Thank you so much for this post. I went into it thinking it didn't really apply to me. I left it realizing that it runs so deep and so far back that it's who I am.
I prided myself in having been called an 'easy baby' (and 'rightfully so', because I was my mother's first) And as a baby, there was an accident and I was rushed to hospital, and I was 'the calm one' (of course, I was in shock) while my parents were panicking.
From there, I had a reputation to uphold. I went from 'easy this' to 'easy that'. As a small business owner, too, I know I keep my prices too low and I offer too much, and that's all related.
Thank you for this piece. I found it brought up feelings of anger in me, which is incredible because my anger is exceedingly hard to find, and if you can't even find your anger, then you're just doomed to enact trip-on-the-floor low-maintenance forever.
Tara I am so pleased that this article resonated with you. I think the anger is justified, and I think we all shove this down so deep that we don't realize the impact it has on our daily lives
Tara, I too was an "easy baby" (born 2 years after my higher-maintenance sister) and wore it like a badge of honor. But when I was in my 20s and my father told me that I was the child he never worried about, I didn't take it as a compliment. He meant it kindly (I think). But what I heard was that I'd been so good at being invisible he didn't have to give me much thought at all. I'm in my 50s now and working on getting in touch with my anger. I now believe that anger, if we're brave enough to find and acknowledge it, has valuable information to share with us.
This resonates deeply and unexpectedly. I pride myself on being a strong independent woman who doesn’t “need” my husband or anyone else (as any well respecting first child gifted student born in 1982 is), but find myself telling my husband that I would still like help, but then quickly back off when I hear myself asking. At work, I have said repeatedly that I strive to be the easiest employee any of my managers have. If they have a team, I want them to say “wow, Jessica is the easiest - I barely have to do anything to manage her”. But that also leaves me feeling like the “set it and forget it” employee desperate for attention or validation. Just this week I told myself that I’m going to start having the audacity that I see younger generations displaying at work (because sometimes it makes me want to clutch my elder millennial pearls, but they get away with it and are thriving!). Thank you for this essay and journal prompt!
You are right about the younger generations thriving. I watch my daughter and her friends and have hope that they will remain so accurately maintained. 😊 Isn't it interesting that our definition of strong, independent woman means we can't need anything from anyone. Not even the baseline that we offer everyone else without argument.
SUCH A GREAT PROMPT! Even at 35, I've reached the point where I choose to embody the "too much" woman, the high maintenance woman. Because fuck everyone. The people pleasing requiring us to shrink in submission is complete bullshit and it makes me enraged. It makes me mad because I believed that lie for so long.
Now, I definitely believe that "accurately maintained" is a more respectful way to put it, and also, sometimes we need to be assholes first then calm down and find the balance.
The virtue costume line is the one I'll be turning over for a while. I didn't realize I'd been wearing it as a credential — I can handle anything, I don't need much — until I read that and recognized it as the bargain it actually was.
The easy daughter became the easy employee became the easy everything. Same costume, different decade.
Oh boy, this hit a very specific cusping Gen X nerve. So many of us were trained to be low-maintenance like it was a moral achievement. Don’t need much. Don’t ask twice. Don’t make it awkward. Be easy to love. But you’re exactly right: at some point, low maintenance stops being a strength and starts looking an awful lot like self-abandonment.
“Who benefits from me needing so little?” is the whole essay right there. Thanks!
Easy daughter is a role I’ve been playing for so damn long and am finally starting to wind my way out of. It starts with my mantra, which my dad, brother and husband have all been on the receiving end of: “You’re a grown-ass adult. You can figure it out.”
I absolutely loved this. For whatever reason, the line about stop pretending to be a house plant that can survive on indirect sunlight and the occasional compliment really landed it home for me.
This was an incredible piece. Thank you so much for writing and sharing it. It resonated with me as very insightful about women's lives across many generations as well as the mythology around "difficult women" who, if they'd been men, would have been celebrated and admired rather than shamed, derided, and even jailed. (hello, Martha Stewart & Hilary Clinton).
Now it looks as if women are even melting away and disappearing PHYSICALLY as well. Have you seen the photos out of Hollywood lately? Ugh! Nothing but skin stretched thin over bones. Denying ourselves literal nourishment is apparently de rigour these days. Is there anything that more symbolizes the scorn and hatred of women than telling them they need to shrink themselves in order to be considered "good" and "worthy of admiration?"
I've prided myself on being "low maintenance" my entire Gen X adulthood, and mostly it worked for me because I did insist on a few things: like time and space to be creative in exchange for giving up material stuff like fancy tableware and expensive clothing and vacations, etc. When I actually think about it, maybe I wasn't so much low-maintenance as focused on what I needed/WANTED to maintain and able to let the other stuff go in exchange. I was low-maintenance in some areas because I was high-maintenance in other, to me more important, areas. BUT I recognize the truth here that not all women, or even very many of us, were able or were allowed to make that choice.
Be strong. Be healthy. Be demanding. Be needy about things that make sense to be needy about, like emotional support and respect and love and connectedness and time to pursue your interests, creativity, and purpose.
