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Show You Tired, Mother? No Wonder You Should Be Every week the average U. S. mother of three children washes 750 dishes and 400 pieces of silver; handles 250 articles of laundry; makes beds 35 times; shops for, carries, sorts, stores, and cooks 175 pounds of food; and walks 35 miles just in her kitchen! And this is only a small part of what is expected of her. Today, in spite of her many work saving devices, the average American wife and mother suffers suf-fers from "what has been called Homemaker's Fatigue," report Mrs. Zelma B. Miller and Benjamin Benja-min F. Miller, M.D., in the March issue of Parents' Magazine. In grandmother's day women canned can-ned most of their own food and sewed their own clothes, washed by hand, pressed with flatirons, beat rugs, scrubbed the wooden floors yet still managed to stay peaceful and relaxed. What then is wrong with women today? The "ordeal of the American woman," according to Prof. Max Lerner, is that "she is bedeviled by to many functions. She leads, simultaneously, a multiplicity of lives, playing at once the role of mother, home manager, hostess, host-ess, nurse,' shopper, figure of glamor, supervisor of the children's chil-dren's schooling and play and level until afternoon or early evening. Fatigue can be lessened by determining your own daily rhythm and planning your hardest hard-est tasks for peak energy period. Part of the solution is also to set your standards at a different level. Don't let the little, undone jobs make you tense or angry. A tidy, well ordered home like the ones you see in the ads is indeed lovely but the price you pay for it may be too high. Sacrifice Sac-rifice excessive neatness for quiet and peace every hour. Lack of planning and poor work habits is another cause of homemaker's fatigue. Housewives House-wives should consider what jobs have to do and plan to do them in th most economical way. For example: Researchers know that warking involved in Operation Bcdmaking can be cut to 23 feet instead of the possible 262 feet as a recent survey found one homemaker doing by starting at the head and working around the bed. "If you use your body correctly, have suitable work-surface work-surface heights, sit, bend, lift and stretch properly, you can eliminate a tremendous amount of fatigue and nervous tension," the authors suggest. Long range family and home planning help, too, to forestall fatigue. Doctors report that the most tired women patients they encounter are the ones whose children are born very close to- gether. Before choosing a home location consider two important fatigue inducing factors loneliness lone-liness and lack of help. "When we visualize the ideal home a place for children to grow happily where they will be oved and cherished a relaxed mother with a little extra time and energy for herself is the center cen-ter of the picture. A tense, worn-out worn-out mother has nothing left of herself to give her children and her husband. In such a home everyone suffers emotionally, perhaps even to the point of developing one of the diseases due to stress." trips, culture audience and culture cul-ture carrier, club woman and often worker or careerist." Furthermore, Fur-thermore, she must do or feels she must do all of these jobs perfectly. Experts agree, however, that it isn't the amount of work a woman does and the number of calorics the expends that make her so bone-tired. The normal human body has its cycles, various vari-ous hormones, water, salt and dozens of other body substances may vary tremendously during the day. Low blood sugar is especially espe-cially associated with fatigue; the homemaker will feel far less tired if she maintains a steady blood sugar level during the day. This requires regularly spaced meals plus snacks after periods of hard work." The endocrine glands, too, operate op-erate at different rates with different dif-ferent people during the day. Some people get off to a good early start but their vitality runs down in the afternoon, thers do not reach their highest energy |