It’s time to accept the ‘multi-tasking woman’ is a myth

Iwas going to debunk a myth today – but Angelina Jolie beat me to it. Ain’t that always the way? Writing in Time magazine’s Parents newsletter, the superstar supermum and all-round outshiner made a surprising admission: gold-standard parenting in lockdown was “impossible”, she decreed. And if this pandemic was to prove helpful in any way, it would be in exposing the idea that we could “do everything right, answer all needs, and stay calm and positive” as a myth.

“Women can’t multitask” was what I read into Jolie’s words. “Maybe they never could.”

The timing was eerie. I’ve bought the multitasking myth for 40-plus years, casually using it to assert our superiority over men in conversation, when I wasn’t weaponising it in arguments. But a few days ago, that myth came crashing down – along with half our sitting-room ceiling.

I still can’t remember turning the bath on. But I remember the frenzied “superwoman” mindset I was caught up in. I remember thinking that because women were multitaskers extraordinaire and the lockdown tasks had been multiplying at a pandemic rate for the past five weeks, I was going to explain the need for “ramparts” in the Middle Ages to my eight-year-old – pulling up a few Windsor Castle close-ups on Google Images to clarify my points – check on the roast, empty the dishwasher (might as well) and locate the navy tie that the Old Man wanted to wear to work in the morning – simultaneously. I wasn’t just going to get those things done, either, but do them all perfectly.

I was half way through the mechanics of raising and lowering ramparts, while text-plaining to my mum how to do a Skype update, when I heard my husband’s yells from upstairs: a mix of primal horror and disbelief. “Trump’s giving another press conference...” was my first thought. Only when I sprinted up it wasn’t POTUS on the telly suggesting that mass embalming may do “a tremendous number” on the “Chinese virus” that stopped me in my tracks – but the sight of torrential rainfall in our sitting room.

The bath water was pouring through the light fixtures, down bookshelves

Bath water was pouring on to the sofa. My husband’s head was damp

and on to the sofa. It was tracing vertical tracks down the watercolour we’d picked up on our honeymoon in France. The back of my husband’s head, I noticed, was damp.

I don’t believe in signs any more than I believe in taking parenting advice from A-list humanitarians, but this one was hard to ignore. And when I told a few female friends and neighbours about the debacle, an uncanny number came back with domestic implosions of their own – everything from leaving the oven on and branding their other half ’s jeans with the iron, to descending into

an expletive-filled tirade against Zoom in front of three open-mouthed kids.

All of these had taken place over the past fortnight. Which was no coincidence, according to a therapist friend who explained that “the adrenalin that got us through the first few weeks of lockdown has given way to a slump in terms of energy and optimism”.

That theory makes sense of the “pandemic personalities” poll, published yesterday, dividing up Britons into “accepters”, “sufferers” and “resisters”. And although the word “sufferers” seems overblown in reference to lockdown (let’s reserve it for the sick and dying, along with their relatives), it was no surprise women made up two thirds of that group.

Yes, there are a vast number of men doing their share of everything from the hunting and gathering to the cooking, home schooling and anxiety soothing, but statistically women are still likely to have more balls to juggle than their male counterparts. I’ll bet they’re far more likely to throw them all up in the air at once, too, especially now. And then stand there, stunned, when they drop the lot.

“It is a lovely thing” to discover that your family don’t need you to be perfect, Jolie insists in her essay. “In fact, the more room they have to be great where you are weak, the stronger they may become.” This was certainly the case on the night I left the bath running, when it was my husband, not me, who ran upstairs to turn it off, and my daughter who fetched the buckets and towels. I just stood there, watching the plaster come away from the ceiling in great curling sheets and thinking: “How could I let this happen?”

The answer’s simple: I bought the multitasking myth. Instead of seeing it as yet another impossibly high female standard to live up to, I tried to show off a superiority I didn’t have. I thought if I could just “do everything right, answer all needs, and stay calm and positive”, we could get through this. But that’s clearly impossible. And as myths and stereotypes are being debunked on a mass scale every day, just think of what we’re all learning. For one thing, you might want to turn that tap off.