Every feed carries this story. Revenue is up, the children are learning Mandarin, the husband is content, and she is out running at six and looks better than she did ten years ago. The caption explains that it all comes down to discipline and the right priorities.
Millions of women read that and draw a conclusion about themselves: I am not trying hard enough. Then they add one more item to the list.
The invoice for that list arrives late, and that is the whole difficulty. For the first ten or fifteen years the scheme works. Then, closer to forty, it starts coming apart, and from several directions at once: the body, the relationships, the relationship with herself. It looks like coincidence. It is not. Why the package costs what it costs is explained by Peruquois, a leading World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, and the author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women, who has worked with women worldwide for decades.
She is sharp about the ideal itself: “That is why I do not believe in this idea of super women. I think it is a deception. I think it is an illusion in which the women of our time are dying.”
What the package is paid with
She explains the mechanism through one quality that matters to a woman more than the rest.
For years the energy of a successful woman is pointed at achievement. At drive, at the next level, at the result. What gets suppressed in the process is the sensitivity of the body, because sensitivity is inconvenient: it slows things down, asks awkward questions and demands pauses the calendar does not have.
And then comes what she describes in very physical terms: “when a woman's body dries out, the sensitivity, it is as though the flow of love dries out.” The drying is not a metaphor. First the taste for food goes, for touch, for music. Then desire goes. Then it becomes unclear why any of this is being done at all, because the pleasure of a result also travels through the channel of sensitivity, and the channel is shut.
Hence the collapse on three levels at once. The body stops recovering, the relationships run on logistics, and a flat, steady irritation with herself moves in.
One fuel for every task
What is set up wrong is not the volume of tasks. What is set up wrong is the assumption that all of those tasks run on the same fuel.
A career, a home and children require different fuels. Some of it lives on will and structure, some on softness and presence, and switching between them in the fifteen seconds of an elevator ride is not possible. A woman who tries to run the whole day in one mode does not understand, by evening, why her child said “Mom, you are not listening to me,” when she was physically right there.
Peruquois is honest that combining them can be done: “Women can absolutely balance a career and children and a husband. But it is very difficult. Very difficult. And you have to admit that to yourself.”
That admission is the first working step. Not abandoning ambition, but a clear look at the price you are paying, and a decision about where to bring that price down.
Where the real line runs
The line does not run between work and home. It runs between what is done in love and what is done through gritted teeth.
A woman who runs her own business and loves it can work long hours and come out of it alive. A woman who has held a title for fifteen years out of fear burns out on half the load. What matters is the manner in which the hours were lived.
There is a very practical piece here that Peruquois raises separately. A big city accelerates you by itself: it pushes you around the clock to achieve and not to stop. Against that background a woman needs more awareness to set her own parameters, including the simplest ones, such as the hour she goes to bed, because late nights hit the nervous and hormonal systems faster than anything else.
What stays, and what the price buys
The load does not have to shrink for the outcome to change. A woman whose sensitivity is intact carries the same weight and ends the day with a different remainder. Her decisions are better, because a calm body sees more options. She wastes fewer movements, because she notices earlier where the strength is running out for nothing. And her children get a living mother rather than a well organized one.
If you have lived in that mode for a long time and want to stay in your work without losing yourself, Peruquois has a course called Your Solar System. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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