Women taking care of … everybody?

What’s so different for women? It’s a question we hear a lot from people interested in learning about or partnering with Positive Women’s Network. And there’s a whole list of answers that any of us are happy to recite upon request (you can find them here on our website). They’re not particularly mysterious, and definitely not meant to be divisive or to arouse sympathy … they’re just some additional challenges that the women  living with HIV are likely to face while men living with HIV are not. This post deals with one of these challenges, which I feel is particularly straightforward but often overlooked. In other words, when I mention it to somebody outside our circles, I often get the “uh huh, yes, I’d never thought of it that way” response. Women are caregivers.

I’m not going to make any claims here about whether this is “natural” or “good”, but it’s real. Obviously, until very recently, women had no choice but to be constantly bearing or nursing children. It’s no coincidence that the advent of birth control and safe abortion coincided with the opening up of alternative opportunities for women (hmm, so that’s why we call it choice …). Yet, we are women and men brought up in a society that still separates roles and responsibilities by gender. We can challenge and rebel, but it is still women who take the majority of domestic and childrearing responsibility. But it’s more than that; it’s not just about being moms and taking care of our children.

Women are taking care of everybody. I recently had a conversation with a young man at another HIV organization, who was asking what they could do to get more women active in leadership roles in their agency. (We get that a lot, as you can imagine!) He was surprised when I jokingly reassured him that we are not hoarding all the activist HIV positive women, but that we also struggle to find women who are able to participate. Not because they don’t want to or don’t feel qualified (a common assumption), but because they’re just so damn busy taking care of everything and everybody. “Oh yes, lots of women have to take care of their kids,” he said. I must have been feeling a bit stressed in my own life as a working mom, because I said something like, “not just our kids, but other people’s kids, and our parents, and our cousins, and our great-aunts, and our neighbours, and all of their pets …”

Many (most?) women living with HIV just plain don’t have time to do all that must be done to care for themselves and those that depend on them. Venturing into the realm of what should, could, or might be done is not an option. Have you been following Brooke Davidoff’s blog The Voice of One?  Brooke’s an inspiring young mom living in the US. She discovered she had HIV when she was pregnant with her first child – a lovely little boy called Myles who’s almost a year old. I always enjoy reading her stuff, but a recent post really struck me. It’s called “I don’t have time to be sick” and it starts like this:

Job that pays the bills (most of the time) – check
Medication and 12-month refill for my prescriptions – check
New medical insurance through work – check
Positive support system via friends, family & fans – check
Having free time to go see a new doctor and get my lab work done — NO check.
I simply don’t have TIME to be sick.

Brooke is not alone! This is a feeling that many positive women can relate to, and it’s just one example of What’s so different for women.

-Miriam

This was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under Daily Moments, HIV stigma, sexual health, Spiritual and Emotional Health, Support . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.

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