Published: September 23, 2009 12:24 am      

GESENHUES: Exhaustion blues

HuffingtonPost.com is running a series of articles by life-coach-slash-author, Marcus Buckingham, who happens to be a male writing about women and their lack of happiness. According to several cited studies, the trend is that our happiness over the last three decades makes for a downward sloping line graph.

Even though women have experienced, “ ... greater educational, political, and employment opportunities,” their overall happiness is suffering. According to Buckingham, “Over the last few decades, women, in comparison to men, have become less happy with their lives.” Per his findings, “As women get older, they get sadder.”

First, let me allow my lefty-liberal side a quick moment to wag her finger at HuffingtonPost.com for running the piece in the first place. As a liberally-slanted news site, why publish anything that fuels the most right-winged conservative theorists who claim our world was better off when women were without shoes and in the process of creating life? Please, let’s not give certain radio show hosts more fat to chew on.

Second, even after reading the entire article twice, I’m still not buying how they are defining happiness. While, “Greater educational, political, and employment opportunities,” may lead to greater happiness at first glance, the real outcome of such opportunities is greater gratification. Which begs the question, does doing the daily work it takes to be more gratified over the course of a lifetime result in day-to-day happiness?

My initial thought was that we’re not less happy, but simply more aware of all that is available to us on an emotional, mental and physical level. It’s easier to be less satisfied when there are more options to choose from ... right? (And, just so you know, when I refer to “we” I’m talking about all women-folk.)

But then I thought, wait, it’s not that we have too many options that render us blue; it’s that our definition of happiness is always evolving.

Maybe sometime in the early sixties, women were happy with a husband who had a good job and house with a couple household appliances. We had washers and dryers and vacuums to follow behind in our high-heels and freshly-ironed, crisp, white, cotton aprons.

The 1970s came along and our happiness included a college degree with a macrame chair. We could live with or without the husband as long as we had an eight-track player in our original (but slightly used) Volkswagon bugs and Nissan Datsuns. We had our Erica Jong and Betty Friedan books under one arm and our Ms. Magazine under the other.

And then the ’80s happened and there was all that cocaine and big hair and shoulder pads and no one was happy about that.

Finally, the ’90s showed up and we were intent on having it all. (And now when I say we, I’m talking about me and my peers ... all of us girls who fell hard for Duran Duran and wore Tretorns to school.) Going to college wasn’t about making a political statement; it simply was what we were supposed to do. Few of us thought, “I’m going to be the first women to...” Our mothers had already started the journey to make most of those professional and political leaps for us.

What my generation didn’t know is that 33 percent of us who became wives would out-earn our spouses. And while our spouses are much more likely to contribute to domestic duties than their fathers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cites that the division of household labor is still lopsided: 65 percent of women are cooking versus 38 percent of the men; 50 percent of women are doing the housework versus 20 percent of men; and in homes with children under the age of six, women are spending 1.2 hours a day providing physical care to their kiddos whereas men are giving less than half an hour worth of their time.

What we didn’t know is that our belief that we could have it all without having a nervous breakdown was slightly frayed at the edges.

Now, at this very moment, we are just figuring out that having it all is hard. It leaves us without sleep, with unused gym memberships, with guilt about not feeding our kids enough fruit (and not just fruit, but locally grown fruit from a farmers market where we have to rise early on a Saturday morning — the only day we have to sleep in — so that we get there in time to choose from whatever hand-picked peaches are still available.)

Maybe our lack of happiness is simple, hardcore exhaustion.

Maybe all we need is a good, long, uninterrupted nap right smack in the middle of a Wednesday.



Amy Gesenhues is a freelance writer who lives in Floyd County. You can read her daily commentaries at www.AmyWroteIt.Wordpress.com. E-mail her directly at amy@amywroteit.com.