The Many Tasks Of A Woman

It always amazes me to see how women manage to juggle so many tasks. Many of my friends work as well and sometimes I wonder how they can do it. Their husbands leave in the morning after breakfast, wearing suit, tie and an ironed shirt to head to work and come back home after a long day to enjoy dinner with the family. For my friends their work day starts at the same time. Their day though, starts much earlier.

While husband can get ready, shower and make sure he is well shaved, wife is getting breakfast and the kids ready and prepares lunch boxes for everyone who needs one, husband included. While she is doing that she is having her breakfast on the go and then when everyone else is sitting down, eating brekky she rushes to get herself ready. She drops off the kids at school and then makes her way to where every she works.

If she gets a break she picks up or drops off her husbands shirts to get ironed (if she doesn’t manage to squeeze time in to do it herself) and quickly does the grocery shopping. Then she heads back to work, taking care of her tasks there until she needs to leave to pick up the kids again, taking them from school to their after school activities or taking them home to do homework while having a snack she prepared for them. She puts on laundry while she cooks dinner. After dinner she makes sure the kids take a shower or bath and are ready for bed and puts away dirty dishes, cleaning up whatever needs to be cleaned up. At this point she is still in her work cloths. Her husband might have had a late day at the office, only coming back after dinner so she heats something up for him.

She quickly puts the laundry in the dryer in order to make sure everyone has what they need the next day. Finally she might find time to get changed and have a shower as well. While the kids are in bed and husband watches his favorite TV show she is folding laundry and preparing whatever she wants to put in the lunch boxes the next day.

When she is done with it she remembers that she forgot to make the appointment for the kids she wanted to make already for days and makes a note in order to not forget again the next day.

Just when she thinks she might poor herself a glass of wine and sit down, joining her husband who fell asleep on the sofa watching TV, one of the kids starts calling for having had a nightmare and not being able to fall asleep again.

While she cuddles with her child making sure all the bad thoughts are replaced with happy ones she just manages to set an alarm on her phone before falling asleep on the little bit of space left in her child’s bed.

This is not my life. But it’s the life many of my friends have. While they of course never complain and manage their days just perfectly well, I wonder where they get their energy from. What I described here is also slightly over the top as many of the Dad’s do as much as they can to help out at home of course. But then there are others too.

The ones that come home wondering why she is so exhausted. Wondering why she is still wearing her work cloths, why stuff is not taken care off and why she forgot to pick up his shirts at the dry cleaner he walks passed when he gets his coffee in the afternoon. There are the ones who get annoyed when she asks if they could help out folding laundry, telling her that they just spend hours in the office working their butt off. The ones that don’t understand why she looks so exhausted and why she is not keen on making out but just wants to sit down and relax for a moment.

I baffles me to hear some stories and I wonder how it can work and why some of my friends just accept this schedule rather than making small changes to them. Just like asking their husband to pick up the shirts when he walks passed the dry cleaner or making his own lunch box. Or just helping her fold the laundry while sitting on the sofa, watching TV. Not a big deal, right?

See, I get it when one works and the other one is a stay-at-home-parent. I think then the job of the parent staying at home is running everything at home. But if both work the same amount of hours per day, the workload at home should be split up too.