I need someone to invent a strimmer for women please. Anyone?

 This female version of strimmer would be much lighter and have a harness which takes breasts into consideration. Men are always taking breasts into consideration except when it might be remotely useful to the woman.

 It wouldn’t have to be pink or purty. I have no idea why grown women are always annoyingly associated with the colour pink when all females grow out of this phase at the age of 6 years or so with the exception of my 80 year old mother.

Also there would have to be a lot less length. I’m saying this with a completely straight face.

The reason for this is that I have noticed that despite the harness that’s supposed to take the weight, a certain amount of forearm strength seems to be needed to operate these devices with precision simply because the real weight is at the working end. Far, far away from your centre of gravity.

And might I suggest that forearm strength is directly proportional to the presence of foreskin. When you don’t possess any of the latter, there is a commensurate decrease in the capacity of the former. With the single exception of Martina Navratilova, our woman forearms are puny affairs, useful in that they attach our more functional upper arms to our very busy and industrious hands. 

I wanted to buy a strimmer and took myself to the internet to see if there was a smaller version of the implement but if you go online and look up ‘Strimmers for Women,’ the request is blithely ignored.

Ignored! What is this? I’m being ignored by the fucking internet? Is that even possible? You can learn how to build a bomb in your kitchen or get detailed instructions on applying blusher so that you look forty five years younger. But not a damned thing about woman sized strimmers.

Eventually I found a thread where a light weight woman was plaintively wondering if there was any such thing ‘out there’ as a light weight strimmer. I was sitting at my desk at home and I wriggled my bum in my seat with interest. This was my exact question. I too am a small woman with a peculiar and particular interest in strimming.

So I read on.

She received a lot of manly advice about all varieties of brush cutters and there was an endless rush of guys competing with each other by listing brands of same, but the bottom line was to hire the thing, and preferably then hire someone– (a man someone of course-) to do the job for her.

However as far as I was concerned this was just a design flaw problem. And what I wanted to know was this? Why couldn’t some strimmer-inventing genius come up with the idea to invent a model especially designed for women! Open up the market. CREATE a new market. Lady strimmers. (Sort of like lady shavers only not as easily stored.)

I separated from my husband a few of years ago.  We have remained friends to a degree which has confounded many and we continue to support each other practically. He is still perfectly willing to help in the rather large garden around the family home where I live with our two teenage girls.

Mark is a very competent and manly man. He’s always had wonderful instincts in all matters house and garden. For the fifteen years we occupied this home together, all that he planted flourished. The alder trees that wave cheerfully at the sky all summer. The Escalanoia hedges. The willow in the snarly unseen bit at the back of the site. He was the King Strimmer making light work of the overgrowth around the edges of our garden.

I on the other hand- well- everything I plant turn to shit. It’s not that I dont try. I’m quite gamey and certainly not the kind of woman who never ventures past the kitchen window. Over the years, I have mowed the lawns and humped sacks of compost and dug holes and wobbled bow -legged back and forth wheeling heavy loads in the wheelbarrow. I carpet burn my knees with weeding for two days every spring when the excitement of lambs and daffodils after an endless winter went straight to my head. Then I don’t weed another minute until the following year.

 Every May, I plant flowers in containers which I place around the porch leading to the door of the house. During those first few weeks after planting as I arrive at my home, I am greeted by the cheerful little faces of begonia or petunia shivering in pleasure as I walk by. They always seem delighted to see me. And I them. The containers explode with colour and are a wonderful welcome as the air gets warmer and spring turns into summer.

However as the summer wanders on, the honeymoon period ends as I get busy working and now I hurry past, eyes down, mumbling apologies to the wilting forlorn little heads. Promising to water them tomorrow. ‘Too tired now guys. ‘Sorry. Sorry’

 Also I work away from home a lot and trying to get teenagers to remember to water flowers is about as useful an exercise as asking the dog to put out the bin.

I try to make it up to the poor things on days off, watering and feeding and dead-heading flowers for Ireland and within a few days, the flowers straighten up once more and to a man they breath a sigh of relief. Congratulate each other like stalwart survivors. They have dodged the bullet yet again.

‘Whew!’ they laugh, elbowing each other playfully. ‘That was a close one. Yer one is a bit of tease.’

My father had a joke about a farmer who tried to teach his donkey to survive without the inconvenience and expense of having to be fed every day. The punch line went ‘And no sooner had I the fucking fellow trained, didn’t he up and die!’

