Superwoman Syndrome

How many times do you hear “Oh my god, you’re a superwoman!” Or “She must be superwoman!” 

Is this healthy? 

I’m sure we’d all like to think of ourselves as having super-hero/ine powers at some point, but to put women on a pedestal and be in awe of how they dash from one task to the next and fill every waking moment being super-busy, doing everything (and seemingly pulling it all off) is just not doing any of us any favours.

When I started writing this article, I titled it Superwoman Syndrome. I didn’t realise that was already a thing, it just seemed to sum up what I was writing about. But a little research soon revealed that, in 1984, Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz, wrote a book called exactly that. 

I haven’t yet read the book, but have added it to my list. If you have read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, any take away or a-ha moments you got from it – please share your thoughts on the Self Care Gold facebook page.

So why do we find ourselves adorning these crazy-busy (and probably super-stressed) women with such a revered title? 

Why do we make that ‘always-on-the-go’ lifestyle seem enviable?

Why do some women wear their burnout as a badge of honour?

Well, it’s my personal belief that women are still not free from the shackles of conditioning from decades ago. 

Let’s step back in time. Most of us won’t need to dig out the history books, we don’t need to go back that far. Even as recently as the 1970s, I remember most (I reckon 90% at least) of my friends’ mums didn’t go out to work. Back in the here-and-now, I can count on one hand the number of my kids’ friends’ mums who aren’t in employment (by choice).

But, of course the employment and entrepreneur opportunities for women have opened up hugely since the 1970s and so we can now have it all, in theory. 

But do we really want to have it all? 

Our 1970s predecessor females who typically didn’t go out to work had all those non-employed hours to devote to nurturing the children (like me and my brothers), keeping the home looking good, making sure meals were prepared and on the table for the family, volunteering in their communities and socialising with other women and mums. And they did it bloody well!

For 2020s women, life looks very different. 

There are heaps of stats plastered all over the web – claims such as 60% of women are the main breadwinner (1).

The employment rate among women of ‘prime working age’ (aged 25-54) is up from 57% in 1975 to 78% in 2017. The rise has been particularly large among lone mothers and mothers of pre-school- and primary-school-age children (2). Now, as a mum of two primary-aged children, I know just how much attention kids of that age need and deserve.

In the main, these advances of women in the workplace should be viewed as victories, but as some of the homelife practices haven’t changed to keep up over the last few decades, it’s not all wins and grins. 

It seems that in this day and age, even in families where women are in full-time, paid employment, women continue to do the lion’s share of the domestic necessities such as childcare, cooking, cleaning, shopping. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the phrase the ‘second shift’ – referring to these domestic tasks. 

Surveys are plentiful such as the one reporting just over one in 10 women – 13% – say their husbands do more housework than they do (3)

I think we can go one further and add in a ‘third shift’ for a significant number of women who are trying to supplement their employment income or change their situation by starting an entrepreneurial venture. They do a shift at their place of employment, they come home and carry out the familial duties then they sit down to start work on their side hustle.

Wow! Yes we really do have all the opportunities – fabulous!

But it shouldn’t mean we have to take them all and certainly not all at once!

If you’re like most of the women I know, you’ll be aiming for near perfection across your work in all your ‘shifts’.

Women nowadays have the benefit of seeing just how amazingly well their female predecessors carried out their domestic and family roles. They also remember very clearly how the men in their family achieved success at work [often supported in many ways by their wives, but I digress 😉 ] .

Now we have the opportunities, expectations and need to play both these roles, we strive to be as good at each one as we witnessed the previous one or two generations being, when the roles were still divided.

Naturally, our influences from earlier in our lives still hover in our subconscious and can contribute to our current value system (whether we want them to or not!) 

My Mum gave up her career when she had her first child – my eldest brother – she was 21!!! My other brother joined him 2 years later then I came along a further six years on. Mum didn’t work until I was about 8 or 9 and then took a job in the local newsagent/sweet shop two days a week – she was by now in her late thirties. Her maternal, familial and domestic roles took priority.

This pattern wasn’t at all unusual – it was the 70s. The vast majority of families in my childhood experience owned their home, had one car and one parent in full-time employment – the male. I can honestly only remember one lad I was at primary school with whose mum had a full-time career.

Of course your experience may well be different, but back to those stats – “Overall, the proportion of couples with children where only one adult works has almost halved from 1975 to 2015)”4 – it’s definitely in keeping with my childhood memories.

 

Here’s an exercise I use with my Self Care Gold followers to get conscious about a typical day’s workload. You might like to do it.  

Three times during one day, write out everything you’ve done over that past 4 or 5 hours. 

