How Are We Supposed to Do All This

Let’s do the math, because I’m a numbers person. Numbers can make a thing seem doable. Or not.

I work full time, which is theoretically eight hours a day (more on that in a future post). But if I’m honest, it’s never eight hours, and it’s not the “normal” 8 hours that people want it to be. It’s eight hours plus the emails I answer in the school pickup line and while I wait on my kids at dance. I have kids who need things: rides, forms signed, snacks that meet increasingly specific standards, emotional support at 9pm when they are protesting bedtime because they’re big girls now. I run the household, which is not a chore, it’s a second unpaid job with no PTO, where I do have one outstanding employee (my husband) but I’m the entire HR department. I’m lucky too, my parents are young, so I’m not yet fielding calls about their doctors, their medications, their falls, their finances, while also being their kid, which means grief is already in the room even though nobody has died yet. I see you, firstborn daughters. And underneath all of it, I’m the one running the money. Not just earning it. Running it. I know the account balances, the due dates, whether the mortgage and the summer camp deposit hit the same week. I’m the one who tweaks the 401(k) contribution when cash gets tight and quietly turns it back up later (yeah, I do that too). I am the CEO, COO and CFO of a household that never once asked if I wanted the job(s). In addition to the kind of big job I already have that pays me, that I’m in my peak earning years of.

Oh, and my health. My body picked this exact moment to stage a full rebellion. I’m not sleeping, or I’m sleeping and waking up furious for no reason, or I’m sweating through sheets I just changed. I love the gym, thankfully, and I would live there, but it has to fit in those waking hours too. And sure, I’m exercising, but I’m supposed to be exercising AND eating well AND going to the doctor AND getting the mammogram AND the colonoscopy AND whatever bloodwork my friend just told me to ask for, and I’m supposed to do all of this in the twenty minutes I have between the second job of running my house and the actual job that pays me.

So. How are we actually supposed to do all this?

I’m sorry to say, I don’t have a six-step system that fixes this. Anyone who tells you they do is selling something, and it’s probably not going to help, because it wasn’t designed for you. (Although I do know a couple of things that sure worked wonders for me, there’s a whole lot of grifters out there). There is no framework that adds hours to a day. What I have is a few things I know to be true, because I am currently living inside this exact decade, and because I have sat across from enough women in it to know I am not special, I am just one of us.

The math was never going to work, and that’s not a personal failing.

My therapist once told me that I wasn’t giving myself credit for all that I actually do. She said “You generally do more in an hour than a lot of people do in a full day.” I thought she was full of it, honestly. But years later, I know she was right. I am, we are, trying to do the job of about five adults. Full time employee. Full time parent. Full time household manager (and trip planner). Soon to be full time caregiver to my parents, because I’ve watched the job description up close and I know it’s coming. And, by the way, full time head of household finance, the one holding the whole balance sheet in her head. That is five full-time jobs distributed across one nervous system that also needs to sleep and heal and occasionally enjoy something. And I need to have all the right supplements for that too. Nobody built a support framework for this, because there’s never been time to. Women have had full legal and financial personhood for less than a hundred years. I’m part of the first generation doing all five of these jobs with a bank account of my own, and no one handed me a manual, because there isn’t one yet. The system was built on the expectation that someone else, a wife, would be doing three of those five jobs unpaid, and then it just left me standing there when the wife turned out to be me too. I am not bad at time management. I am doing an amount of labor that was never designed to fit inside one person, and so are you.

The menopause part is not a subplot, it’s rewriting the whole story.

Nobody warns you that the exhaustion isn’t just “a lot going on.” Our hormones are genuinely, chemically changing how we sleep, regulate stress, how much patience is left at 6pm. I am not weak for finding this harder than I did five years ago. My biology is different than it was five years ago. I’m trying to treat it like the variable it is instead of a character flaw I need to push through, and I fail at that more than I’d like to admit.

My house looks like there was a tornado inside of it, and I’ve made my peace with it.

