Do all mothers/wives/women feel the same way?
Your partner has stress at work and you are the one he leans on. Your children have problems at school/ with health/ with friends and you are the shoulder they cry on. The world around you throws up obstacles that fall in your path and trip you up at every turn, and all these things seem to settle on your shoulders. Is this a female thing? Perhaps not.
My experience of life so far and insight into those of others around me is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but from where I stand it does seem that it is the women who become the sponges and soak up the stresses of everyone else.
Fathers care. They acknowledge the stresses of their children, but do they feel the burden in the same way? I'm not sure. Siblings couldn't give a fig about the stresses of their brothers/sisters and we all have our own difficulties to handle.
So is it a trial of nature that puts us in the path of this constant flow of tension, or is it a more personal, self-inflicted woe? The fate of the over-analytical lucky, who have no famine, disease or civil unrest to focus their daily toil on and so look to the world around them for explanation? What do you think?