Unlike television commercials, I don’t know too many women who wake up brimming with enough energy to enthusiastically leap off their well-sprung mattresses smiling broadly. For most, it’s probably easier to identify with the wrung out dishrag lying limply in the sink than it is to relate to the phony Ms Cheerful in ads peddling mattresses. Most women are exhausted and we’re worn-out because we’ve taken on too much.
Seventy years ago my grandmother had one job (although not one I’d have wanted) and in my mother’s day, females began straddling the demands of career and home. Now many women spend so much time maintaining their image that the cumulative hours spent titivating add up to a third full-time occupation.
In her time my grandma showed little concern for ‘faux’ nails or cellulite and my mother would have concluded that spending four or five hours a week sweating in the gym was an early sign of madness. Today we consider these superficial image concerns normal.
In Africa we are privileged to have home-help but even so, working wives on average devote three times more than their men to unpaid work at home. One wonders why? In the US, only 57% of working women who can afford help at home take advantage of it.
Evidently many well-groomed females accept that providing free labour at home, while at the same time bringing in a large share of the bacon, is all part of being a real woman. And it’s not.
As far back as the 1850’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton - a pioneer of the suffrage movement – said that unless ‘self-sacrifice’ is removed from the women’s agenda, no progress would be made to free our gender. Little did she realise just how much women would sacrifice in pursuit of being crowned the SuperWoman of this new millennium.
Being prepared to sacrifice all of our time and our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being is perceived by many to be natural to the female psyche; some even consider it noble.
But little girls don’t pop out of the womb with a ready-made inclination to give; they have to be conditioned to do so. As girls we were taught to base our self-esteem on how much we keep giving, even though this is unrealistic. So to feel good about ourselves we tout up how much we’ve handed over and then become more exhausted when we realise just how much it cost us.
Tasks like preparing school lunches or supervising homework do not require breasts and neither does playing taxi nor catering to the whims of a fussy family with a personalised feeding scheme. Quite ingeniously the Creator blessed both men and women with two five-fingered appendages and both are equally capable of putting these handy attachments to work at home.
Cooking, cleaning, ironing and tidying don’t come naturally to a woman; many learnt these tedious skills as children. So with the greater life experience that adulthood brings, educated grown men should find picking up such mundane skills quite a cinch. And if they resist by feigning incompetence or bulldozing their way through the dishes, instead of taking over, bite your tongue and let him get on with it (that’s after you’ve hidden the good dinner service, of course). After a while (and in some cases this can be a long while) his male pride won’t allow him to continue appearing so ham-fisted.
Also if he’s one of those needing a GPS to locate the wash basket, when he next questions the whereabouts of his clean blue shirt, simply inform him that it’s on the floor where he left it last Friday.
If we’re not prepared to put both feet down, then we can’t expect spoilt men to change their behaviour. After all, if we had someone who brought us a drink with our slippers while we slothed on the sofa, and then they fed us, picked up after us, entertained us, loved and pleasured us (vulgar habits and all), why would we change such an idyllic situation? So instead of wishing or hoping men will change, we must stop buying the excuse that ‘boys will be boys’ and start basing our self-worth on things other than the exhausting learnt habit of giving indiscriminately.
