Mom’s on Strike

The title is borrowed from a movie where a working woman stops running the household in order to make her husband and her three children appreciate her. I was tickled by the movie.

For us ladies who have to juggle between different roles, we are torn apart when trying to decide which role is important. This is even more difficult for those who strive for perfection in each role.

Lets understand that we don’t have to be superwomen and kill ourselves in the process. We may be good in multitasking but that doesn’t mean that we have to do it all. We can encourage our family and colleagues to do small portions so that we are not overburdened all the time. Let me share a story. Like all working mothers, I too had to get my sons ready in the morning…one for school and one for the creche. I would lay out the socks on the bed and the shoes on the floor for them to wear on their own. The younger one was too small to understand the right way of wearing the socks. I would tell him to just manage to push his toes in and pull up the socks…doesn’t matter if the ankle portion was popping up on the top of the feet. And push his feet in the shoes and attach the velcro strap (didn’t buy shoes with shoe strings). There was a day when he wore the shoes on the wrong feet and I learnt of it in the evening when I picked him up from the creche. What I am trying to say is that we can delegate some work/decisions where mistakes do not have high costs or consequences. By the way, the young kid quickly learnt the right way to wear socks and shoes.

Which role should you focus on? Prioritise please. Priorities keep changing over time. And it is okay to put profession on the top of the list and children in the middle when required. We can’t have children being toppers in the class and we also being at the top of our profession. When we spend time on focussing on our profession, children will take a backseat temporarily. And when we focus on the children (especially from teenage to young adults phase), our profession will take a backseat temporarily. Of course we also need to get in our partners to share domestic responsibilities with us. A note of caution. Don’t expect your partner to do it the way you do it. There will be some deviations from your SOP of handling domestics issues (be it children or chores). Just move on.

When we engage our family in the daily activities, the feeling of being overburdened and not being appreciated will reduce to a large extent and hopefully we won’t have to do a “Mom’s on Strike”.