Q: I would like it if you could give me some suggestions for helping my wife. The woman never slows down. She does as much, if not more, around the house than she did before she started to work full time in town.
She drives the kids everywhere to their games and practices, and she has never said no when the church or some community group asks for extra baking or volunteer work.
I cannot keep her out of the fields during harvest. She gets up a good many nights to help in calving season and she and the kids have 50 hens laying eggs daily. I am worried that my wife is going to run herself dry and get sick. But she will not listen to me. Do you have any ideas?
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A: I wish that I could count the number of superwomen I have met these past few years. Their numbers are overwhelming. I really admire them.
Most of them never complain. I wonder if they even know how hard they are working to make their families’ lives better, or if they appreciate the sacrifices they are making. My guess is that they don’t.
Neither am I sure how you can best help your wife.I suspect that you do what you can to help around the house. If you don’t, you can start there. Otherwise, the best you can do is to let her know how much you appreciate all that she is doing.
Too often women are at the doorsteps for admission to the nursing home before anyone bothers to thank them for what they have done.
Your wife, as you might suspect, is in danger of having the occasional meltdown. This is when she needs you the most.
But she does not need you to start telling her what to do, advising her to do less, or implying that something is psychologically wrong with her. She needs to know how much you admire her.
Meltdowns or burnouts are loaded with feelings of inadequacies and self-doubt. The more you can help her see past these negative moments in her life, the better are the chances she will decide what she needs to do to look after herself.
We are in the middle of a huge change of lifestyle in the country. Neither our moms nor our grandmothers took employment outside the home as much as our wives do these days. In some ways the changes are good. They give our wives more opportunities for personal satisfaction than their mothers had.
But household management still has to happen. Until we learn how to include these tasks as the family’s responsibilities and not just a woman’s job, and until we can convince our wives that they do not have to be fully responsible for the house, they are going to continue to try being superwomen.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan who has taught social work at two universities. Mail correspondence in care of Western Producer, Box 2500, Saskatoon, Sask., S7K 2C4 or e-mail jandrews@producer.com.
