I’ve had a few conversations with friends in the last day about how overwhelmingly busy we are. It is reminiscent of those first years after we had babies. During those years we constantly were dealing with feeling of great domestic upheaval, unrealistic expectations of what had to be done on the job in order to stay employed, nagging worry over neglecting friendships, and overall just a sense of always swimming against the current.
That seemed to let up for a while, only to return in the last year or two. I think that this has to do with a) having teenagers at home, b) ailing or dying parent to worry about, c) unrealistic expectations of what has to be done on the job in order to stay employed, d) pre-, full-bloom, post-menopause, and e) experiencing serious, even terminal, illnesses.
Just as we thought we could have it all (profession, partnership, and children) when we were in our twenties and thirties, we are now struggling with all the above-mentioned situations simultaneously in our forties and fifties. Not wanting to simplify things, but it seems to me in my parents’ generation they did things serially: cope with distressingly uncommunicative teenagers in their forties, then menopause in their fifties, then ailing parents in their sixties.
It is not easy, of course no one said it would be easy, but it is reallyreally not easy to try and master these challenges all at once. This is not meant to sound like whining, but just stating how stupefied, petrified overwhelming inadequate we (I) feel at times.
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