Let’s Be Honest – A Woman’s Work: COVID Edition
Recently, I put a request out on my personal Facebook page for insights as to what people wanted me to write about for my column this month. Truthfully, I had no idea. As we fully submerge into the second month of isolation, I am feeling the burnout and overwhelm. I am not on the frontlines in terms of engaging in person-to-person work (my private practice has moved entirely online), but I am busy trying to help my clients navigate working from home, parenting and trying to salvage bits and pieces of their mental health – while trying to do the same for myself.
The comments I received were heartbreaking. I heard from mothers who sounded like they were absolutely drowning. My friends vulnerably shared their anxieties about trying to raise children while working, guilt around using screens, coping with profound feelings of isolation and crippling worry about the future, their children and their own mental health. I heard from single people who felt cut off, forgotten about and scared. I heard from single mothers who had no help and I heard from women in relationships who didn’t either.
As a recent single mother myself, trying to homeschool and take care of an ill parent while running a private practice has been, at times, panic-inducing. I heard from my friends on my Facebook post asking (begging) me what to do. In full transparency, I don’t have all of the answers myself. This pandemic highlights the desperate need we have for our systems and structures to stay in place, because when they break, we have absolutely nothing to catch us. What I heard was that the normal “Do yoga! Write a gratitude list!” suggestions were failing women.
In addition, the propulsion to everything online meant for more opportunities to compare to other women who seemed to be sailing through this pandemic with their home-cooked apple pies and finger-painted furniture with kids. So this begs the question: what do we do when nothing is working? How can we manage what is a mental health crisis in the making? How does a woman work, often alone and with the weight of what feels like a million roles on their shoulders?
My short answer is that we don’t. Because we can’t.
In my own therapy sessions, I have sat there gasping for air to a therapist who is likely just as isolated and flattened as I am. I am candid and vulnerable and she helps me to lessen the expectations on myself, to forgive myself for the screen time my daughter is now getting and the homework assignments I can’t seem to keep up with. She reminds me that I can’t be a machine and that I need to express myself creatively by painting and making art for myself and myself alone. She reminds me to take my medications as prescribed, to go for walks six feet apart with my friends when I can. She says I need to get outside as much as I can, get to nature, go out to the country. She says I need belly-laughs (and these come from my socially distanced walks). I know that I need therapy, more often. I need so much support, now more than ever. I can’t do any of this alone.
I am clearly not a doctor, but I am a therapist and a mother and a woman, so these identities might qualify me for sharing my experience. I can’t tell you if a walk outside is the right choice for you. I can tell you it’s been the right choice for me. Therapy has been the right choice for me. Permission to be grossly imperfect has been the right choice for me. Crying, writing in my journal, learning a new craft (adult paint by number on Amazon is where it’s at, folks), meditation and medication are where it’s at for me. These strategies have been useful to my clients as well.
In these unprecedented times, we need to re-examine woman’s work and smash it to bits. Looking for ways to care for your spirit and soul are key to surviving this mess. The same impossible standards that are placed on us “out there” cannot survive in lockdown.
Breathe. We will get through this. May you be happy.
