u/BostonBridge096

Some backstory:

Before I met my husband I spent a full year completely single, I had a cute little cottage by the lake, a car I loved driving around, a business I worked hard to build and travel experiences that I never thought possible. I wandered through random bookstores and took my time sifting through old books and new, I wrote songs, poems, and created amazing desserts just for me. I learned dances to songs in my living room, I had music on while I’d get ready for the day every morning, singing alone and dancing around. I had all the energy in the world to say hello to and chat up anyone in the grocery line or sitting near me at the steakhouse bar. I made friends everywhere I went and genuinely made other people’s days with my open conversation with them.

I was thanked daily by my customers in my shop who looked forward to coming back to hang in the waiting area with me next time their cars needed work. I worked out at a gym everyday with loads of energy where I was greeted by the other usuals and would see the men looking across the room smiling at me and other women giving me thumbs up and sometimes asking what my routine was. I was someone and I was seen and my presence was appreciated and I made a difference in the lives of many each day.

Now nearly a decade later, I’m a wife and stay at home homeschooling mom and I don’t recognize myself inside or out. My lakefront cottage is gone, my business is long gone, my time is not mine, my space is not mine, my personality is gone, my creativity and energy is gone… My freedom is gone.

Cohabitation with not one but two more people (my husband AND 8 year old child) has sucked my soul dry of anything I had or was. Even when my husband is helpful and attentive and assuming a grand portion of the household upkeep and the parenting, I still feel completely drained. I blamed myself for YEARS for not finding fulfillment in my mom-wife life, telling myself to stop complaining and just get it together… But after 2 months (max) of ‘getting it together’ with working out, healthy meals planned and executed for everyone, healthy grocery lists, an executed daily-cleaning list, my real estate work tended to, ample ‘meditation’ time to handle everything better, an entrepreneurship-based schooling curriculum executed without pushback… I’d eventually crash again and wallow in to nothingness again. The truth absolutely is that this system of living that we have all be shown as being ‘the way’ IS a prison that we’ve just been gaslit enough to step in to and not be allowed to speak up for how we notice the cage and the bars.

I think back to my own childhood and how my mother was mostly a stay at home mom (she also worked at times as well though) and I saw her break down in an over-worked/burnt-out state. I wonder now if she realized that she was raising her kids to do and become the exact same thing: over-functioning parents who work for some wealthier person’s mission (a job) and teach their kids to follow the same path in the same systems that will too, enslave them by stealing all of their time, money, space, and energy. I often wonder if my mother knew that what she was working so hard for with her kids would result in them losing themselves to the very same systems that she sacrificed her entire self to as well, would she have changed course? Pulled us from the schools that were us teaching us how to work for someone else’s mission to ‘get good jobs’? Taught us never to move in with someone else or never move someone else in to our precious space? Would she have at least tried to warn us??

I am waking up to this realization that every blueprint for ‘how to live life’ that I walked in to without questioning was never made for our success as people, it was made for the success of my country-men’s wealth and power, specifically for those at the tippy top. I look around and see both men and women having sacrificed themselves to fit within these systems without ever questioning that maybe it is the system itself that is the failure; not themselves, not their spouse, not their kids for not focusing ‘enough’ or complying enough… Maybe we don’t need their medications to fit within their systems because the systems should be built around US in the first place, not the other way around. It’s that we’ve all traded our freedom for the perceived-safety that the marriage blueprint provides, and the parenting-blueprint, and the home-buying blueprint, and the education-blueprint, and the debt-incurring blueprint, and the job-blueprint, and they’ve made it so there is red-tape guiding us away from ever seeing any other option.

Every system we’ve been blindly ushered into was created for the power and wealth-building of those we’ll never even know or see. Our free-labor as women has been sold to us the ultimate life-dream that we’ll regret missing out on and that every large corporation will thanklessly benefit from as we bear the children that will inevitably be raised up to become indebted to their corporations in some form via debt or working-servitude. I recognize now this is not a problem with me, with my husband, with my child, or anyone else who is just playing their part in this system’s blueprint… It IS the system itself that IS the sole problem and women have been the tool to keeping it alive with each marriage and with each child they bear and raise in to the system.

In conclusion, being a mom and wife living in the same home and available to others 24/7 like an unpaid maid/chef/chauffeur/therapist/etc all for the cause of building the wealth of those at the very top with our lives of school loans, mortgages, corporate jobs, car payments, etc while raising up children to presumably become another pawn within these systems is deadening… But I am awake now and want to open the eyes of as many other women who will listen.

“It takes a lot of effort not to be free”