The group's future is in question. We may only have three months left of , funding and again politics has stepped in the way. We will not know about funding for another month, we are told, because of the outcome of the referendum. If the funding does not come through, the staff may face temporary layoffs to ease the financial strain. We could opt to save money immediately by cancelling the space we have found for the women's group, but we all look at each other grimly when it is even mentioned. It seems we would rather make a personal sacrifice in our salaries which we can't afford, than lose our space. Any solution is temporary since the scarcity of resources is a permanent fixture in the literacy movement especially when it comes to woman-specific programming.

Funding and space were the sources of resistance to the women's project that I expected to discover. I was authentically surprised when I started to see my own resistance.

Personal resistance

When I was left to hold somebody else's baby while facilitating the group, I felt resentful. Why not my own baby who I was missing and weaning? My breasts would ache when a group member's baby cried. Or when someone's baby-sitter, didn't show up, and her child was left to crawl around our feet while we talked and all I could think about was the electrical sockets while I wanted to focus on the women themselves. I had to acknowledge my personal resistance to the demands the group made on me as a woman.

No matter how hard I tried to be a facilitator, I never stopped being a woman facilitator. There were times when I had to grapple with whether I could afford to stay with the job because my own childcare costs were eating up my salary. I went through a non-work related major personal crisis while all this was going on and there were many days when I had to channel all my energy into being present for the women in the group while I felt my own life was falling down around me. It was hard to listen to another painful situation to which there were no easy answers while I was trying to finish up so I could pick up my kid from the baby-sitter and remember to buy some food for dinner. Or when between the other demands in my work, I did not have time to prepare something for the group and it wasn't a particularly good session, I felt resentment. Some days it was all just too much. How could I keep putting out so much when my life was too demanding and my own needs were not being met?

Sometimes I got emotionally hooked by the women in the group. I heard myself getting too involved in solving a problem, and then realized later that I had gone too far. At times we acted too much like friends and I wished I had some professional facade to hide behind. But I was not just a facilitator I was a woman facilitator.

We have had visits from other service providers who said to me afterwards, "I don't know how you do it." I can't help but think that they were feeling their professional mask being chipped away and were relieved to see the door. Working with the group is a constant reality check. It keeps me real in my work. I love it because of this. Some days I must admit I found myself wishing that this was a mixed group and we could just focus on content and move away from the emotional.