International Women’s Day – Being strong and fragile is ok

I’m so mad to the world right now. I’m also mad at myself for subconsciously accepting and living in this idea that women can handle more than men and therefor they implicitly have to.

We are capable of being mothers, wifes, having a career and a group of friends. But at what costs? Is this really sustainable? We eventually try to be good at everything and most probably get really stressed trying to chase high standards in all these aspects. In the long run it kind of feels like a mice in a spinning wheel: it’s never ending, as soon as you try to focus on one aspect of this multidimensional life , another side almost or completely falls apart. I feel that sometimes the only way to keep going is accepting the mediocrity. Not really exceeding in all, or at least not feeling like we exceed in all these aspects.

I am here, sitting and think of this day, what it means to a lot of women in the world, what it means to me. It feels like that we achieved so much but the road is still so so long. There are some little things that makes everything so freaking unbearable.

We go on maternity leave with fake expectations that,unfortunately , other moms seeded into our heads. Because somehow if you decide to have kids you can’t complain of how hard it is to have them. Most time we say to each other that it will get better, but guess what?! It doesn’t, it just get different. There’s so much judgment on how to raise kids and such a shame that most of it comes from the ones that should know better. Yeah, let’s keep saying that is ok to feel exhausted, it’s ok that the entire organisation of the family is on your shoulders, it’s ok to expect that you focus less at work to be able to keep up with the family life, or even better, expect you to have a high performance at work while having it at home too. Let’s keep saying that is great if your husband helps you out at home, even if you are the one who has to tell him what to do and how to do it, because family-management is not a real job and does not take much of an effort. Yeah, mental load is a myth that desperate moms invented to give a fancy name to their insane frustrations.

Here we are, celebrating how strong we are. Today I don’t want to celebrate how strong I am because today I don’t feel strong. I want to celebrate how fragile I am right now, how sensible, how broken I am as a mom, wife, friend and human being. Today I want to celebrate that I am an human being, not a super hero. Today I am shouting to the world that I am done. Is not fair and what we have is not enough, is not equal, is not right. We need help before we break, we need support to change things, to be able and free to say we are not fine and that is ok.

Today I am not strong but I am still a women, as all the others.