I hadn't considered it from this angle before. I am regularly saying, "I'm low maintenance, so I can manage to retire in December after forty years of full-time work, on a very small income." I wrap it in my 'sustainability-driven' lifestyle (I haven't actually driven a vehicle for fourteen years as part of that mission) and wear it like a Brownie (pre-Girl Guide) badge of honour. Maybe my self-assigned 'low maintenance label' needs to go in the metaphorical shredder! Thank you for making me think before I start my working day (six months to go)...💜🙏
Most of my financial coaching clients (and myself) are Gen X- and I see this so often! We were trained to keep our needs small lest we become a burden. This is not the general fear of millennial women. But this essay helps me understand why Gen X women struggle with identifying our wants and desires. No one wants to be called high maintenance…! We were supposed to be independent and never “messy”.
Great question! Being trained to not be “high maintenance” has impacted so many women's money stories. The most common story I see women telling themselves is that they should suppress their wants. I had a client once struggle buying nicer bras and matching underwear, even though she made great money as an adult, because she felt that made her high maintenance. When I pointed out no one would see her beautiful matching undies except for her and her lover, she said, “I don’t know—I really want them, but do I want to be one of “those” women who need all that fancy stuff?” Her childhood story from the seventies was to keep up with her brothers and “don’t be such a girl!” “But you ARE a girl”, I said to her one day. “And this is not a bad thing. This is a great thing.” She replied, “That’s not the story I heard!”
There’s so much of this I want to quote back to you about what resonated, it is so well said! The over-performer and under-resourced GenX woman is why so many of us are f’ing exhausted.
"What do we call a man who requires constant soothing, admiration, patience, explanation, reassurance, domestic support, social planning, and emotional interpretation?
I loved this movie so much. It’s funny, I’m GenX but I’ve never consider being “high maintenance” a negative. (Or inaccurate 😂) We’re worth some effort. And it’s a great way to weed out the ones who are NEVER going to make the appropriate effort.
Here is the example right, Cynthia? Being the easy daughter means carrying the weight for everyone else. 🤗
Thank you so much for this post. I went into it thinking it didn't really apply to me. I left it realizing that it runs so deep and so far back that it's who I am.
I prided myself in having been called an 'easy baby' (and 'rightfully so', because I was my mother's first) And as a baby, there was an accident and I was rushed to hospital, and I was 'the calm one' (of course, I was in shock) while my parents were panicking.
From there, I had a reputation to uphold. I went from 'easy this' to 'easy that'. As a small business owner, too, I know I keep my prices too low and I offer too much, and that's all related.
Thank you for this piece. I found it brought up feelings of anger in me, which is incredible because my anger is exceedingly hard to find, and if you can't even find your anger, then you're just doomed to enact trip-on-the-floor low-maintenance forever.
Tara I am so pleased that this article resonated with you. I think the anger is justified, and I think we all shove this down so deep that we don't realize the impact it has on our daily lives
Tara, I too was an "easy baby" (born 2 years after my higher-maintenance sister) and wore it like a badge of honor. But when I was in my 20s and my father told me that I was the child he never worried about, I didn't take it as a compliment. He meant it kindly (I think). But what I heard was that I'd been so good at being invisible he didn't have to give me much thought at all. I'm in my 50s now and working on getting in touch with my anger. I now believe that anger, if we're brave enough to find and acknowledge it, has valuable information to share with us.
This resonates deeply and unexpectedly. I pride myself on being a strong independent woman who doesn’t “need” my husband or anyone else (as any well respecting first child gifted student born in 1982 is), but find myself telling my husband that I would still like help, but then quickly back off when I hear myself asking. At work, I have said repeatedly that I strive to be the easiest employee any of my managers have. If they have a team, I want them to say “wow, Jessica is the easiest - I barely have to do anything to manage her”. But that also leaves me feeling like the “set it and forget it” employee desperate for attention or validation. Just this week I told myself that I’m going to start having the audacity that I see younger generations displaying at work (because sometimes it makes me want to clutch my elder millennial pearls, but they get away with it and are thriving!). Thank you for this essay and journal prompt!
You are right about the younger generations thriving. I watch my daughter and her friends and have hope that they will remain so accurately maintained. 😊 Isn't it interesting that our definition of strong, independent woman means we can't need anything from anyone. Not even the baseline that we offer everyone else without argument.
SUCH A GREAT PROMPT! Even at 35, I've reached the point where I choose to embody the "too much" woman, the high maintenance woman. Because fuck everyone. The people pleasing requiring us to shrink in submission is complete bullshit and it makes me enraged. It makes me mad because I believed that lie for so long.
Now, I definitely believe that "accurately maintained" is a more respectful way to put it, and also, sometimes we need to be assholes first then calm down and find the balance.
I'm impressed with your attitude, Amanda. I aspire. 🙂
The virtue costume line is the one I'll be turning over for a while. I didn't realize I'd been wearing it as a credential — I can handle anything, I don't need much — until I read that and recognized it as the bargain it actually was.
The easy daughter became the easy employee became the easy everything. Same costume, different decade.
It's one of those instant identities we rely on to avoid the hard work of figuring out who we really are, I think.
