Walking too many dogs at the same time

Or how midlife women are always doing too much and feeling overwhelmed

I’ve been mulling over why so many women my age are feeling overwhelmed. This isn't just stuff I’m making up. It’s real.

It’s actually goddamn real I tell you.

It’s based on the 200 messages or more that I received when I asked if women my age were feeling overwhelmed (this was in relation to work but many of the messages were about life in general).

We’re commonly known as the ‘sandwich’ generation because as we get into our forties and fifties, we are often the ones looking after children, and elderly parents. Also holding down jobs and doing the majority of the domestic chores. We are on the PSA at school. We are baking cakes and arranging birthdays, and buying presents for children every weekend because there are so many birthdays that you have to keep a drawer with just presents for parties in it.

We’ve been brought up with a hard work ethic (like all eighties kids), but also an underlying spirit of rebellion. Watching Nirvana on MTV. The rebellious and the commercial mingled into one channel. We wanted to work hard but were also torn because we wanted to be creative like Kurt Cobain. Many of us abandoned creativity to make money as that was the only way to survive.

On a personal level I was obsessed with wealth as a child, and watched Dallas and Dynasty obsessively. I believed that a lifestyle where I lived on a ranch with my own paddock of horses and big, solid hair was attainable. I just had to do as much as I could at all times. I had to be ruthless but also say yes whenever anyone needed help of any kind.

I was thinking today about how the midlife stage of life is a bit like walking multiple dogs. There is too much but always the drive to take on more.

Stick with this analogy for a moment.

Imagine you have a dog. This dog is small, likeable but isn’t toilet trained and you have to stop every few minutes to encourage it to pee. This is okay because you can focus on the dog, and you can also look around at the world, notice the trees and the fact that the clouds have that weird swirling thing going on that makes them look like a tie-dye scarf.

‘I am doing this. Well done me,’ you say to yourself.

So you get a second dog. The second dog is what is expected. You have it foisted upon you and you realise you need two dogs to be taken seriously these days. This dog is bigger than the small one. It’s mean. It likes to nip small children as you walk past so you can’t stop walking. You have to keep going whilst also instructing the small dog where to pee. You can’t take any phone calls when you’re with the new dog because it’s likely to nip some kid. You can’t see the tie-dye sky anymore. You start to feel a little overwhelmed.

‘This is okay,’ you say, ‘I can manage this. Two dogs. I kind of wish I maybe hadn’t got the second one. But I need to do this. In fact the woman over there is doing fine! Come on! Grow a pair!’

You now have a third dog. You struggle to remember how you got this dog because the big, mean one is keeping you up all night, and so you are sleep deprived, can’t take phone calls when you’re walking, and are aware that you have 3000 unanswered emails because the non-toilet-trained-dog has been peeing all over the house, and you have to do a deep clean every morning. This means you’ve had to prioritise that dog for now. You stop seeing friends. You ask a teacher at your kids school if she can give you a pint of milk and she looks at you strangely.

The third dog is odd. It kind of walks and then does this thing where it keels over and sleeps. Like it’s in a coma. So you have to kind of drag this dog along. It also has bad breath, and the stench seeps into every material in the house, and so as well as the deep cleaning you also have to burn candles. The third dog is worrying as you think it has a serious illness. You spend a lot of time trying to Google what is wrong with it but come up with no answers.

When you walk these three dogs, people in the street shout out to you.

‘Hey how are you?’ they shout.

‘GREAT!’ you reply.

But you aren’t great.

Still it seems like these other women, these women you see on social media, also at the school gates, all have more dogs. There are always more dogs to take care of. So you say yes to a fourth despite the fact that you rarely sleep nowadays, and spend your life cleaning, lighting candles, walking these dogs and buying them food. It feels like your life has turned into a treadmill of doing stuff for others.

Luckily this dog, number 4, is not weird, is fully toilet trained, not mean and so you feel like you’ve won the lottery. Until you realise it can’t walk. It has to be carried in a very specific way under one arm. You find walking the dogs really challenging with this new dog, because you have one that needs to be encouraged to pee in the right place, one where you have to avoid kids and can’t answer the phone, one that keels over and just dies where it stands, and then this one who is only happy if it’s under the crook of your arm. You develop a hunch. You get stomach cramps. You see a few stats about ‘burn out’ but what does that actually mean?

You have 8000 emails. You know that some of them include important messages about the dogs. If you see one dog related message on WhatsApp you burst into tears. There are dark circles under your eyes. You can’t remember what life was like when you were young. So much of your life is looking after others.

Did Kurt Cobain have all these dogs? Did the big-haired lady from Dallas?

Other women are not surprised when you tell them how tired you are.

‘You have too many,’ they say, ‘I made the exact same mistake and I don’t know what to do.’

‘Could I put them all down?’ you ask in weak voice that you hardly recognise as your own.

‘No you’ll have to keep going until they all die and then maybe you can go back to one or two dogs. Only lazy women don’t have four dogs.’

So you pick the one up in the crook of your arm, it’s tongue pushes out the side of its mouth, and it sort of grunts but you have to keep it alive. The mean one needs a muzzle, the non-toilet trained one pees on the bush before you leave, and the half-dead one you drag along the pavement. Your phone buzzes with unanswered messages. You hunch over the grunting dog.

‘Who will take care of me?’ you whisper into its ear.

It grunts and you feel the warmth of its fur under your arm. It’s a small consolation at least.