I am not your superhero.

I am not your superhero.

And I really wish everyone would just STOP referring to women as ‘strong’.

Specifically.. Those women who parent children with high care needs, or are unpaid carers, or are holding excessive workloads.

Women single parenting. Widows. Women carrying the weight of an ex or current partners’ Failure To Adult. Women caring for ageing parents or relatives. Women doing what they do, not because society expects THEM to. Women who simply do the work because no one else will show up and save them from it.

It’s honestly demeaning to call a woman a Superhero because they’re filling in for other people’s roles they continue to refuse to take.

These women don’t need your sympathy either.

They just need adequate support, because they’re actually just like other people. And ALL humans need and deserve adequate support, recreation time, mental breaks and to live a life that contains fulfilling activities they enjoy.

So often, these women tell me they just want people to either be helpful, or keep their praise to themselves. They smile and say thank you and silently seethe and rage inside as they walk away. They don’t have the executive processing and emotional regulation available in their day to waste time on unpacking all these well-meaning comments, to uncover why they cause that pang deep down in their chest and make their throat tighten sharply in response.

They would never dream of being rude. They suck it up. Breathe it all in and breathe the words out. Remember to do their gratitude journal. Hold their tongue. Have their self care bubble bath. Catch all the flies with honey. Write the emails. Advocate for their vulnerable charges with love, cupcakes and kindness. Grey rock their ex. Apologise for not calling the therapist back. Pay their overdrawn fees. Wish their credit was better. Dream about having the time for starting a business or working a regular full-time job. Push back down the crushing weight that expands and threatens to overwhelm their nervous system to a point of no return.

But refusing to drop the tasks, the glass balls they are juggling, is simply not an option. Even though not all the balls are their tasks, and even though they’ve already asked for the help they need. These women ask regularly. No one they ask ever refuses to take their glass juggling balls, their rightful tasks, back.

The rightful task owners just… don’t ever take their balls.

An active refusal, and a passive lack of action are the same thing.

I know so many INCREDIBLE women who are carrying the workload of lazy humans or systems who simply refuse to do their tasks.

Ex partners not understanding how to identify, create a strategy, do AND finish a task.

NDIS not understanding what disability related care tasks look like, because they forgot to read the reports they paid for.

Government departments calling these women's relentless, complex additional daily tasks Reasonable Parental Responsibility.

Teachers and principals not understanding what masking means.

New partners clamouring for more of their time, without researching how to create more time in their partner’s day.

Medical professionals not understanding the difference between respecting their own medical knowledge and respecting lived experience.

Grandparents with the refrain, ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ without understanding their inability to delegate while inside chaos.

Throw a rock and you’ll hit a well meaning underperformer floating blissfully on the peripheral of these womens’ lives.

And every single person in the community that these women fill the unpaid task gap for,

KNOW, on some level, they’re not carrying their glass ball.

They feel a bit bad sometimes.

But they don’t care ENOUGH to take their ball back. After all, they ran away and joined a new circus. They’re juggling a new and different set of glass balls of their very own that they chose. And it’s complicated.

They say, It’s simply not an option for me. I don’t have the kind of setup and system that allows me to do those tasks. SHE DOES.

So they juggle their own set of balls and look on.

They clap and cheer for her.

‘What a rock star! What a superhero! I could never do what she does!’

Yes, they could all do their tasks that these women do daily because of their lack of action, even as they continue juggling the glass balls they can’t drop. The glass balls no one wants to take from them, because when people look the other way long enough they can start to romanticise these womens’ consistency in caregiving, their refusal to live a life at the expense of a vulnerable person, as a woman’s entire personal identity that defines them.

Introducing… The Superhero.

Of course they could do what she does.

They just fucking don’t.

Kat Abianac xo

PS. If you liked this post, click & join our Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/600867071601242