Oh boy, this hit a very specific cusping Gen X nerve. So many of us were trained to be low-maintenance like it was a moral achievement. Don’t need much. Don’t ask twice. Don’t make it awkward. Be easy to love. But you’re exactly right: at some point, low maintenance stops being a strength and starts looking an awful lot like self-abandonment.
“Who benefits from me needing so little?” is the whole essay right there. Thanks!
It’s a tough journal prompt that is scary, too!
Easy daughter is a role I’ve been playing for so damn long and am finally starting to wind my way out of. It starts with my mantra, which my dad, brother and husband have all been on the receiving end of: “You’re a grown-ass adult. You can figure it out.”
I absolutely loved this. For whatever reason, the line about stop pretending to be a house plant that can survive on indirect sunlight and the occasional compliment really landed it home for me.
We are allowed to want more. 🙂
This was an incredible piece. Thank you so much for writing and sharing it. It resonated with me as very insightful about women's lives across many generations as well as the mythology around "difficult women" who, if they'd been men, would have been celebrated and admired rather than shamed, derided, and even jailed. (hello, Martha Stewart & Hilary Clinton).
Now it looks as if women are even melting away and disappearing PHYSICALLY as well. Have you seen the photos out of Hollywood lately? Ugh! Nothing but skin stretched thin over bones. Denying ourselves literal nourishment is apparently de rigour these days. Is there anything that more symbolizes the scorn and hatred of women than telling them they need to shrink themselves in order to be considered "good" and "worthy of admiration?"
I've prided myself on being "low maintenance" my entire Gen X adulthood, and mostly it worked for me because I did insist on a few things: like time and space to be creative in exchange for giving up material stuff like fancy tableware and expensive clothing and vacations, etc. When I actually think about it, maybe I wasn't so much low-maintenance as focused on what I needed/WANTED to maintain and able to let the other stuff go in exchange. I was low-maintenance in some areas because I was high-maintenance in other, to me more important, areas. BUT I recognize the truth here that not all women, or even very many of us, were able or were allowed to make that choice.
Be strong. Be healthy. Be demanding. Be needy about things that make sense to be needy about, like emotional support and respect and love and connectedness and time to pursue your interests, creativity, and purpose.
But you weren't high maintenance in your need to be creative, Shelley. You were accurately maintained. 🙂
Well, yes.
Performing lack of need in relationships, but also in workplaces and even maternity wards.
We wore competence, strength and hyper-independence like an armour.
Sometimes it didn’t protect us. It just stopped us from noticing when we were injured.
https://joannedoylewrites.substack.com/p/leaning-in-cost-all-gen-x-women?r=3s9z4a
I hadn't considered it from this angle before. I am regularly saying, "I'm low maintenance, so I can manage to retire in December after forty years of full-time work, on a very small income." I wrap it in my 'sustainability-driven' lifestyle (I haven't actually driven a vehicle for fourteen years as part of that mission) and wear it like a Brownie (pre-Girl Guide) badge of honour. Maybe my self-assigned 'low maintenance label' needs to go in the metaphorical shredder! Thank you for making me think before I start my working day (six months to go)...💜🙏
I think if you are "low maintenance" to please yourself, Kerry, that's very different than being low maintenance for others.
Most of my financial coaching clients (and myself) are Gen X- and I see this so often! We were trained to keep our needs small lest we become a burden. This is not the general fear of millennial women. But this essay helps me understand why Gen X women struggle with identifying our wants and desires. No one wants to be called high maintenance…! We were supposed to be independent and never “messy”.
And how do you see this this manifests itself in women's money stories?
Great question! Being trained to not be “high maintenance” has impacted so many women's money stories. The most common story I see women telling themselves is that they should suppress their wants. I had a client once struggle buying nicer bras and matching underwear, even though she made great money as an adult, because she felt that made her high maintenance. When I pointed out no one would see her beautiful matching undies except for her and her lover, she said, “I don’t know—I really want them, but do I want to be one of “those” women who need all that fancy stuff?” Her childhood story from the seventies was to keep up with her brothers and “don’t be such a girl!” “But you ARE a girl”, I said to her one day. “And this is not a bad thing. This is a great thing.” She replied, “That’s not the story I heard!”
There’s so much of this I want to quote back to you about what resonated, it is so well said! The over-performer and under-resourced GenX woman is why so many of us are f’ing exhausted.
Exhausted but awakening, Tammi! We need to stick together and suport our phoenixes rising.
"What do we call a man who requires constant soothing, admiration, patience, explanation, reassurance, domestic support, social planning, and emotional interpretation?
Usually?" I call him a pain in the ass.
Better term than I came up with. 🤣
"Who benefits from me needing so little." This is truly helpful perspective when we're arguing with ourselves about ourselves.
It’s a tough journal prompt, but it’s worth the pain.
I loved this movie so much. It’s funny, I’m GenX but I’ve never consider being “high maintenance” a negative. (Or inaccurate 😂) We’re worth some effort. And it’s a great way to weed out the ones who are NEVER going to make the appropriate effort.
Great essay! Really enjoyed it!