Feeling Overwhelmed By Responsibilities? Join The Club

Here’s what sucks about being a working mother: the constant guilt and the pressure of meeting deadlines and pulling your weight while still making it home in time for dinner. Here’s what sucks about being a stay-at-home mother: the constant guilt  and the pressure of tending to your kids 24/7 while figuring out what to serve for dinner. So, yeah, Mommy Wars my ass all moms have some form of stress and neuroses, not to mention a giant to-do list that never seems to go away.

A new study confirms our quest for balance (or at least a bit of ‘me’ time). A majority of both working and stay-at-home moms feel overwhelmed by responsibilities, according to a survey by ForbesWoman.com and TheBump.com. The sites polled more than 1200 mothers and found that 92 percent of working moms and 89 percent of stay-at-home moms feel overwhelmed by work, home and parenting responsibilities. Meanwhile, a whopping 97 percent of stay-at-home moms say they need at least an occasional time-out from parenting (you think?!). But 84 percent of them don’t get a break from parenting after their partner walks in the door at the end of the day (now that‘s a fail).

The numbers confirm what most of us already know: moms are a busy bunch. And no matter what the set-up, being a parent comes with loads of responsibility that often falls on our shoulders. In fact, these startling figures make me think of Rebecca Asher’s book, Shattered: Modern Motherhood And The Illusion Of Equality, and her claim that women today are still bearing primary responsibility for bringing up their children to the detriment of everything else in their lives. According to the survey, moms overall say they feel resentful toward their partner because of the unbalanced load of household and parenting responsibilities (70 percent of working moms and 68% of stay-at home moms).

When it comes to disciplining the children, however, more than a quarter of moms surveyed say that they and their partner split the role evenly. That’s at least some good news. But, overall, we need to be asking for more help. And, while we’re at it, we should stop trying to be supermom.

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