I Cannot Do It Alone
I could not ever do what all do if I didn’t ask for help. I have spent my whole life watching women do it all – work full time jobs, care for their children, cook, clean, shop for food, pay bills. Women’s liberation gave us access to the workplace, and that’s about it. We still handle dramatically more than our fair share of household duties, and worse, we have become so trained by this way of life that we insist we are fine: “No no! I’ve got it!” I have heard so many of my friends and family say, reassuring their husbands who may be offering some help. “I got it!”
Now, to be sure, women are rockstars at multitasking, we want things done a certain way, and we can, in fact, do it all. My concern is, at what cost? Because I worry that the cost is too high, to my own sanity, my own heart, my own long term physiology, I ask for help. And that may be a bit of an understatement. I insist on help.
The Women In My Life Are Dying
I am the oldest child of five. I have three sisters and a brother, and I have been taking care of people all my life. My first little sister came along when I was three, my second youngest sister is ten years younger than me, my brother is thirteen years younger, and my youngest sister is 14 years my junior. My mom asked me for help, a lot. I watched my mom kill herself to raise her kids, cook, clean, work, and pay bills. My stepfather worked. That is it. He went to work, and he came home. He watched a lot of television.
My mom’s life slowly drained away from her. She got cancer by the time she was in her fifties, and she was so busy doing it all that she put off visiting the doctor until colon cancer had spread to her other organs. Stage IV. Not good.
Fortunately, she not only survived her bout with cancer, but she has been cancer free, and lazy husband free, for years now.
And my mother is not alone. I have watched many, many women, of all ages take on 30 hours of work to be done in a 24 hour day, and get it done. Day after day.
Sadly, I also know more than my share of women who end up with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and, lately, fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia
This last condition is the one that really woke me up to what happens to women.
“What is fibromyalgia?” I ask one of my aunts who has it.
“Well,” she says. “It is basically the name they came up for this condition where you have pain but they can’t figure out why.”
What?!
Fibromyalgia, the way I now define it, is basically the result of women (and a very few men) suppressing stress, anxiety, and exhaustion for so many years that it finally bursts through a mere mental state and manifests as real, actual, agonizing pain.
Cause of Death
“Maybe we can go out to dinner tonight.” This same aunt once asked her husband one day when he got home from work. I had moved in with them after running away from home. I had a job as a hostess at Marie Callendar’s down the street. I was 15.
My aunt was a stay at home mom, and my uncle owned his own business.
“Well, let’s see. Did you earn it today?” He asked this in such a casual, sweet, paternalistic tone, that for a second I couldn’t register it in my brain. This was the same uncle I watched come home after work another day with a diamond necklace and drape it around his wife’s neck while she did dishes, planting a kiss on the back of her neck as he did it.
“Earn it!? Earn it!?” I was outraged. “I got paid today. I’ll take her to dinner. She doesn’t have to earn it.”
This is an ongoing story my aunt and I reflect on whenever we talk about how strong she has gotten since those days.
“You were strong even then, Shanna.” She’ll say to me.
Strong Because I Had To Be
I don’t know where it came from, but I always had a sense of fairness and justice, and I knew that women having to do it all at home only to be told they had to earn their dinner was wrong. I knew that women who worked both inside and outside the home were doing so much more than their husbands who merely brought home a paycheck. The trick always was, it seemed, that the man’s paycheck was bigger. That, apparently, made all the difference.
And this dynamic, of women doing it all, literally driving themselves into early graves, is not only the fault of men who play into it. It is our fault too. Still today, I see women do it all the time. And I do understand why. I have the same impulses. I listed the reasons above.
But I don’t want to die young. I don’t want pain that comes from nowhere and can’t be cured. Also, it just isn’t fair.
So I Ask For Help
I learned very early on as a bank manager that the best leaders are great delegators. You learn the strengths of your team and you encourage the members to play to their specific skills. You do not try to do everything on your own. That is the recipe for failure.
The most successful people in business know this, in politics as well. Presidents have cabinets full of people to advise them, heads of agencies, congressmen have clerks, CEOs have executives, and Deans have administrators. Every successful model across industries and society follows a team effort mentality.
Why should the home be any different?
It Shouldn’t
One of the many reasons I love that my husband and I have opposing schedules is so that he is required to feed, play with, and bathe our children when I’m not there. My girls are such mama’s girls that if they didn’t have only him to count on four nights a week, they would literally hang on my hips and ankles all hours of the day. I would bathe them every single night because they would want me to. I would run myself ragged outside and inside the home because I could.
But because I literally cannot take care of them for those hours, and because we have it set up so that my husband is with them when I am not, the girls will grow up with a solid relationship with their father that they wouldn’t otherwise have. And they will see a man who cooks, cleans, cares for children, and loves his wife, all while holding a fifty hour a week job.
My husband busts his ass, and because I know how hard he works, if I was home full time, or if we worked the same hours, I would be inclined to do everything else, to take some of the pressure off of him.
But What About the Pressure on Women?
If I spent years insisting that “I got it!” he would naturally back off, hands in the air, “Okay!” he would say. And years would go by, and I would eventually stop saing I got it, because he would eventually stop offering help, and I would eventually resent him for not helping enough, because years and years of doing it all takes its toll. And then I would be bitter and get fibromyalgia.
No thank you. I like my health. I enjoy sleep.
So I ask for help.
“I took all the laundry down.” I tell my husband the other day, as he’s coming home, and I’m heading out to work. “There a load in the washer, a load in the dryer, and the rest is in the laundry baskets, waiting in line. We live on the fifth floor. The laundry room is on the first floor. And only one of the four washers is working currently.
“Aw man!” He responds. “How am I supposed to get it all done tonight?” He wonders. It’s a valid concern.
“Honey, do what you can. Whatever you don’t get done tonight, I’ll finish tomorrow.”
And we did. And that’s how we do everything. It is not perfect. It never is with anything. He gets frustrated because I don’t take the compost out. I get frustrated that he leaves his shoes everywhere for me to trip over. We bicker like brother and sister.
But We Are a Team
We had these kids together, we made this life together, so we run it together. I sure as hell am not going to do it all alone. Besides, he wants to be involved. He wants to be useful. He doesn’t want me to kill myself doing it all.
Think about it. This same rule applies to every aspect of life. People want to help, they want to be useful, and they want to share wisdom and tricks of the trade.
Fellow moms on the playground are always offering to hold Matilda while I run to the bathroom, or take Celaya for me if I can’t get out with the baby.
Fellow writers leap at chance to include me in writing groups or tell me about places to get freelance work.
No Woman Is an Island
The only people that don’t want to help are the ones who have been convinced, by themselves or society, or both, that they got where they are all by themselves. This is a myth, a fairytale. It does not exist. Everyone gets help. Knowing that makes it easier to ask for it.
We are by nature collaborative and communal human beings. No woman is an island. We cannot get all we want from life all by ourselves. No single person on earth has ever gotten anywhere of import on his or her own. Luck, fortune, the grace of the gods, whatever you want to call it, yes, it exists; fortune smiles on you. It happens. But the memorable expression about fortune, is that it favors the bold.
And you know what the bold do?
They ask for help.