I recently wrote a Facebook post based around the quote from Doris Lessing from her novel The summer before the dark which says:
‘After the years of living inside the timetable of other people’s needs’
It seems that this resonated with quite a few women so I thought I’d expand on the thought.
When I first read that line I understood completely what she was talking about. That was me!
I’d swear that I exclaimed out loud. A resounding YES, exactly, that’s exactly how I’d felt and a lot of women that I’ve spoken to in recent years have, in different words, said exactly the same thing, they just get tired of literally ‘living inside the timetable of other people’s needs.’
A recent client of mine said quite succinctly ‘I really do get quite fed up with being the sole provider of information, entertainment and food. I often just want to be left alone … sometimes I feel as though the responsibility placed on my shoulders is quite relentless.’
Welcome to our world as women, partners, wives and mothers.
The main character of Doris Lessing’s novel, Kate, goes on to say that ‘in between Kate, the girl who had married Michael and Kate of three years ago, which was when she had become conscious there was something to examine…..’ and I think that’s the thing, we involve ourselves so completely in everyone else’s needs and requirements and demands that we don’t see what is happening to our ourselves, that we’ve changed, that we’ve lost who we were. But there comes a point when we gradually do begin to see it, when we start to question, not only our lives but ourselves. We’re not completely sure what’s wrong, we’re not sure what we need to change or what we want to change it to but we do start to examine our lives and pose a few questions.
The thing is that that’s when the guilt sets in, we start to feel guilty that we’re having these thoughts. We should be happy about things, we should not only love our children but we should love all the work that goes into parenting, we should love providing a clean, tidy and happy home for our family, we should be happy that we get to go out to work as well and contribute financially, we should enjoy planning and executing amazing social events for the family. We should, should, should ……
Hmm …. Wrong!
Society gets into our heads and we listen. Society and all its expectations certainly ruled my life for a long, long time and even after I’d realised this and made a few changes, created a life for myself that I thoroughly enjoyed, there was society popping back into my mind on regular occasions just to see if he could put the brakes on.
Society’s expectations kept telling me that in my mid-fifties I shouldn’t enjoy researching the burial practices of the Romano-British population, I should be focusing on family and planning my finances for when I get older. Society said that as a sixty year old I shouldn’t go hiking through the highest mountains on the planet, that I shouldn’t be creating a new business and that I shouldn’t still want so much more from my life.
But I stopped listening to that nasty voice and I’ve finally got to the point where I’ve told society’s expectations to get lost, I’m not taking any notice.
The message that I finally took on board was LOSE THE GUILT.
Stop feeling guilty about wanting something more or something different.
Stop feeling guilty for thinking about yourself.
Stop feeling guilty when you take time out.
Stop feeling guilty that you don’t want to do what everyone else is doing.
So what I’m going to suggest to you is that you stop for a while, take some time for yourself, ask yourself a few hard questions and listen, really listen to what you have to say, not to what everyone else or ‘society’ has to say.
Really think about where you want to see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years time. If you continue the way things are now are you going to get there, are you going to achieve what you want to in life? Are you going to feel happy and fulfilled and be the confident person you know you can be?
Just asking.