I used to try to keep all five jobs looking fine from the outside. The house looked fine, like I said, I have a stellar employee and my husband takes care of the kitchen space in addition to cooking and grocery shopping now. The kids looked fine. My parents’ stuff looked handled. My job looked fine. Meanwhile I was the only place where the deficit showed up, in my sleep, in my health, the extra weight literally on my body, in the fact that I hadn’t seen a friend in four months.

Now, I don’t apologize if the Christmas decorations are still up in April (no joke, they were). If you want them taken down, you do it. There are dishes in my sink more often than there aren’t, and my best friend walks in and right by them like they’re not even there, because she is not there for my kitchen. My mom comes over too, dishes or no dishes, and if some part of her is judging the state of my sink, that’s a her problem, not a me problem. If nothing is allowed to visibly slip, you become the thing that slips. I had to pick what gets to look undone, and I don’t pick me to ignore. I pick the house. Let it look undone. The laundry pile is not a referendum on my worth, and neither is my sink.

That tweak has honestly probably saved me, and is the reason I can sit here and write what’s in my soul to others. It’s the reason my body looks and feels so much better, that my sanity has stuck around, I chose myself over what was expected of me by others. It changed everything.

Ask for the thing directly, not the vague hint of the thing.

“I’m overwhelmed” is not a request anyone can act on. “Can you take the Tuesday pickup for the next month” is. I have watched so many capable women, myself included, wait for someone to notice how drowning we are instead of just naming the specific rock we want them to carry. People, even good, well-meaning people, are bad at noticing. I’ve had to practice saying it out loud, plainly, without a softening apology attached. Tell them exactly what to pick up.

But I resisted this on principle, and honestly, I think we can do one better than asking for “help.” Understanding that responsibilities need to be divided and that “helping run the household” is like saying you’ll babysit your own children. You’re not a babysitter, you’re a PARENT. You’re PARENTING. You’re not helping me, you’re adulting. Get used to it. Read Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play with your partner, and talk about it. Use the tools. That woman changed my marriage.

Being the CFO doesn’t mean I have to be the one losing sleep.

Somewhere along the way, “handles the money” turned into “carries the anxiety about the money,” and those are not the same job, even though I treat them like they are. I can be the one who understands the accounts without being the only one who’s allowed to worry about them out loud. If you’re the default financial decision maker in your house too, that’s a real skill and a real load, and it deserves the same boundaries as anything else on this list. I’m working on looping my husband in on the actual numbers, not just the summary. I’m working on setting a budget for vacations and then handing it over to him (thanks honey, for being the best Disney Dad ever). Saying the anxious part out loud instead of absorbing it silently and calling it competence, game changer.

I already know I won’t do the parent care thing perfectly, because I watched my parents try.

I haven’t lived this one yet, not directly. My parents are still young, still independent, and I count that as the luck it is. But I watched them do this exact dance with their own parents: the calls that went to voicemail, the decisions made later than anyone wanted, the guilt that sat in the room whether or not anyone said it out loud. I know what’s coming for me, because I’ve already seen the dress rehearsal. And here’s what I know before I’m even in it: I will not manage my parents’ decline the way I’ve managed my kids’ childhood, with total presence and total effort. There won’t be enough of me. Some calls will go to voicemail. Some decisions will get made later than I’d like. That won’t be me failing my parents. That will be me being one person instead of the five the situation will actually require.

There is no version of this where I do all of it well at the same time. Not because I’m not capable, I clearly am, I’m still standing. But because the amount of care this decade demands from me was never going to fit inside one body on one schedule. The goal isn’t to finally crack the system that lets me do it all. It’s to stop being the only place where the math doesn’t work, and start putting the shortfall somewhere other than my own health and sleep and sense of self.

I am not behind. I am not failing. I am running five jobs that were built for a household of people, not a household of one, and I am still, somehow, showing up for all of them. So are you.

That’s not proof we can’t handle this. That’s proof of exactly how much we can.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and are intended for informational and educational purposes only. This content reflects personal observations and experiences and should not be construed as financial, investment, legal, tax, medical, or psychological advice. Individual circumstances vary, and readers should consult appropriate professionals regarding their specific situations.