The Feminine and Masculine of It All

"The goal was to build a life where your capability wasn’t required every minute of the day."

Thank goodness my business is online and can be run part-time.

I think about this more often than I probably say aloud. Because if I had to work full-time hours, run a household, raise two boys, manage the changes that come with being a woman in her forties and carry the practical reality of doing it all as a solo mum, I am not convinced I would be as happy as I am today.

I would be spending what little spare time I had complaining about my life or, knowing me, searching for that exact solution.

That is not a criticism of women who are exhausted by theirs. Quite the opposite. I think we have spent decades celebrating how much women are capable of carrying without asking enough questions about whether we should have to carry it all at once.

Capability is an interesting thing. It can build a career, raise a family, manage a crisis and keep a household moving. It can make us independent, resourceful and exceptionally good at getting things done.

When capability becomes the only way we know how to move through the world, life can begin to feel like one long list of things we are competent enough to handle.

For many women, particularly those who have spent years in corporate environments, leadership roles, competitive sport, business or solo parenting, the qualities we might traditionally call masculine are deeply familiar. Action. Structure. Decision-making. Discipline. Protection. Forward movement.

They are not male qualities. Just as intuition, creativity, receptivity, presence and emotional wisdom are not exclusively female ones.

We all have access to both.

The difficulty is not deciding which one we are. It is learning how to move between them without abandoning one in favour of the other. My own life requires both of me every day.

There are hours when I am speaking with people, following up, learning new skills and doing the work that creates income and momentum. That part of my day asks me to be focused and disciplined, to make decisions and act before everything feels perfectly comfortable. I am directing energy towards an outcome. Moving. Leading. Creating structure around what matters.

Then there is another part of my day that looks almost entirely different.

Visualisation. Gratitude. Personal and leadership development. Time spent understanding myself more deeply and cultivating the kind of leadership that does not rely on title, volume or control. Learning to listen to what is happening beneath the obvious.

These practices are not passive. If anything, I have found them to be some of the most exposing work I do. There is nowhere to hide when the person you are required to lead is yourself.

But the energy is different. It is more receptive. More reflective. Less concerned with forcing an outcome and more interested in becoming the person capable of creating and attracting one. In flow. 

And then there is every other moment.

The household. The school logistics. The food. The exercise. The washing. The appointments. The invisible mental list that seems to regenerate faster than it can be completed. The nights when someone may not feel well. The ordinary, relentless and often beautiful responsibility of being present as a parent.

This is where the lines become less obvious.

There is discipline in looking after our health and softness in allowing ourselves to rest. Structure in keeping a household moving and presence in sitting down long enough to hear what happened at school. Some moments ask us to act. Others ask us not to. Most lives, I suspect, cannot be divided neatly into one energy or the other.

Solo motherhood certainly does not leave much room for rigid ideas about feminine and masculine roles.

Sometimes my boys need Mumma Bear. They need me to step in, make the decision, sort something out or protect them. There are moments when action is the most loving thing I can offer. Other times, they need something softer from me. Cuddles and kisses. Guidance. Support. Wisdom. The patience to stand nearby while they work something out for themselves.

That distinction has become increasingly important as they grow older. Love is not always doing something for someone. Sometimes it is resisting the urge to fix what they are capable of learning to navigate.

I saw the other side of this recently in a moment that involved, of all things, my tennis game.

I had been emotionally challenged by something on court that I could feel but could not quite explain. I did not have the right words for it, which is frustrating when you are used to being able to analyse a problem and work towards a solution.

I shared it with the boys.

This came directly after I had been the support one of my sons needed while he worked through something of his own. I could not take the action for him. I could offer guidance and perspective, but he had to be willing to move forward himself.

When the roles were reversed and I mentioned my tennis concern, both boys jumped immediately into action. Their solution was simple: take Mum for a hit. No lengthy analysis. No need to understand every layer of what was happening. We would go out, have fun, hit some balls and see if something shifted.

I loved their enthusiasm. Action could be taken, so they took it. Whether it worked or not was almost beside the point. For the record, it did.

Then, not long afterwards, I dropped a hard-cover lunchbox on my toe. The pain lasted through the night and there was absolutely nothing useful anyone could do about it.

The boys sat with me on the couch while I iced my toe. No fixing. No solution. No action plan. Just presence.

