'Lessons in Chemistry' - About Being Part of the Solution, not Part of the Precipitate

Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business. Do you see my point?
​~ Lessons in Chemistry

By Melissa Walsh

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Doubleday Books, 2022

A referee refused to shake my hand years ago while I was at the bench watching a youth hockey team warming up before a game. I was the team's head coach. I was wearing a coach's jacket. The players were little girls. He saw me and skated over.

"No moms behind the bench," he said as I extended my hand. I thought he had come over to greet me with the customary ref-coach pre-game handshake.

"I'm not their mom. I'm their coach," I said.

He asked me to show him my USA Hockey Coaching Education Program (CEP) card to prove this to him. I got my wallet out and showed it.

"Well, you know, I just don't need a mom over here screaming."

"I am not their mom. And I don't scream."

A bit later, he brought the scoresheet over and asked one my assistant coaches, a player's dad, to sign it. I took it.

"I'll sign that."

I returned the sheet to the ref. He gave me a nasty look, likely returning my nasty look at him, and skated off. I remember feeling so angry during that game. So frustrated with being treated unfairly. We were playing a boys' team and won that game. We won all but one game against the boys that season. It was the girls' teams we struggled to beat. We only won two games against them.

But the win-loss record wasn't the point for my 8U hockey players. Their lessons in hockey were about so much more — how to jump out onto the ice when it's scary, how to skate as fast as you can to gain control of a loose puck, how to get up after getting knocked down, especially when an opposing player had rammed into you on purpose and the ref didn't even call a penalty.

For me, the coaching experience became more lessons in standing up tall and keeping my mind in check after being hit with misogynic cheap shots.

To be treated with a lack of respect and not as a thinking and feeling human being stings. It hurts. It can erode confidence and surface feelings of despair and defeat. How does a woman heal from this kind of treatment?

Bonnie Garmus' novel Lessons in Chemistry is a lovely story about a highly intelligent woman finding her strength and not losing her mind while being knocked down hard — like from a two-hander slash — by old school, late 1950s and early 1960s misogyny.

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