I did this exercise myself some time ago and here’s my list:

Tuesday

• Got up and remembered to drink water (yay!) (Me)
• Put the kettle on and made tea for me and my partner (Me)
• Put two slices of bread into the toaster for my partner (Else)
• Made my breakfast and breakfast for my two kids (Me & CC)
• Gently woke the kids, trying to ensure a positive, gentle start to their day (CC)
• Made my partners pack-up lunch (Else)
• Went back to re-rouse the kids (Else)
• Made the kids’ pack-up FAVE5, morning tea and lunch (had to first wash a few lunchbox pots to fill that had lingered in school bags until bedtime the night before (CC)
• Checked text messages to make sure there were no work surprises that would mean changing my hours that day (Work)
• Ate my breakfast (Me)
• Shouted for the kids to get up (CC)
• Chatted with my partner about dinner plans (he would cook but I would have to shop for any missing ingredients) (Dom)
• Checked my emails in case there was anything needing my urgent attention (Me)
• Went back in to daughter’s bedroom and stayed (nagging) until she actually got out of bed (CC)
• Put breakfast pots into a bowl of hot soapy water with the intention of washing up before I left the house (makes my return at the end of the working day so much more pleasant) (Dom)
• Checked with kids if they needed anything special at school e.g swimming gear, signed notices (CC)
• Showered, dressed & got myself ready to leave the house (Me)
• Broke up kids’ squabbles (CC)
• Started to wash the pots (Dom)
• Checked messages again to be sure nothing needed my attention before I arrived at work – responded to two I felt I should, including one arrangement for a kid’s play date after school – changed the pick up arrangement with the other child (CC)
• Chivvied up the kids to clean their teeth, get dressed etc (CC)
• Cleaned the kitchen surfaces (Dom)
• Broke up more kid squabbles (CC)
• Yelled at the kids we were going to be late (CC)
• Opened the curtains throughout the house (Dom)
• Made our bed (Dom)
• Quick check of the fridge to see if we needed anything else when I went shopping (Dom)
• Checked the calendar hoping I hadn’t forgotten an important event (CC/Else)
• Yelled at the kids I was leaving and to grab their bags and shoes (CC)
• Told off daughter who then had to look for something and made us even later (CC)
• Kissed & dropped kids at school telling them twice the arrangements for after school – pick up place for one; playdate for the other etc (CC)
• Dashed into the veg shop next to school so I wouldn’t have to go after work with children (Dom)
• Selected podcast to listen to on my drive to work (one that I thought I needed to help me launch my business) (Work)
• Drove 20 mins to work (Work)
• Non-stop work (literally dealing with first enquiry before I’d even put my bag down) until 10.30 (Work)
• 10 minutes break for a cuppa (Me)
• Non-stop work for 2 hours (Work)
• 30 mins lunch break – checked personal emails, tried to delete as many as poss (still over 21,000 unread!) Replied to only those I felt I needed to (Me)
• Back to work for two hours, raced to the car to beat the 3pm school traffic (Work)
• Drove to school for the pick up while continuing with the podcast from the morning (CC) & (Me/work)
• Asked daughter about her day and chatted about any morsels I was tossed! (Me)
• Did a few more bits of food shopping for dinner & fridge (Dom)
• Went to Op shop on daughter’s request (Else)
• Arrived home (very thankful I’d mostly done the washing up in the morning and the kitchen surfaces were clean & tidy)
• Got daughter’s lunch box out her bag to do with the last few bits of washing up (CC)
• Went on laptop to create Self Care Gold Facebook page and progress my website (Work)
• Followed daughter around house picking up her trail of discarded items (Else/Dom)
• Worked more on the business (Work)
• Monitored what daughter’s watching on Netflix/YouTube (CC)
• Partner arrived home, unpacked his bag – onto the dining table
• Chatted briefly about our days (Me)
• Picked up clothes for washing from bedroom floors (Dom)
• Picked up son from playdate (CC)
• Folded clean washing and placed piles of clothes in relevant bedrooms (Dom)
• Searched online for 2 x Mothers day gifts (for UK) (Me & Else)
• Broke up kid squabbles/fights (CC)
• Tried to do more work while having conversation with partner – while he prepped dinner (Work & else)
• Enjoyed delicious dinner – all together and chatted about stuff (bliss!) (Me)
• Chivvied up kids to get off screens and get showered (CC)
• Washed up dinner pots (Dom)
• Put kids to bed – too late to listen to reading tonight (bad mother!) (CC)
• 8.50pm sat down to relax with partner & TV (Me)
• Put daughter back in bed (she’s a real night owl) (CC)
• Sat down again (Me)
• Made toast & drink for partner (Else)
• 1 hour 15 mins watching shite on TV (Me)
• Went to bed (Me)

Man I’m exhausted just reading that – and oh shit – tomorrow’s netball practice too!

All demands on my time, all things I felt like I should do.

The next thing we do is to put all those actions in the list into categories (in brackets). This is the result:

(Me) Actions that I did for me – 17

(Else) Actions I did for someone else (not considered direct childcare) – 9

(CC) Actions associated with childcare – 23

(Dom) Actions that are considered domestic duties – 13

(Work) Actions solely for work (employed or own business) – 9

If I analyse that a little more closely, I can see that six of the (Me) actions were what I’d consider to be essential self-care e.g eating, showering, getting dressed (hardly fulfilling). 

