Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. It is also the day home schooled children go back to school, which perhaps makes it National Mother’s Day - a week ahead of the real official thing. 

And boy do we deserve two this year. 

It is ALSO exactly a year to the week since we first went into lockdown. And I think all mothers, and all women, are coming out at this end very different to how they went in. 

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘Choose to Challenge’ inequality. And it’s either super important or super ironic that the last year has shown us how un-challenged gender inequality really is, when everything else is stripped away - and how big a challenge we are still facing. 

This pandemic has hit women far harder than men, mothers harder than that, single mothers harder than THAT, and poor and black or ethnic minority mothers hardest of all. 

Like many other people I want to join in the end of home school celebrations, the bottoms up, we made it, things are only going to get better, wa-hoo party-time club.

But I can’t. 

Because I’m really, really broken. 

There are too many cracks to hold the hope in. It spills away like water. 

Let’s look at some stats, because this is the internet, and you can’t make a statement like ‘Covid hit women hard’ without evidence - particularly if you ARE a woman, because your opinion is automatically offensive and needs seeing to (What about an International MENS Day?), all of which also needs challenging, but that’s another blog. 

Some examples: 

* Women are one and a half times more likely to have lost their jobs than men because of Covid - Institute for Fiscal Studies
* Women took on 78% more childcare than men during the first lockdown - ONS
* 79% of homeschooling fell to women - Mumsnet
* 18% of women reduced their hours, 7% took unpaid leave - TUC
* Calls to domestic abuse helpline went up 66%, visits to the website 950% - Refuge.

Look - you get the picture. 

When the chips were down, when the brown stuff got really REALLY real, women stepped back down from the progress of the last 30-60 years to become the 1950s housewives they never thought they had anything in common with, caring for children, caring for elderly relatives, cooking, cleaning, and mental-loading. 

Oh, AND working (when we still could) AND schooling.

And some did (and are doing) all that trapped in a few square metres with abusive partners. 

And we were set up to fail - fail at all of it - over and over again, on repeat, for a year, because having it all is impossible, and doing it all is impossible, and multi-tasking isn’t actually a thing - just more tropes to trap us and boxes to define us and what success for women should look like - and we were told to only do our best but to do everything at once and we drowned in expectations, and contradictions, and overwhelm, and fear and GUILT.

And it ain’t over yet. 

Now we will be picking up the fallout of reinforcing routine, back to school anxiety and fatigue, post-school restrain collapse, interrupted friendships and rusty social skills, the education gap, the next period of isolation/lockdown personal, local or national, all while picking up the tatters of our jobs and our own lives, and all while doing so much more. There is always more.

And there is still no rest or recuperation or restorative, no village, no back-up, no real-life connections to anchor us. I know it’s around the corner, I know other people are planning and booking and hailing normality, but I can’t see that far. 

The cracks blur my vision. 

The impact of the last year (plus) on women’s collective vision, on our mental health, our careers, our relationships with our children, with our partners, our confidence, our understanding of ourselves and our parenting will last a long, long, long time. 

And I don’t have the energy to choose to challenge any of that, right now. 

I’m not even sure I have the tools or wherewithal to start shoring up my own cracks, let alone those baked into the system. 

The good news is that I’ve been broken before, so one day I know the cracks WILL cover over, will fade to scars, and then fade again to a few extra wrinkles, probably on my brow, where my trauma collects.

One day I will be able to see beyond them. 

One day I might even think they are beautiful. 

But right now they are raw, open wounds, and tomorrow I will retreat to lick them. 

And I will celebrate International Women’s Day (and National Mother's Day) by glorying in just doing one thing at a time only, fully, properly, and well. 

Even if it is only drinking a cup of tea. 

Which is about the only challenge I feel like I can really get behind. 

xxx