That’s me and flowers. If only they weren’t such demanding little brats. I should be able to train them, as I have done with my indoor cactus type plants, to survive without watering and feeding for weeks on end. I keep forgetting to tell myself that flowers are not just for Christmas. I have to be more responsible and not resent them for being so needy.

Back to the strimmer. All these years my ex husband did his thing, strimming only the bits of garden he saw fit and totally ignoring any requests on my part as to which parts of the garden I wanted to tame.

How I yearned to be a champion strimmer! I wanted to lay waste to the raggedy bits of over growth at the edge of the garden that he refused to cut. I wanted to see the ankles of the trees at the front of the house and unearth the secret garden and the steps he once built at the ignored back gable of our house.

But every time I gamely took up a strimmer, it felt heavy and unwieldy and over long with all the weight at the working end. I had the impression that I was trying to operate a goal post pole.

And on the few occasions where I stubbornly persisted I was a loose canon. Mark winced and cursed as I careered around the edge of the garden laying waste to new hedges and small trees, gouging big wedges of earth out of the lawn. Out of the planet it seemed. Clumps of clay hung off my hair, shrubs were tossed hither and yon. After such unsuccessful outings with Mark’s strimmer I would retreat with a degree of rare humility and that would be the end of it for another year.

A year after our separation I bought a damn strimmer. It was an impulse buy I admit. There it was leaning nonchalantly against the wall in the garden implement section of the local Homeland store. I stopped and eyed it with interest. Took it down from where it lolled with its’ arms folded, daring me to take it on. It looked smaller and more manageable than the big industrial sized yoke that Mark used.

Daughter number 2, sweet sixteen at the time, gazed at me doubtfully through her specs as I muttered to myself ‘Ah just look at you….’ stroking the thing like a long lost lover.

‘You don’t need a strimmer Mom. Dad will do that job for you’ she suggested with a worried look. She knew there would be trouble in paradise.

But I didn’t want to go on forever depending on my ex husband. He was about to build his own house. He had a girlfriend for godsake.

I was on my own and wanted to grow up and be independent in all things.

Jake, a helpful young man at the counter in Homeland gave me a 10 minute tutorial about the thing and I nodded earnestly although I didn’t understand a single word. At home I took it out of the box and when I laid the alarming number of separate bits on the table I realised that I didn’t have the first clue about how to assemble it. If only I had listened to Jake earlier. I read the instructions carefully, tried to match the diagram with the actual bits that lay on the kitchen table but it was as incomprehensible to me as a foreign language.

Or Enigma. I would need Benedict Cumberbatch and a team of mathematicians to come from Oxford and scratch their heads and stay up all night trying to figure it out. Alternatively the current ex-husband would have to be drafted in. Well shit.

When he saw the thing he was outraged. He would have been more reasonable if I had purchased a real live giraffe. ‘Such a waste of money!’ he ranted.

‘Not that much money’ I sniffed. (It was on sale…)

He went on in that vein for a while. Why couldn’t I just let him do whatever tidying up the lawn needed after mowing etc etc? Why did I always have to go rogue?

I resented his argument. He didn’t understand that this was my lawn now. We had always done things his way. This was my small way of staking the ground on which I now lived. Without him. Of course he got over his tantrum and put the thing together with blithe efficiency for which I was grateful. Is this what happens to women who have things assembled by men for years? We become mechanically illiterate.

I consider myself pretty competent and practical. I’m a nurse with all the practical skills that entails. I’m outdoorsy and hardy. I do all my own painting inside and out. I’m calm in the middle of life and death emergencies.

But I m fucked if I can make out a single line of instructions on how to assemble a strimmer.

So is there a moral to this story? Of course not. We all just muddle along doing the best we can.

Since then I have been using my strimmer frequently and without any problem although I will still need Mark or Jake in the garden centre when the entire top flies off or I decapitate the dog.  

Meanwhile I have cleaned up the bits of garden that I wanted to uncover. I exposed the secret garden again, shabby and forlorn and filled with towering weeds that have stalks the width of tennis racket handles. I mean when did they arrive?

 So may I beg your pardon people but I have strimmed and afterwards in the house, with shaky forearms and skin flecked with grass I have pronounced myself pleased.  

Over the winter as growth recedes and shrubs and plants and weeds alike bow out after the last curtain call, I hope to go around and cut back and lay bare and groom my garden in preparation for a profusion of happy growth next year.

It’s a lovely plan and who knows? I might even carry it out.