A rant.

Last night as I was making dinner and planning how to organize Summit's room and dealing with the laundry and vacuuming and having a conversation with my mother about something regarding Ella's school stuff and yelling at the kids to quit fighting/put down the ds/do homework, Matt was sitting in front of the television watching the news. (Not to say he doesn't do anything. Let's just clear that up right now. He works. He's the main money maker. This is important, I know.) In the midst of all of this, my stress level was elevated to about an orange. Coincidentally, there was a segment about a study that was conducted concerning women and stress and how much higher (40%, but I would argue more) women's stress levels are compared to men. He called me in... to stop what I was doing... to watch the news about something I already knew?! Seriously. I could have told him that. In fact, I have told him that several times before. And to the jackasses who conducted the study: was that necessary? You probably spent thousands of dollars (in a down economy, no less) to research something that women have been shouting from the rooftops for centuries. You didn't believe us? Of course not. Matt didn't really believe it until he saw it on television.

This is something that I have thought about more and more since becoming a mother. I suppose those feminist theory literature classes could have contributed to some of this insight. I mean, really, we have a lot on our shoulders as women. When women were in the Good Housekeeping phase of our existence, did they complain out loud? No. Those magazines told them to have a well-kept house, well-kept children, and warm food on the tables when their husbands came home. (By the way, why don't men have to read those ridiculous magazines?) They were supposed to look beautiful and keep their mouths shut. No complaining. No dissonance. Now, we have to do that and work. And we have to keep up with all of the perfect Type-A mothers out there who we know pick apart our/my ability to forget everything that we're/I'm supposed to do. I'm the mom scrambling at the last minute to get everything done, and no matter how much I try to pay attention to detail, I inevitably neglect to remember something. Usually something important. For shame!

So what do us women do when one of us flounders? We talk smack about us behind our backs. (And, I say 'our' because we're all in this together, ladies.) Why? Because it makes us feel better about our own supposed shortcomings. But, I mean, seriously? Are these really shortcomings or actually a long line of awesomeness that somehow misses another piece of the awesome? And is that so bad? No, but  it seems that nothing we do is really ever enough, even though we do enough to move mountains on a regular basis.

And we have to look the part of a perfect woman, too. We have to fit into size 0 jeans. We have to have big boobs that don't look like they've every nursed a baby, greyless hair, and  wrinkle-free faces. We have to have all of the latest trends. We have to have spotlessly clean homes that would out-do the styles in Architectural Digest. We have to have all of the most spectacular experiences. We have to. We have to. We have to. And if we can't? We feel like doo-doo about ourselves. Yuck!

Perhaps this is where part of the stress comes from. We have all of these cultural expectations to live up to and we have intense feelings of guilt, deficiency, and ineptitude whenever we make one itsy-bitsy 'mistake.' Hell, even when we get it all done, we have a looming sense of having left someone or something out. Well, I call bullshit on this, my friends. I rock. You rock. Women rock.

And so, my rant has come to an end. I've got laundry to do and dinner to prepare for tomorrow since I have a conference to go to all day long before going to coach Ella's baseball practice.