{"id":2814,"date":"2026-03-09T19:14:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T18:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/thoughts-on-international-womens-day\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T19:15:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T18:15:40","slug":"thoughts-on-international-womens-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/thoughts-on-international-womens-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on International Women&#8217;s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>My first one as a mom has made me a bit reflective:<br\/>Today is International Women&#8217;s Day.<br\/>A day for strong women, they say. For everyday heroes. For equality.<br\/>But strength is a strange compliment when it actually just means that someone has to carry a lot for a very long time.  <\/p>\n\n<p>Many women carry. Every day.<br\/>They carry responsibility, expectations, mental to-do lists, appointments, and other people&#8217;s worries. They carry children in their arms and projects at work.<br\/>They carry families through crises and, often enough, themselves through days when their own bodies don&#8217;t want to cooperate.  <br\/><br\/>Because some women aren&#8217;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. <\/p>\n\n<p>And yet, they get up.<br\/>Take children to the childminder, daycare, or school. Go to work.<br\/>Coordinate doctor&#8217;s appointments between meetings. Listen, organize, comfort, and function.  <\/p>\n\n<p>Care work is the clinical term for it.<\/p>\n\n<p>A word that hardly hints at how much love, patience, strength, and sometimes self-sacrifice it involves.<br\/>It is the work that rarely receives applause.<\/p>\n\n<p>The work that happens when no one is watching. The work that keeps a society running\u2014and yet is often treated as if it were a given.<br\/>Mothers know this especially well. <\/p>\n\n<p>Everything is expected of them: devotion, patience, presence\u2014and 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.  <\/p>\n\n<p>That&#8217;s why International Women&#8217;s Day shouldn&#8217;t just talk about strength.<\/p>\n\n<p>But also about the fact that women shouldn&#8217;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.   <\/p>\n\n<p>And about the fact that a mother, a working woman, or a woman with a chronic illness shouldn&#8217;t be admired because she &#8220;manages everything.&#8221; Instead, she should be supported so that she doesn&#8217;t have to manage everything alone. <\/p>\n\n<p>Perhaps true equality begins exactly there:<br\/>When we stop celebrating women for how much they can endure\u2014and start building a world where they have to endure less. \u2764\ufe0f <\/p>\n\n<p>A world where they don&#8217;t have to justify their own interests, goals, and breaks. \ud83c\udf1e<\/p>\n\n<p>A world where we women don&#8217;t have to be eternally grateful for someone supporting us, but where what we rock on our own is also seen and appreciated. \ud83e\udd18\ud83c\udffd <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My first one as a mom has made me a bit reflective:Today is International Women&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5034],"tags":[168,439],"class_list":["post-2814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nicht-kategorisiert","category-opinion","tag-a-matter-of-attitude","tag-mindfulness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2817,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814\/revisions\/2817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kayhelena.work\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}