Excerpt from The Gospel of Wellness by Rina Raphael, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As for parents, the storm of stress elevates to a Category 5 hurricane: the average mom claims an 8.5 out of 10 on a scale of stress, positioning them somewhere between a Cathy cartoon and a ticking time bomb. A leading cause of stress is time. Sixty percent of moms say they simply can't squeeze in everything on their to-do list, which usually amounts to planning a nutritious dinner, helping with children's homework, organizing the social calendar, and oh, also staying fit and attractive. In addition to all that, 72 percent of moms are stressed about how stressed they are.

Delving into why the American woman is about to burn down her white picket fence would undoubtedly fill volumes. But suffice it to say that one major reason is that she is in no way living the utopian dream envisioned by feminists past. Women are not equal in status nor immune from sexism, and they are still burdened by the domestic assumptions made by society. Our foremothers burned their bras and filed for divorce en masse, but that didn't release Betty Draper from pot roast duty. College girls dreamed of being Tina Fey or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then found themselves soothing male egos in the boardroom or arguing with their spouse over whose turn it was to carpool.

While middle- to upper-middle-class women are technically liberated, for many their situation feels like further imprisonment: now they need to be both Working Girl and June Cleaver. Their life is nonstop emails and baby tantrums; they have two jobs but the respect of one. This is what the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1989 termed "the second shift," by which Western women inherit a double-career life. They'll work a full day at the office, commute in traffic back home, hang up their coat, then run into the phone booth to transform into Superhousewife. The current hyperproductive and performative nature of American life is likely to blame. We're on a constant treadmill of doing way more than a normal human would have aspired to do until recently: attain career success, birth two kids, achieve a slamming body, cook like Ina Garten … You get the idea.

Futher compounding the issue, the days of living off a single income are long gone; as the cost of living increases and wages stagnate, both partners need to bring home the Beyond Meat bacon.

But again, there's the rub: as the average American increasingly needs to work long and sometimes unpredictable hours at demanding jobs, who is going to manage caregiving? When the workday doesn't end until six, who fixes dinner? How can you make partner at the law firm when you need to scuttle out at a reasonable hour? Someone needs to hold down the fort. Someone needs to take care of the kids. Not everyone has relatives nearby who can pitch in and provide free babysitting. And not everyone can afford paid childcare. This is not a predicament exclusive to women raising children with men. Same-sex couples also deal with one partner who inevitably needs to pick up the slack at home.

We may have fought the good fight for women's careers, but as Hochschild observed, "The workplace they go into and the men they come home to have changed less rapidly, or not at all. Nor has the government given them policies that would ease the way, like paid parental leave, paid family medical leave, or subsidized child care—the state-of-the-art child care, that too is stalled." In essence, women changed, but many men, employers, and the government simply put up their feet. They see women struggle to scoot out of the office before children's bedtimes. They hear the exhaustion of those pumping breast milk in their cubicle. But bosses just put another meeting on their calendars. In 2019, a Pew Research survey confirmed what everyone already knew: half of employed moms say being a working parent makes it harder for them to get ahead professionally.

The COVID-19 pandemic only intensified this workload, exposing deep cracks in the system. With schools closed, moms quickly found themselves juggling work Zooms while trying to help their first-grader log in to class. Mothers scrambled to monitor the kids, keep up with double or triple the dirty dishes, and then somehow appear alert during department meetings. In between all of that, they had to stave off a virus that kept them away from friends and family. A significant portion also had to manage eldercare for their aging parents. Their lives, like their wardrobes, began unraveling. They wiped their hands on their sweatpants, looked all around, and asked, How?

Excerpted from The Gospel of Wellness by Rina Raphael. Copyright © 2022 by Rina Raphael. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.