Down the Rabbit Hole

Superwoman Days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT-i9iK13S0

I know I'm Superwoman, I know I'm strong
I know I've got this 'cause I've had it all along
I'm phenomenal and I'm enough
I don't need you to tell me who to be

The lyrics are from Kelly Clarkson’s song, Broken and Beautiful. On a at day like today, I can proudly relate to these lyrics. I am juggling one closing, prepping for a problematic one in two days, closing out commissions for the month and submitting all the marketing for the summer deadlines in addition to drafting the campaign layouts for the remaining two quarters of the year.

If that sounds like a lot, my morning actually started five hours ago when I was up loading laundry and the dishwasher, packing the car with riding cloths and boots and rehearsing the heart to heart chat I was going to take on with my daughter that morning. In between exchanging texts with my husband, I was sending emails, getting the dogs fed and medicated and getting my uncooperative daughter up and out the door. Motherhood is a lot. Working full time in a demanding industry in an understaffed office is a lot. Doing both is damn near exhausting some days. Some days I just rock it. It is easy to check things off my list and tell myself I’m a Superwoman. We women are amazing, right? How else could we run our households, hold down jobs and get shit done? Superwomen, each any every one of us.

But there is the truth…I average three to four mediocre days a week for every one of those kick-ass Superwoman ones. I wake up with so many aches and pains each morning I feel like a broken and brittle doll. I don’t get after my daughter as much as I need to. My house isn’t spotless. I cut corners and simply just run out of “umph” more times than I would ever admit. I’m running to catch up…on everything it seems. And work? Well, work is always there, always demanding more. There has always been someone’s slack that I need to pick up, gears that need to be greased and fires that need putting out. As a working mom, I am acutely aware of every time I need to leave early, and split vacations days to cover her breaks and days off. I am the only one with school age children in my office and it weights on me more than it should.

I wear so many hats that I feel like I am constantly triaging my parental and work responsibilities so I can prove to them that I can do it all. Yet, I’m loathe to admit that each and every “Superwoman day” is brilliantly and cruelly balanced by the days when I am painfully reminded that no one really cares. Its work right, we all do it. No one cares as long as it gets done. There are days when I give into the frustration, the invisibility, the twenty-five years of working in that same box. Some days its deceivingly easy to trip on my own cape and end up crying in the bathroom.

So Superwoman? Maybe not so much…Which brings me to the chorus of Kelly’s anthem, and in essence, the truth behind the Superwoman myth for me.

Can someone just hold me?
Don't fix me, don't try to change a thing
Can someone just know me?
'Cause underneath, I'm broken and it's beautiful

More days then not, I feel like I’m failing it all…my marriage, my daughter, my career. I do not feel like the Superwoman. I do not feel like I am even “seen”. I don’t feel like a person who has her own aspirations and dreams, or at least once did. I feel burned out and tired. Broken.
The truth is I will always need to be held and comforted more often than I will ever admit. Even if I appear to be getting it all done, I am not. Rest assured that regardless of what it looks like, I am knowingly robbing some Peter to pay some Paul somewhere, and I know it will catch up to me. I am not artfully and skillfully shouldering all that I need to have done in a day and I sometimes just need to hear that it is okay.
I don’t need someone to fix things for me, I just need them to know me and understand that no one has higher expectations of myself than me. Sometimes this Superwoman just needs comfort. Sometimes I need someone to gather up all my broken dolls limps and just hold me for a moment.