When we moved back to South Africa seven years ago, I took a job working away from home as opposed to the freelancing I’d been doing for years. We needed a second steady income in order to qualify for a bond, but I was also done with the juggling act that is working from home when you have small kids. And I loved it – earning a regular salary, having colleagues to chat to again and a reason to put on mascara and straighten my hair in the morning. But, while there were loads of fun things about getting out of the house, an unfortunate spinoff was that I started to worry more or less constantly about what I was going to do if one of my kids got sick or if prize-giving was scheduled at 10 on a Friday morning or if somebody had a netball match and had forgotten to take their togs. Having a husband who travels a lot, there’s no backup person in our home to deal with these unpredictable and inevitable aspects of parenting.
How was I going to do those things and attend my important meeting?
And I learnt pretty quickly – as all working moms do, I imagine – that there are few things worse than the guilt you feel when you have to leave a crying, feverish little person at home with someone who isn’t you. Or, much as your child begs, you can’t help with lifts to the World of Birds or be a marshal at the cross-country event. So, when my contract ended, sad as I was, it was also a relief to go back to having a flexible schedule again. Except – and we women really take the prize for this – almost immediately I started fretting about a whole series of other things. Was I going to be employable after another stint at home? What was happening to my career? And – most ironic of all – now that I was back home and earning less, was I being a good female role model for my daughters?
And it’s amazing how we seem to be surrounded by brilliant fathers and inadequate mothers. Fathers just don’t beat themselves up in the same way. We mothers? We will half kill ourselves to do the job right and then the one time we become overwhelmed and frustrated and lose it and mess up, that isolated incident is what we lie awake and think about at three o’clock in the morning. Not the litany of sacrifices, the endless acts of selflessness or the blinding love that motivates and guides every parenting decision we make.
And it’s not just related to parenting, this sense of our own inadequacy. It’s the not-thin-enoughness that has us pounding treadmills at 5am; the not-young-enoughness that makes us cover the grey and have scary substances injected into our faces. It’s all so mad, the things we do to make ourselves worthy of love and, I suppose, earn our right to exist in the world. I read a great quote on Facebook the other day. It said, ‘Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.’ I love that because as girls, isn’t it just exactly what we’ve been taught – that we have to be perfect in all these impossible ways?
How about the notion that actually we don’t have to prove anything to anybody and are completely fine – even awesome – just the way we are?
Recently I turned 45, and on the morning of my birthday I took myself for a walk along the beach and thought about this thing called life: where I’m at and how I feel about being here. And one thing really hit home for me. I need to work at stopping this senseless worrying over nothing. Because no-one is going to take me by the shoulders, look me in the eye and say, ‘You are doing enough. You are enough.’ We have to start doing this for ourselves. Time is ticking by and it’s such a waste of the beautiful experience of being alive in the world. I know it’s not an easy mental shift, but surely if we tell ourselves this every day eventually it will sink in? It is certainly worth a try.
Susan Hayden is the voice behind the popular blog Disco Pants & A Mountain
