The Unfiltered · Monday · No. 3
I know a woman.
She wakes up before anyone else. Makes breakfast. Gets two kids ready, gets them out the door, gets herself to work, does the work, comes home, makes dinner, does bedtime, does the dishes, and then — when the house is finally quiet and nobody needs anything from her for five fucking minutes — I don’t know what she does. Cries, maybe. Or just sits there in the silence and breathes. Or maybe she’s already asleep because there’s no energy left for anything else.
I don’t see that part. Nobody does.
What I see is the smile. Every time. The genuine, warm, how-are-you smile that makes you feel like you matter. And I know — I know — what that smile costs. I know there’s a mountain behind it. I know she’s fighting battles nobody knows the name of, carrying weight that would buckle most people I know, grinding through a life that would make a lot of men curl into a ball and call it a crisis.
And she smiles.
Then there’s him.
I’m not going to say much. He doesn’t deserve much.
What I’ll say is this: if you are sitting next to a woman like that — if you are waking up next to someone who carries that much, who gives that much, who is that much — and you are not doing everything in your power to be worthy of it, you are not a man.
I don’t know what you are. But you’re not a man.
And I want to be very clear that I’m not saying this to be poetic or provocative. I’m saying it because I watched it. I watched someone extraordinary hold everything together while the person who was supposed to stand next to her stood there like a spectator. Like a fucking guest in his own life. Like the whole thing was happening to him and not because of her.
It made me angry in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
There’s this myth about male strength.
The myth says men are the strong ones. Men carry things. Men hold it together. Men are built for hardship.
And then I look around and I see women carrying things that would destroy men. Not physical things — though also physical things. I mean the other stuff. The invisible, daily, never-ending stuff. The mental load of a household. The emotional labour of keeping everyone okay. The financial stress that doesn’t go away. The mothering and the working and the bill-paying and the future-planning and the holding it together for the kids even when she’s not okay, even when she’s exhausted down to the bone, even when there is nobody holding her together.
While some of the men around her complain about being tired.
While some of the men around her need to be thanked for doing the dishes once.
While some of the men around her mistake a quiet house for peace they created rather than peace she’s sustaining through sheer fucking will.
Some women are forced to be more of a man than most men will ever be.
That’s not a compliment. I want to be completely clear about that. It’s not a compliment. It’s an indictment. It’s an indictment of every man who decided that showing up halfway was enough. Who let someone else carry more than their share. Who benefited from a woman’s strength without ever once acknowledging the cost of it.
Watching her for one ordinary Tuesday in her life made me ashamed.
Not in the wallowing, self-pitying way. In the quiet way. In the way where you look at someone and think: I would have complained. I would have said it was too much. I would have found an exit.
She just keeps going.
No drama. No waiting for someone to notice. No speech about how hard it is. She just goes because there are two kids who need her to go, and because falling apart is not on the schedule, and because — I think — she’s decided somewhere deep down that she is the only person she can count on to hold the line.
And so she holds it.
Every. Single. Day.
The Stoics wrote about equanimity. About facing difficulty without flinching. About doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel about it.
They wrote entire books about this. Long books. Books people study for years.
She just lives it. Without the books, without the philosophy, without anyone calling it virtue. She lives it because she has to. Because the alternative is everything falls apart and she loves those kids too much to let that happen.
Marcus Aurelius had an empire. He also had advisors, physicians, an army, resources beyond imagination.
She has herself.
I know who I think is tougher.
I’m not writing this to celebrate her. She doesn’t need my applause and she’s not asking for it.
I’m writing this because watching one unremarkable Tuesday in her life put something in me that I had to get out. Because I saw what happens when a woman can’t just be a woman — when she has to be everything, all at once, with no backup and no acknowledgment and no end in sight.
And because I know she’s not alone. I know this is a thousand women. Ten thousand. I know that smile is a million smiles worn by people who are exhausted behind them.
And because the man reading this who recognises himself in the other part of this story — the one who isn’t carrying his weight, who isn’t seeing what’s in front of him, who has somehow decided that existing in proximity to a strong woman is the same as being a strong man —
I see you.
And you need to do better.
We all do.
The Unfiltered runs every Monday — raw prose, no lessons, no answers. Just what’s true that week.
