My first one as a mom has made me a bit reflective:
Today is International Women’s Day.
A day for strong women, they say. For everyday heroes. For equality.
But strength is a strange compliment when it actually just means that someone has to carry a lot for a very long time.
Many women carry. Every day.
They carry responsibility, expectations, mental to-do lists, appointments, and other people’s worries. They carry children in their arms and projects at work.
They carry families through crises and, often enough, themselves through days when their own bodies don’t want to cooperate.
Because some women aren’t just fighting for their place in a world that is still unequal. Some are simultaneously battling chronic illnesses, pain, exhaustion, and a body that sets limits while the world keeps demanding performance.
And yet, they get up.
Take children to the childminder, daycare, or school. Go to work.
Coordinate doctor’s appointments between meetings. Listen, organize, comfort, and function.
Care work is the clinical term for it.
A word that hardly hints at how much love, patience, strength, and sometimes self-sacrifice it involves.
It is the work that rarely receives applause.
The work that happens when no one is watching. The work that keeps a society running—and yet is often treated as if it were a given.
Mothers know this especially well.
Everything is expected of them: devotion, patience, presence—and at the same time independence, career, and self-fulfillment. They are always supposed to be enough. For their children, for their job, for those around them.
That’s why International Women’s Day shouldn’t just talk about strength.
But also about the fact that women shouldn’t just be allowed to be strong, but also allowed to be tired. Allowed to be sick. Allowed to need help. About the fact that care is not a weakness, but the foundation of our society.
And about the fact that a mother, a working woman, or a woman with a chronic illness shouldn’t be admired because she “manages everything.” Instead, she should be supported so that she doesn’t have to manage everything alone.
Perhaps true equality begins exactly there:
When we stop celebrating women for how much they can endure—and start building a world where they have to endure less. ❤️
A world where they don’t have to justify their own interests, goals, and breaks. 🌞
A world where we women don’t have to be eternally grateful for someone supporting us, but where what we rock on our own is also seen and appreciated. 🤘🏽
Leave a Reply