I am Woman... I can do Anything! Or is that Everything?

As women we truly believe that we can do anything which is true but we get lost in trying to do everything. We are trying to fill so many roles, those of our past and those of the future we want. For those women in the baby boomer era, they are dealing with a lot of confusion and guilt – who are they, what is it that they truly want. Many in that era were brought up with learning how to cook, clean, do laundry, look after the house, sew, look after everyone’s needs..... Our mothers did it all, even if they worked. So then we must too. But we knew we wanted something different than our mothers. We wanted a different life.
So we grew up and left home with the impression we could do anything. We went out and got a job, got educated, started a career, we moved forward. It wasn’t until we found a partner that we really started to fulfill those roles that we’d been taught. We did all the household chores, looked after everyone and often had a job, a career or we tried to further our education. We still felt we could do it all... had to do it all. It’s what we’d been taught. It’s not that most men wouldn’t help but we never asked them and if they did we didn’t like how they were doing the chore. So we kept doing it. Doing all of it. Then along came kids. We added that to our shoulders as well. Our mothers did it all, so we had to. Right? Isn’t that what being a woman is? We became incredible multi-taskers. Not only can we do it all but we can do it all at once!
That’s where we get lost. We lose who we are, we forget our dreams. We don’t really want to do all those things, we don’t really like doing all those things but rarely do we give them up. We feel it is all up to us. We have to do them. We have to make sure they get done and get done right. So we find ourselves trapped in the middle of the old ways and trying to create new ways of being, for ourselves. We take on so much that there isn’t time for us. Energy for us. Energy to do much of anything, except keep up with all that is already on our shoulders. We get caught up in all of those roles and we don’t know who we are anymore. We don’t know what we want. We feel lost in a journey that is spiralling us away and we don’t know what to do to stop it.
If that isn’t enough, then there’s the guilt. We don’t feel we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing if we’re not doing those traditional roles – cooking, cleaning, etc. – as well as our careers, our education, our jobs. We get caught up in all that needs to be done, all we feel we need to do - the old ways versus what we want in the new ways. And that only ‘I’ can do it. But I don’t want to do it. What will others think?
We are at a time where we need to create the life we want, do those things we want and share those things that need to be done but we don’t always want to be the one to do them. It is time for change.
It is time for us to realize that we can do anything... but we don’t have to do everything!