The Strong Woman Trap
The
Strong
Woman
Trap
A Feminist Guide for Getting Your Life Back
By Sasha Mobley
NEW YORK
NASHVILLE MELBOURNE VANCOUVER
The Strong Woman Trap
A Feminist Guide for Getting Your Life Back
2018 Sasha Mobley
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing in partnership with Difference Press. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC.
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ISBN 9781683503354 paperback
ISBN 9781683503361 eBook
Library of Congress Control Number:
2016918458
Cover Design by:
John Matthews
Interior Design by:
Chris Treccani
www.3dogdesign.net
Editing:
Kate Makled & Angela Lauria
Author Photo:
Courtesy of the author, Sasha Mobley.
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DEDICATION
For Mary Dunseath who told me that someday isnt a day of the week.
Introduction
Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
Carol Shields
I wrote this book because it was the book I needed to read when I was going through one of the greatest crises of my life.
I also wrote it because I kept hearing women women who I find really powerful and impressive tell me how they feel a little frazzled, a little frayed, a little tired all the time. I also hear in their stories how alone they feel and that the most precious dreams they have always seem just out of reach. They follow this wistfulness up with a confident statement about how once they get a handle on the great burden of their responsibilities, they will finally be able to have their lives back. Over months and years, the cycle repeats with different players and duties, but their dreams keep getting deferred. Nothing changes.
A little longer and a lot longer are the same if you keep pushing your own priorities out. This is how dreams die. I want to put an end to this carnage of dreams. Im doing this by telling my own stories and investigating in depth how strong, capable women keep getting stuck under the burden of their own beliefs. Mostly I wanted to share how to get out of the traps we willingly enter and to start living the lives we dream of.
Im intimately familiar with these traps.
I was raised to be strong. I also was taught that to get anywhere in the world I would have to prove I was not only just as strong as but stronger and more able than those around me. I performed my feats of strength and waited for the world to notice.
When the world didnt notice, I did more.
The people who did notice filled the space separating us with their wants and needs. I added it all to the burden carried proudly on my back.
At first, I didnt notice but I was starting to bow under my burdens weight. The things I lovedwriting and artwere replaced outright with a never-ending stream of responsibilities. I started to convince even myself that my life was really about being there for others and that my purpose was being fulfilled in this way.
But if that was the case, why did I feel so angry all the time?
When I started sharing my ideas for this book with other women, I got so many looks of recognition that I knew I was onto something. This was not just me; it was a cultural phenomenon that needed fuller exploration and then careful, compassionate expression.
For over 100 years, women have been on a path of proving our equality to men and demanding our rights. The power we demonstrate when we come together made our culture rush to declare our equality but not necessarily to enable it. The result is individual women trying to squeeze their way past a glass ceiling, leaving the women left behind to fight their way through.
Its stunning how individual women are still trying to prove their strength as if that was an exceptional quality. I think we are still shocked to discover how strong we are!
What if we didnt have to prove anything? Where could we go then?
Part One
Strong Woman, Trapped
Chapter 1
When Everything Depends On You
I want to tell you a story of something that happened to me when I was still in my 20s. I lived in one of those apartment buildings that have all the front doors facing outsidethink of a Motel 6. There was a flight of stairs to take you to each floor, a corridor out to the carport (no closed garages), and a tiny elevator you could use if you needed to carry something big and heavy.
Well, this was before cell phones, so when I did the grocery shopping I couldnt simply call upstairs to get my partner to help me with the bags. Usually, I had a moderate load of four or five bags of groceries so I would loop them over my arms and just book it up the stairs. One trip for efficiency, plus I got the tiny workout of hitting the stairs with all those bags.
I did this for years, and on good days Id feel like I climbed Everest. On bad daysdays when I was tired or had a bad day at workId be all pissed off for having to do the shopping. Plus, where was my partner to help me with all these stupid grocery bags?
Id come stomping into the apartment with a little anger cloud over my head. Then Id drop the bags loudly and put the groceries away silently, my passive aggressive protest for not getting any help with the bags.
One day I was returning from one of these trips, and it was raining pretty hard. I had my bags looped over my arms as usual, but just the trip to the stairs from the carport was enough to get meand everything I was carryingwet. A tiny tear started to develop in one of the bags.
I glanced at the little elevator, but for some reason I started going up the stairs anyway at a faster than normal pace. I could tell the bag with the tear was about to come apart. I put it higher on my hip and jerked my other bags closer. But just as I started to get my arms around those, the torn bag came apart entirely and a cascade of jars and cans fell the entire two stories down. I watched the jar of spaghetti sauce explode in slow motion. Everything else scattered across the pavement, rolling into the wall and in front of the landladys doorway.
As I cleaned up my mess, I swore under my breath and tried not to make eye contact with the people who walked bymy neighbors.
I was thinking Idiots! Cant they see I need help? Clearly I have to do everything myself!
Not my finest moment. Not a tragedy. Nothing was hurt but my pride. That said, looking back, the stewing resentment and near-blind rage of that moment really said something about how I viewed my place in the world.