I have thought about those two moments more than they probably realise. In one, they moved quickly towards action because action was available. In the other, they understood instinctively that nothing needed to be solved; I simply did not need to sit there alone.

Perhaps this is what balance actually looks like.

Not a perfect division between feminine and masculine energy. Not a personality test. Not a relationship formula.

Simply the emotional intelligence to recognise what the moment requires.

There is a version of the feminine and masculine conversation that has become popular online, particularly among women. It often suggests that women have become too independent, too driven or too “in their masculine”, and that the answer is to find someone who allows them to soften.

I understand the appeal of the idea. There is something deeply attractive about being able to put down what we have carried for a long time. But I am not convinced our ability to do that should depend on somebody else arriving.

There is a difference between enjoying the support of another person and needing them to provide access to a part of ourselves we have never learned to cultivate.

We deserve access to both.

To know how to act when action is required and how to be still when it is not. To have the discipline to build something and the self-awareness to recognise when pushing harder is no longer useful. To protect the people we love without controlling their lives. To receive support without outsourcing our emotional stability.

That, to me, is emotional wealth.

It is not isolation. It is not a declaration that we do not need anyone. Human beings are built for connection, and a rich life is made richer by the people we share it with.

But connection and dependency are not the same thing.

There is a particular kind of freedom in being able to enjoy someone’s presence without requiring them to manufacture an emotion we cannot access without them. To love without asking another person to create our worth. To receive support without making someone else responsible for our sense of safety. To build a life with people rather than waiting for them to build the missing parts of us.

I want that for my boys, too.

I want them to grow into men who know how to take action and how to sit beside someone when nothing can be fixed. Men who can lead without always needing control, support without immediately offering solutions, receive care without seeing it as weakness and make decisions without disconnecting from themselves.

I am beginning to see that the balance I have been learning through my own personal development and life experiences is becoming part of their language for life. Not because I have sat them down to teach them about masculine and feminine energy. Because children notice how we live.

They notice whether we treat rest as laziness. Whether we ask for help. Whether we can make a decision. Whether we trust ourselves. Whether we stay present with discomfort or rush to make it disappear. They learn from the way we move between strength and softness long before they have words for either.

This has also shaped the way I think about business.

One of the reasons an online business suits my life so well is not simply that I can work from home or choose my hours. It is that the structure allows me to build around the whole of my life rather than requiring every other part of me to compete with work.

There are hours for focused, income-producing action. There are hours devoted to learning, reflection and leadership development. And there is enough space left for me to be a mother, play tennis, run a household, look after my health and live inside the life I am building.

The work still requires discipline. Flexibility without self-leadership quickly becomes procrastination. A part-time business does not mean a casual relationship with the outcome.

But neither should ambition require us to live in a permanent state of force.

The best work I have done has come from the relationship between the two. The masculine gives an idea structure and rhythm. The feminine gives it meaning and depth. One creates movement; the other creates attraction and notices whether that movement is still taking us somewhere we actually want to go. 

We deserve both.

I no longer think of work-life balance as a clean division of hours. Life does not divide itself that neatly. Motherhood follows me into the working day. Ideas arrive while I am driving. Leadership lessons appear on a tennis court. A conversation with one of my children can teach me something about business, and something I learn through business can change the way I parent.

An intentional life is less about keeping every part separate and more about knowing how to meet each moment as it comes. Sometimes the moment requires a plan. Sometimes patience. Sometimes we need to take the shot. And sometimes we need to sit beside someone on the couch and just be.

The point is not to choose one way of being and call it balance. It is to develop enough of ourselves that we have a choice.

We do not need to wait until we have mastered every part of ourselves before we begin living fully. I am not sure that moment ever comes. We are all still learning, still changing and still being shaped by the lives we are living.

And somewhere in the middle of that life, people find us. Friends. Mentors. Children. Communities. Perhaps a person we could never have planned for.

Unexpected and unannounced.

The point is not to have it all worked out before they arrive. It is to keep becoming someone who can meet life as it is, capable of action and stillness, strength and softness, independence and connection.

Maybe that is the feminine and masculine of it all. Not who does what. Not who completes whom.

Simply learning to access enough of ourselves that the life we create, and the people we share it with, are chosen with intention.

xx

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