Women are F***ing Exhausted

Have you seen the episode of The Simpsons where Marge gets arrested on purpose? A month-long vacation where someone else cooks, cleans, manages the schedule. Most days I think it’s crazy, but sometimes I sit at home on a Sunday evening listening to my children fight over what TV show to watch because I am so over coming up with activities for them and yelling at me to referee and I understand wanting to live in something other than pure chaos. 

I’m Colette, CEO of HeySunday and single mom to two toddler boys. I wanted to start a business that I could run out of my garage, but with over 500,000 orders placed in 2024, this company has grown bigger than I could ever have dreamed. You have given so much to me, and now I’m here to give back to you. We’re going to talk about the reality of mom life—the grueling, demanding, boring, lonely and tedious moments of running a household. We’re a company run by moms and we’re here to normalize that it’s ok to be fucking exhausted. Let’s talk about it. 

For me, this started during COVID (OK, maybe that’s because my first son was born right before we started quarantine). But I’m not alone in this: COVID-19 hit women especially hard. The Washington Post even warned that the “coronavirus child-care crisis will set women back a generation,” noting that one in four women who lost their jobs during the pandemic did so because they couldn’t find child care—twice as many as men.

Even before the pandemic, the housework and child care load still fell mostly on moms. How much are you doing in your house? The majority of women felt like they’re doing more than their fair share at home. Meanwhile, only 22% of men felt they carry the burden, and 32% admit they probably don’t help as much as they could (I also don’t think it counts as “doing” a chore if a man asks his wife where the all-purpose cleaner is when he’s trying to clean the countertop).

I had this image of parenting where we would be a happy family coming home to dinner together and talking about what the kids learned in school. But in my fantasy, the chores were just magically completed. In reality, someone has to plan and shop and cook and convince kids to eat literally anything besides plain pasta and apple slices and then also clean up after dinner while they’re crying about how they want to watch YouTube videos of other kids drawing.

And as it turns out, this work falls on the women and the moms of the house. This imbalance, often called the “second shift,” speaks to that all-too-familiar experience of working a full day only to come home and dive right back into another round of responsibilities—dinner, dishes, laundry, trying to be excited about reading the same book for bedtime 36 days in a row. 

Just getting through the day is hard—how am I supposed to have time for self-care or my own goals? My main goal is making it through the weekend with no doctor visits and everyone getting to their soccer games on time.

Modern Women Still Face Traditional Burdens

When my mom was 11, my grandmother went to college and started working as an ER nurse. At the time, 48% of people believed that “a man’s job is to earn money and a woman’s job is to look after the home.” My grandmother might have been the exception to this rule, but her job was still to run the household. The expectation in the 60s was that women ran the home and family.

It’s 60 years later, and I don’t know that this expectation has changed. Let’s be real—if we were good at dividing up household labor between different people, things like the Fair Play game wouldn’t exist (if you haven’t seen this yet, stop reading my article and go to the site now). I just want to be done with work and hang out with my kids because I miss them all day. But I have a list of things that need to get done and I can’t walk by the same dishes in the kitchen sink another time.

Did you know that the US Department of Labor tried to change this in the 80s? It’s better for households to have women working, and the government sponsored employer childcare programs in the office and mentorship programs for women. Are there any companies now that offer free childcare for their employees? My accountant told me I can’t even use money from my business to pay for childcare; it has to be a post tax expense. Where is the help for women that was promised to us?

A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that almost half of women in opposite-sex marriages now earn as much as, or even more than, their husbands—a big shift since my grandmother started working. About 16% of wives are the main breadwinners, and another 29% earn roughly the same as their husbands. That’s almost half of all couples where women are contributing financially. So why is the “second shift” very real?

Women are spending an average of 3.5 hours a day on household tasks. Let’s do the math here. You’re going to work at 8am, you finish at 5pm and then you come home to actually be “done” at 830pm. This is before you’re spending time with your husband (please don’t touch me until I’ve doom scrolled on TikTok for 25+ minutes), catching up with your friends and sleeping. Wait, are you sleeping?

32% of Women Report Not Feeling Well-Rested

I tell myself every night that if I go to bed at 8:30pm with my kids, I can be asleep at 9pm and wake up with them at 6am getting so much sleep and feeling perfect and fresh to start a brand new day.

But in real life, my kid comes into my room at 1:30am telling me he had a nightmare and wants to sleep with me and then I’m awake so I start writing articles about how tired I am (he’s laughing in his sleep right now. I might be exhausted, but there are so many moments that make it all worth it).

I used to work for Microsoft, and we joked that the meditation room was the nap room. I didn’t get it at the time because I was 25 and thought maybe we’d all just stayed up a little too late last night and only had 8 hours of sleep instead of our usual 10. But now I don’t think this is a joke; I actually think offices should have nap pods. If I have a 30 minute break in the middle of the day, I don’t know if lunch or a nap is going to be better for me.

I’ll be the first to admit it: sleep is usually my first sacrifice. If something needs to get done or the kids are having a rough night, missing an hour or two feels manageable—until it doesn’t. 

A survey by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine confirmed that women are 50% more likely than men to rarely or never wake up feeling refreshed. An eye-opening 32% of women report not feeling well-rested compared to 21% of men, and the effects of sleepiness spill over into daily activities for 81% of women. When is our sleep vacation?

“There’s an incredible amount of pressure that some women feel—the need to work, manage a household, and raise children all with a smile. Sometimes, we need to put away our superhero capes,” explains Dr. Seema Khosla, medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep. 

But how can we actually start feeling rested? It’s not easy to just turn off all the responsibilities unless that 75/25 balance between partners starts actually shifting to a 50/50 fair.

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Conclusion / The Price of "Doing It All"

Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City asked if women can ever really have it all. I’m not going to stop until I do—and you do, too. We can work and have time to play and grow and learn and raise children who are emotionally secure.

I want to find ways to help women and lighten the mental load that you and I feel. So I put together a team of people who are going to figure out how to help us. For me and my company HeySunday, this starts with laundry and cleaning. 

It’s time we all start finding ways to lighten the mental load—both in the laundry room and in our everyday lives. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that we deserve a little more space to breathe, relax, and just be moms and amazing women alike. HeySunday has made my dreams come true—let me give you time to discover and manifest your dreams, too.