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Highlands Today

When Is Enough, Enough?

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Joyce Minor

Published: September 2, 2007

How many hats can one woman wear? When is it too many?

I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a cousin, a friend, a neighbor, an employee, a teacher, a writer, a homemaker and a church member. That's 13 distinct roles, and there are probably others I've forgotten to include. Sometimes, it's just too much.

Like most women, I try to balance the demands of my life roles so I can give sufficient time to each. When I find I've taken on too much, I offload something non-essential to get my life back under control. Usually, that works … usually.

When my middle daughter decided to be born two weeks early, the fact that I had a next-day deadline on a magazine article did not keep the baby from arriving. It also did not keep her 2-year-old sister from riding her tricycle off the porch, winding up bloody and face-down on the concrete. Consequently, I had to find a way to be mother, EMT, mother-to-be, and writer all in the same day. I'm not superwoman, but we survived, because I focused on my primary roles and let everything else slide.

Every day we decide which hats to wear and which to set aside, temporarily or permanently. We can balance two or three roles, maybe even four, in a given day. When one role suddenly becomes all-consuming, we shift into containment mode, hoping our families, friends, and coworkers will be there to minimize the fallout. Usually they are, and one more meltdown is averted.

But occasionally, every woman finds herself in a crisis on several fronts at once. If it happens when there's no one to help, you feel like a circus performer spinning a dozen plates on poles. You run from one to the other, giving each a little spin just in time to keep it from falling. But sooner or later you have to intentionally set some of them aside. If you don't, they will all come crashing down.

So you weigh your options and choose the path of least damage. You know there's no way to proceed without disappointing someone. And sometimes that someone is you.

C'est la vie. Suck it up, put on your big-girl panties, and cope.

First, recognize what's primary and, therefore, non-negotiable. You can gracefully bow out of certain roles, but wife, mother, and daughter are not on that list. Unfortunately, some people think they are, and society has not objected.

Ours has become a culture where abandonment of your primary life roles is accepted, as long as you have a good excuse. And these days almost any excuse is good enough. Drug addiction, drunkenness, post-partum depression, stress, even career opportunities have become acceptable excuses for women to just walk away from their marriages, their children, and their elderly parents. More and more women are doing it.

Why? Because we allow it.

What would happen if we didn't? What would happen if judges stopped granting divorces for flimsy reasons like the ever-popular irreconcilable differences? What would happen if people who abandon their babies in trash cans or their dying parents in hospital waiting rooms found themselves on death row for murder? What would happen if a woman who shot her husband in the back while he slept actually had to spend the rest of her life in prison, instead of getting out in less than two years, like a pastor's wife recently did?

I know every case is different. And I know it's not just women who are getting away with abandoning their primary roles. Deadbeat dads are everywhere, too. But what about the rest of us? We allow it.
Where is our moral outrage? When will we start requiring adults to act like adults and make reasonable decisions and sacrifices to do what's right?

When is enough, enough?

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