Tell Me Again. Why Do We Want To Have It All?

For those of you old enough to remember, Aviance perfume used to have a commercial where a woman wearing slacks and a buttoned-down top would dance to a sexy little number about cooking breakfast, taking the kids to school, doing the laundry, fixing dinner, feeding the dog, cleaning up, and then still being desirable to her mate by bedtime.
That song became the theme for my generation of women.
Not only can we do it all—we are expected to do it all.
Somewhere along the line doing it all not only became our right—but now it appears to be our obligation. For thousands of years, men have been denying us females of the right to have it all; therefore, now that we have cracked that glass ceiling, we will do it all-dag nab it! Even if kills us!
Who was that woman who spearheaded this have-it-all-movement? I’d like to slap her!
All I’ve been getting out of this having-it-all-stuff is exhaustion.
I have been advised to prioritize. But then, the items at the top of my list keep shifting based on the crisis of the moment. While addressing one item on the list, the other items are neglected until lights and buzzers start going off to tell me that they can’t be neglected any longer. These alarms are directly attached to family.
Our mothers, who were fortunate enough to be discriminated against by the male population, didn’t have all these items on their lists.
Last night, I was talking to a friend. At nine o’clock in the evening, she hadn’t even been home. The house needed to be cleaned. With her mother arriving today for a visit, she predicted that she receive advise to quit her job to stay home and care for her family.
Our mothers don’t understand. How can they? They were from the Ice Age back when women weren’t free to run themselves ragged. They can’t understand why we run ourselves into the ground having it all: It’s because we can!
A couple of years ago, I emceed a mystery dinner production I had written for a local theater. That became the priority at the top of my list for a couple of weeks.
Trusting my husband, I turned the house and our family over to him. After the play was over and the audience went home, my family returned to the top of my list, at which point I transformed myself from playwright to crisis manager.
While in the midst of rehearsals, my son’s school teacher had sent a homework assignment home to me. It was to be a bonding experience for mother and son to write a paper about a Famous American Woman. With it due on Monday, it jumped to the top of my list at 9 o’clock Sunday night. Too bad my son was in bed and unable to bond with me while I researched our homework assignment.
At seven o’clock in the morning, with the deadline for our project looming overhead, I rousted him out of bed, and dictated “our homework” to him, only to find that it was to be completed on a form, which had disappeared soon after the assignment had landed in our house.
So, I wrote a note to the teacher claiming that my son (he’s a child, therefore irresponsibility is expected of him) misplaced my homework assignment.
Then it came time for coercing my son into his clothes to go to school. This was when I discovered that while my husband was in charge; his son discovered the joy of mud. I had to give Jack credit. He didn’t just let the shoes remain muddy. He washed them, and then let them sit without drying them. Three days later, they were still wet.
Note number two to the teacher went into my son’s bag. This time, I blamed his father for allowing Tristan to ruin his sneakers, which rendered them unavailable for gym.
The time to catch the bus was looming down on us. I whipped my son into his backpack, knelt to zip up his coat to protect him from the cold like the good mother I pretend to be, only to discover that he had holes in the knees of his pants!
That was when doing the laundry was moved to the top of my list. However, even Wonder Woman couldn’t have gotten his pants washed and dried in time for the bus.
I considered writing a third note to the teacher confessing to my ineptitude, but decided that there was still a chance to save my reputation as a semi-adequate mother. I put Tristan into a pair of pants from out of the laundry that appeared clean at a distance, as long as you didn’t have a bloodhound’s nose.
While I rushed Tristan to change his clothes, he asked why he couldn’t wear the torn pants.
Thinking of the two notes he already had that were meant to explain our family, I said, “Because if you do, your teacher is going to report me for neglect and I’ll go to jail!”
I could see his little mind digesting this information while I tried to make him presentable by combing his hair.
“What will happen to me if you go to jail?”
“You’ll get sent to a home to live with a bunch of other kids whose mothers have lost their minds.”
Seeing my party animal son’s eyes light up at the prospect of living in the party zone while I shared a cell with five other mothers who didn’t do their homework, I threw out, “And you’ll have to share all your toys!”
With that, the light was doused and another crisis was resolved.
Now, it’s time to move onto the next item on my list.