It’s too many things to do.

Your co-worker with the organized office and well-run spreadsheet, your neighbor with the perfect yard and well landscaped curb-appeal, your close friend who looks refreshed with plump skin every day.

It’s not possible to run a business, a classroom, a project, a legal practice, travel for work, or keep your boss/clients/patients happy (or mostly happy), while also maintaining the calendar, folders, schedules, backpacks, lunchboxes and comings and goings of an entire household.

And then keep up the laundry, yard, pets, trash, bathroom sink and remember to buy toilet paper as you attempt to meal plan for a busy family with practices, games, obligations and demands in the evenings.

Meanwhile, don’t forget you need to wear the perfect outfit to Saturday’s soccer game and then transition to the little league pizza party before looking hot for “date night.”  Maybe watch a make-up tutorial or attempt to keep up with the latest eye-brow trend (which by the way is ever changing so again – impossible).

It’s not just imperative you work out and keep up on the latest spin class, Pilates, or Peloton trend – you need to do so in $150 leggings with a $90 sports bra and spray tan.

Be sure to read the latest article your good friend posted on Instagram about “self-care,” so go ahead and book that $100 massage you can’t afford and don’t have time for to pretend you aren’t dying inside.

And we’re all anxious, depressed, self-medicating and lonely.

I often think of my grandmother who was a farm wife.  She was in charge of a chicken coop, but she did not have a smart phone attached to her telling her the chicken coop needed to look perfectly charming – along with her pricey, sexy, trendy farm wife outfit and highlighted hair.  My mother never had perfectly manicured fingernails, toenails and $300 regular hair maintenance.  She never felt pressured to get Botox, nor was bombarded by Pinterest outfits.  She passed away in 2009, so before social media and when cell phones were still flip phones and not yet “smart.”  I remember once sitting in the office in her small rented ranch style house on her desktop computer showing her myspace.com while she poured her Miller Lite canned beer into a glass.  We laughed and laughed and looked up everyone we could think of, but she never had to live in a world – or try to work and mother in a world – with the constant onslaught of comparisons, expectations and demands that we face now.  Which would horrify her, because let me tell you, as a single working mom to four in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, she worked so hard.

Playing into the insecurities of women as a marketing ploy is not new, but it seems it has taken over our lives.  People in suits sit around boardroom tables and run data and research how best to make us think we need more, more, more, more to chase some elusive contentment that will come from their perfect ad for an overpriced vitamin, tennis shoe, organizing system, sunglasses, eye cream, bathroom tile, or ridiculous new celebrity trend modeled on a woman 30 years younger than us.

We tell ourselves the answer comes from therapy, self-care and being better to ourselves.  I am starting to tire of being the one blamed.

So we keep running, scrambling, struggling, to chase what “they” put in front of us pretending to believe that once we get the kitchen remodeled, lose 15 pounds and get that next promotion we can feel at ease – that is until one elusive day when we all collectively turn to each other, pause and consider the lunacy of being asked, expected and demanded to do all of this, and do it all with no wrinkles, in a spotless house holding a designer bag.  Until enough of us scoff at this system, and the endless marketing tyranny exploiting our insecurities and shame, we all just keep running.

But for now, I see you all, it’s too much to do.  It’s not possible.  Rest easy and know the task you’ve been given is not possible, in fact it’s collectively laughable, so be easy on yourself working moms while I try to do the same.