The Costume Change
My son likes it when I wear a dress. He tells it to me, matter-of-fact the way little kids do, when he just wants me to wear a pretty dress, or other times, when he delivers one of his more devastating lines, like the fact that women in dresses don't yell. I think he's noticed a pattern and reported it back to me like a small scientist, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
He's not wrong about what he's seeing. His mind sees a woman in a dress who is soft, who sings the made-up songs like women in the fairy tales and books, who has all the patience in the world for a slow morning. There is a different version of me that shows up to a jobsite and has to be direct, has to push a schedule through, has to be the person in the room people look to for answers. There is a version that wants to feel bossy in the good way, the way that gets a budget approved or a deadline met. And there is a version, somewhere underneath all of it, that just wants to feel wanted, feel soft, feel like a woman and not only a manager of other people's needs.
Nobody warns you that these aren't outfits you can just change like clothes. A costume change in a play takes thirty seconds backstage. A costume change in a life takes something closer to what an actor actually goes through to get into character, except there's no backstage, no fifteen minutes alone to become the next version of yourself. You're expected to walk off a work call straight into snack time and arrive fully soft, fully present, fully singsongy, in the time it takes to close a laptop.
What actually has to shift
It isn't really the clothes. I could change into the dress in ten seconds and still walk around for another hour with the tone, the posture, the internal tempo of the person who was just pushing a deadline through. The costume is the easy part. What has to shift is something less visible, the register your voice runs at, the pace your thoughts move, whether you're scanning for problems or just letting a moment be a moment. That doesn't happen because you changed clothes. It happens because you gave yourself a minute to actually let it happen, and most days, there isn't a minute to give.
I think that's part of why the protected hour and forty minutes on Saturday mornings has become so important to me. It's not just time to think or plan or build. It's time where I'm not required to be any specific version of myself at all. I'm not managing a jobsite and I'm not managing snack time. I get to just be whoever shows up when nobody needs anything from me yet. I've started to notice that the softness with my boys comes easier on the afternoons after I've had that morning, because some part of me got to fully exhale first, instead of trying to exhale and inhale a new identity in the same breath.
The old idea about being too poor for love
I caught a piece of an old movie once, from the fifties, where a woman says she couldn't afford to fall in love because she was poor. At the time it struck me as a strange, almost cruel thing for a movie to say. Now I think it might be one of the truest things I've heard about exhaustion, just aimed at the wrong kind of poverty.
Because I don't think love actually requires money. But it does require something that runs out just as fast, which is spare capacity. It takes time to daydream. It takes energy to feel sexy instead of just presentable. It takes a body that isn't running on fumes to feel soft and unrushed instead of just upright. It takes enough sleep, and enough food eaten on purpose instead of standing at the counter, and enough of a workout that your body still feels like yours, before any of that softness has anywhere to land. A woman who is mentally and physically spent isn't unloving. She's out of the raw material love is made from, the same way that woman in the movie wasn't cold, she was broke.
I think most of us are running some version of that poverty now, not the money kind, the time and attention kind. You can be gainfully employed, married to someone who loves you, raising kids you'd die for, and still be too depleted most days to feel like a woman instead of a function. That's the poverty nobody wrote a movie about. It doesn't look like hardship from the outside. It just looks like being tired all the time, which is easy to wave off since everyone claims to be tired, until you notice how much of yourself has quietly gone missing underneath it.
Wanting to feel like more than one thing
I want to be careful here, because I don't think the answer is choosing one identity and calling it the real one. I don't want to only be the graceful woman in the dress, and I don't want to only be the bossy one closing out a punch list, and I don't want to only be the soft, singsongy mother, and I don't want to give up wanting to feel wanted either. I want all of them. I think most women do, whether or not they'd put it in those words. The exhausting part was never having more than one identity. People have always had more than one identity. The exhausting part is being expected to switch between them instantly, with no room built in for the switch itself.
So some of what I've started doing isn't really about the schedule, it's about giving the switch somewhere to happen. A few minutes in the car before I walk in the door. Actually changing clothes instead of staying in yesterday's uniform out of laziness, because it turns out the physical act does help cue the rest of it, even if it isn't sufficient on its own. Not scheduling anything in the fifteen minutes right after a hard work call. Small seams, sewn in on purpose, between the different women I'm being asked to be in the same day.
What I'd tell myself five years ago
I'd tell her that wanting to feel sexy and wanting to feel competent and wanting to feel like a soft, singsongy mother are not three competing demands to ration between. They're three real parts of one person, and the reason it feels impossible some days isn't that she's asking for too much. It's that nobody built in the time for the costume change, and she was trying to do it anyway, out of sheer will, because that's what the day required.
I'd tell her the will is going to hold for a long time, because it always has. But it holds better, and costs less, once you stop expecting yourself to teleport between identities and start giving each one an actual doorway to walk through. My son noticed that women in dresses don't yell. What he doesn't know yet, and what I'm only starting to really believe, is that the woman in the dress and the woman running the jobsite are both allowed to be exactly who they are, as long as somebody, even if it's only her, gives her a minute to actually become the next one.