Of the others, only two – the 10 minutes tea break and chatting with family members – were what I would call pleasurable. Even the 1 hour 15 mins in the evening was unfulfilling as I sat like a zombie staring at crap TV (I probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell you what it was I watched the next morning!)

Searching for Mothers’ day gifts would have been nice to start with but I can say with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t have found on that initial search what I wanted to buy so it wasn’t a productive or fulfilling use of my time either.  

 

So what do we do about it? 

How do we unbecome Superwoman?

I don’t want to be her!

But I can’t see anything on the list that is removable. I’m also acutely aware that I don’t have a super-heroine power to add another hour or two into my day.

Well, I found that list of my day really useful to see just what it is that I am doing, largely on auto-pilot, and what actions could be reasonably re-distributed. 

It also helps me to see if small tweaks to a routine could help.

I realised there were several actions that I could immediately delegate to the kids, namely:

• folding up the clean washing
• clearing the dinner table and putting away dry breakfast pots
• opening their own curtains in a morning
• picking up their own dirty washing and putting it in the laundry
• Preparing their own FAVE (also teaching them about healthy food choices)
• get clothes for the next day ready on the evening before

And to my partner:

• making his own supper snack
• making our bed in a morning 

To be fair though, if I repeated this on a different day, it would show that he does share heaps of the childcare actions and a few of the domestic ones too.

I looked at how I could maybe do things a bit differently that would help ease the morning stress.

I can hear some of you shouting at me for making my partner’s pack up lunch and I did question this, but as I’m there doing mine & the kids’ anyway, making 2 extra sandwiches doesn’t really bother me. He cooks 99% of the main dinners so I feel that’s a good balance.

But I did decide to:

• try prepping most of the next day’s lunches the night before, which was a game changer! However this does rely on the ‘partner supper’ bit above happening to free up some of my evening time 😉

• create a new habit for me and the kids of getting our clothes for the next day ready on the evening before

To get rid of the feeling of wasting time being unfulfilled

• I made a pledge to myself not to sit through uninspiring TV just because it was the best of a bad bunch that was on.

Instead I put my mind to finding a good series on Netflix (we’d had an account for bloomin’ ages but actually only my daughter was using it!) I wanted to make sure my partner and I were spending time together, sharing an experience most evenings so I would have to find something he would also like to watch (update: I found Line of Duty and started us at the very beginning – so far so good).

 

Work was work – there wasn’t much scope to reduce the time I spent there

Although I swore never again would I deal with an enquiry before I’d even put my bag down! I can always afford myself 20 seconds to allow myself the transition into work. A polite “I’ll be right with you I just need to put my bag away” is all it takes to regain the control.

 

My grocery shopping goal

Ever since the novelty of NZ’s short Covid lockdown when we did a grocery shop only twice a week to avoid having to stand in a 30 minute queue to get in, I’ve longed to be able to do a true weekly shop. To be able to plan ahead enough to have everything in for lunches and dinners for Mon-Fri is a dream of mine! (Rock n Roll eh?)

There are external forces against me here, which is why I’ve not yet achieved this – our freezer isn’t large enough for one. And we tend to eat lots of fresh veg and fruit that wouldn’t last from Sunday to Friday for another. 

But the main barrier I have to admit is lack of planning. I haven’t got a clue what we’re eating for dinner tomorrow let alone 3 days ahead. I know there are thousands of online menu planners out there, but unless you have one written specifically to cater for your family’s likes and dislikes, they don’t work. Maybe there’s a tool that could help us plan our own week’s menu including the shopping requirements – if you’ve used a good one please do let me know.

 

Pick your battles

I surrender to the kid squabbles – I know I’ll never win that one : ) but maybe there’s a more time-efficient way of getting my daughter out of her bed in a morning – I live in hope!!

 

Over to you…

I’d love to hear how you get on with your day’s list of actions. More importantly I’d really like to hear what changes you put in place once you’ve analysed the actions, to ease the load on you.

This is a really valuable, totally free self-care activity that doesn’t need you to carve out any more time. In fact the opposite is true – if you can delegate just one task, you’ve clawed some time back for you. 

If you can identify a way to tweak or reorder tasks, it’ll remove some stress from your routine.

Share your successes with other women trying to do the same on the Self Care Gold facebook page

If you’re serious about self-care, your first step needs to be exercises like this. The candlelit baths come later 😉

Try my personalised, powerful 3-day Self-Care Foundation Programme – the starting point for getting effective self-care into your routine so you can regain control of your life… without needing a 25 hour day

 

1 Feministing   2 unknown  3 The Guardian  4 Institute for Fiscal Studies   5 FAVE = Fruit And Veg Energiser