Life Overloaded

What would define midlife for many of us? Settling in our own skin? Viewing our life as a whole, with wellbeing centred in it? Or is it reaping the fruits of our labour from our twenties and thirties and a chance to now enjoy doing more of what gives us joy, and less of what doesn’t? Perhaps one of the welcome parts of midlife is just knowing the difference. It is true I think that in midlife comes the clarity to savour simple things and a deeper understanding of the value of time.

And time is the thing that many women, in particular, especially parents, are very short on in their midlife. For while we may have worked through some of the emotional clutter and baggage that perhaps dogged us before, our plate is then refilled with the needs of others. And it can be a situation of responsibilities and support needed on both spectrums of our lives. Children who are still school going and need to be helped through it, encouraged, as well as socialised, and just simply driven from A to B. It is also a time when emotional and personality issues can surface. Social dynamics become more complicated, the greater the independence, the more questions they need answering.

On the other side, it can be a time of change with our own parents, who depending on their health, may need our care and support also. And depending on the level of need, this may end up in a turning of the tables where you now become their minder. Even without that, the demands are intense. And this is before you factor in trying to maintain a career which hopefully is nourishing, but also may require a level of people management too. The bandwidth for personal space for women in midlife, I would argue, is under serious pressure. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I was struck particularly during this year’s back to school season that part of this is driven by such an unconscious bias, such a plain acceptance that we don’t even see it any more. For instance, the first back to school ads I heard never mentioned a father, they were completely airbrushed from the project. Ads boomed from the radio ‘Mum, where did you put my lunch box?!’, like they were coming from some kind of 1950s time machine. All the broadsheet articles packed with their tips and tricks about how to ease the transition, had simply one stock shot above them, a mother.

On one of the first days of school returning, I had the pleasure of a face-to-face work meeting with two women architects at the top of the game. We did not discuss the recent trends in industrial style, no, our conversation quickly returned to our overwhelmed lives. We talked differences in terms of parenting approach to independence and self-sufficiency, but one thing remained true to us all, we all managed everyone’s lives, as well as our own. And yet despite the fact that these women are extremely good at what they do, when their husbands would from time to time pop by a job site, builders would automatically start addressing them, assuming they were the real architect in the business.

This is an invisibility issue, and it’s not about women getting out there and banging a drum. Men are not visible in the process of caring the way women are.

It is completely acceptable to whitewash men from the picture, and it does no credit to the ones who are really engaged. It is the assumption that the work of care has no value, something that has been forced into a major reckoning in recent months. Yet it still pervades. The Financial Times recently reported on a Private Asset Managers awards virtual gathering, where the event’s founder, James Anderson, made some throwaway marks about women working from home. It should help firms re-engage, he said, “with a highly competent, skilled workforce that currently has been sitting at home twiddling its thumbs and looking after the next generation.” And there you have it. From a person who knows the price of everything, and also the value of nothing.

When you hear ads about caregiving on the radio for the elderly, it is always a woman’s voice. When it comes to care, trust, reliability, it is always a woman’s voice. But as long as we, as a society, continue to edit out men from the equation of responsibility of caring equally, the conditions are never fundamentally going to change.

There is already talk of a ‘She-cession’ in both the US and the UK and for women in midlife who are managing so much, this is a real live issue. They have done statistically done double the hours of homeschooling during the pandemic, and make up 70 per cent of the health and social care workforce globally, putting them directly in the firing line.

The irony is that while many of us are aware we are carrying too much of the load, we are too busy to take on the struggle to change it. But one thing is for sure, as long as we keep painting men out of the picture, taking up that extra slack, and don’t continually question the assumption that it is somehow our work, it won’t change.

A ball never dropped is never caught, maybe it is time we let go.

Jessie Collins, September 2020.

What do you think, dear reader? We’d love to know in the comments below…