Sian and why no woman wants to show she’s vulnerable
FOR MORE than a decade, Sian Williams’s smiling face was the one that we turned to every morning on BBC Breakfast. Unflappable, warm and clever, she was the career woman who had it all — a top job, a devoted husband and four lovely children..
But then, last December, Sian, 51, was diagnosed with breast cancer and that impregnable carapace of confidence began to crumble around her.
In a deeply moving interview, her husband Paul recalls how he wedded three women when marrying Sian. The first was a highly accomplished professional; the second, a fiercely independent woman who could always do ‘perfectly well on her own thank you’; and the third a very private, selfdeprecating and vulnerable individual.
Paul says he always struggled to recognise this third side of his wife, because she kept it hidden.
Yet it was the vulnerable Sian who came to the fore when she went in to hospital for what she thought would be a routine discussion about a biopsy — only to be told she needed an emergency double mastectomy.
After Paul rushed to join her there, he found his wife in a hospital gown looking ‘lost, frightened and fighting back tears’. He wanted to be strong for her, yet confesses he was ‘exceptionally poor at reading the signals’ and couldn’t tell if she needed him.
As Sian explains in her new book: ‘He never knew if I was “strong capable Sian” or if I needed help, which was confusing for him.’
Only now, more than a year after being given the all- clear, can Sian admit the lengths she went to in order to keep her cancer secret from everyone. After the operation, she hid the bottles into which her surgical drains leaked under a big coat so she could still do the school run.
While of course it’s right that everyone copes with a life-threatening illness in the way that suits them best, I can’t help feeling that there are unreasonable pressures on Sian and professional women like her to be perfect and unwaveringly brave in all circumstances.
She has carved her career in a world where sobbing in the office can lead to demotion. Is it any wonder so many professional women find it hard to hold their hands up and say, ‘I need help. I am in pain. I am frightened.’?
The one silver lining is that she now accepts her third, vulnerable self. As Paul says so proudly: ‘She will never be quite the same again, yet I have come to adore and admire her all the more. Some journey, some rollercoaster, some woman.’