with a friend in a rush and has a wave of love for womankind

Last week, a friend of mine turned up late to coffee. She fell through the café door, harassed and dishevelled with a look of intense ferocity on her face. I understood that look well. “Sorry I’m late!” She shouted, storming towards me and untangling her scarf from both her neck and her handbag simultaneously.

“I finished work late, then had to go to the waxers and get my bikini-line done and I was trying to run in heels and damn-near broke my ankle running down George Street and I worried that you’d be kept waiting and get upset with me and...”

Her intro lasted a good few minutes, during which she also found the time to take her seat opposite me, order a coffee and check her lippy in her hand mirror.

I sat dumbfounded by the energy with which she described her exhaustion. I was tired watching her. And the funny thing was, I’d had a similar week. A week in which I’d run a couple of large-scale events – successfully I might add – in the middle of celebrating a friend’s birthday, looking after another heartbroken friend, keeping my home clean and tidy, keeping myself clean and tidy, paying bills, nearly being killed by an enthusiastic bus driver on the High Street and also managing to stay vaguely sane.

“The thing is,” she concluded, calming down somewhat, “I hate getting waxed! Why on earth did I book in an hour of torture when I’ve already had a week from hell?”

Every woman has asked herself this at some point. Why, oh why do we put ourselves through the agony and distress of hair removal when everyone else is so damn busy in their own lives that they would barely notice if you were doubling as big foot?

Needless to say, I couldn’t answer her. One week earlier I’d booked in for the same thing: an hour of torture during a week of hell.

How ridiculous. We run ourselves ragged and then torture our own bodies for sprouting things we aren’t quite happy with.

This whole episode brought home to me how very wonderful we women are. I’m particularly very lucky. Women surround me. I’ve got three mothers (it’s a long story), a plethora of girlfriends I can call on day and night, nieces and stepsisters, an all-female boss structure and most of my colleagues are women.

I love men. I adore them. But I spent an overly large proportion of my younger life pretty much putting them on pedestals. Freud would have had a field day.

It wasn’t that women were bad, it was mainly that they were the authoritarians – the ones who told me I couldn’t. But it was also – and here’s the terrifying bit – a fact that they were like me. With the same parts as me, and the same vulnerabilities as me and – let’s face it – the same sprouty bits they wanted to stop sprouting.

And a little part of me – the part of me who wasn’t entirely cool with my sprouty bits, or my vulnerable parts – loathed these women for it.

Thankfully, I’ve realised the problem isn’t the other women. It was my own sense of self. So this week I was once again staggered by the awesome power of we women and how often we forget how awesome we actually are. Sprouty bits and all.

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