Managing The Mental Load Of Motherhood
No matter how we try and divide household tasks between partners, moms will always carry the mental load — unless we start expecting better.
“I’ll be late”, read the text that came through less than 20 seconds after I’d hung up the phone with the principal from my son’s kindergarten. “Of course you will be”, I muttered under my breath as my son, who had been patiently waiting in the backseat while I was on the phone, launched forward to show me his drawing of a snake. The message from my husband couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time, and now I knew he’d be late for dinner and bedtime. No reinforcements tonight.
My day had already been broken up into small, useless chunks of time that never allow for the completion of any large, meaningful tasks. I’d spent time on one client project in the earlier part of the day, but then found myself calling the dentist to make follow up appointments, cancelling our upcoming cleaning service (I have cleaners — how else do I survive?), missing a call from the chiropractor, and checking to see when last night’s rained out soccer game is being rescheduled.
The day was then cut short by the need to pick up my son from his current kindergarten program and take him to tour a new after-school care program where he’ll go when he starts grade one. An hour and a half later, after filling out paperwork and signing release forms, I found myself on the phone with his current principal.
When you’re five years old you’re just coming into a whole new realm of understating of your emotions and learning about helpful ways to manage feelings. For the past two weeks my son who is typically mild tempered and easy going, has decided that when he doesn’t get his way it’s totally fine to throw things, kick chairs and tables, destroy stuff and scream. Today he threw a pair of scissors at a teacher and nearly hit her with them.
If soccer is rescheduled it will be on for tomorrow night, and then on Friday I’m attending a student-led conference at my son’s school where he can show me everything he’s learning — and we can talk about his temper. I also want to discuss with his teacher some anxiety issues that we’ve been dealing with for the last few years and what I think are sensory processing things that are likely feeding the anxiety and are in need of further investigation. We’ll just add that onto the list of yet another thing to schedule.
The Mental Load and Gendered Parenting Norms
Like so many mothers, my list of to-dos goes on and on and doesn’t end. Along with this list is the mental clutter of trying to keep it all straight. My husband is an active and equal partner in our relationship, but the further we get down this parenthood road together I become more and more convinced that most men aren’t capable of managing the mental load — or what many refer to as the “third shift”. I see what happens when I go out of town on a business trip for a few days — the house is a mess, pizza has been ordered for every day and my husband is at his wits end by the end of day three — and I wonder what would happen if I disappeared from the picture entirely.
While he’s always busy at work (and I’m not?), it seems very rarely that he can take the time to be away from the office to manage childcare, appointments, and school commitments. In the event of an emergency or important event he is always there because nothing would keep him from the big stuff, but when it comes to keeping the wheels turning and the lights on, most of it falls on my shoulders. Part of this is my own doing because I know that if I delegate something over to him it will get done…eventually. In most situations we don’t have time to waste so I just go and do it, and this is in part where the problem lies.
There is a constant running list in my head of things that need to be researched, scheduled and arranged. Upcoming birthday parties and plans for long weekends. Appointments for yearly check ups at the doctor, and eye exams. Testing for anxiety and making grocery lists. The mundane, the boring and the everyday. These tasks fall to me because I’m mom. I’m the default because of the gendered norms we’ve built into motherhood.
For the most part, I’ve taken on the many hats of motherhood because I’ve felt like I have little choice in the matter. More often than not service providers regardless of industry speak directly to me, to mom, and might include dad in the conversation. They know that the coordination and decision making for our family likely rests in my hands, so they’re set to address my needs and concerns. Forget dad, he’s an accessory in all this. The same goes for brands and consumer products. They know who their customer is and target their marketing straight at me.
Continued normalization the mom/dad gender role binary like I’ve described, likely means we won’t make any progress towards equalization of household management tasks. The burden has to shift if women are ever expected to make real social gains and achieve true equality. Whether we’ve chosen it for ourselves or had it chosen for us, the unequal distribution of household tasks needs to start fading into the memory of our collective consciousness and become something that we look back on and cringe. Change has to start at home and it begins with our expectations of each partner in our relationships.
Ask For More and Expect Better
I said earlier that the management of the mental load in my relationship falls to me, because I choose to take it on and this is part of the problem. As I play out my role of “mother” I consciously and subconsciously watch how others do it and model a lot of my behavior after what I see. Motherhood doesn’t come with an instruction manual and typically there’s too much to do to try and march to the beat of my own drum. But what would happen if I started to expect more from my husband? What would the result be if we had an honest conversation about the mental load and I asked him to take on key areas as his to manage?
My initial gut reaction to this thought is slight panic because it would mean that I would lose some of the control that I think I have over how our family functions. But I wonder if at the end of the day this might not be such a bad thing. Too tight of control, or rather attempts at control, isn’t healthy for me or for my husband and our relationship. It reinforces social norms and expectations and teaches our son that dad isn’t competent. This pattern of behavior also doesn’t allow my husband to step into his role as an equal co-parent, and that is truly doing him a disservice. I know he’s capable, but I just don’t give him the chance to actually act it out.
If we start to ask for more from our partners and expect better from them, pervasive social attitudes about the roles of moms and dads can start to shift. Equally important is that we as women, as mothers, start to expect better from ourselves when it comes to expectations and the division of labor in our relationship. We have just as much responsibility to take an active part in changing the conversation around motherhood and the mental load as our partners do in picking up some of the slack. While it’s easy to sit and rail against the system and blame inter-sectional systems of power for our current lot, I’d rather be pragmatic and think about solutions that might see an improvement in my life this time next week.
Maybe I’ve oversimplified it or suggested an approach that isn’t realistic, but I truly feel that if things are going to shift, we work together with our partners to find ways to manage that reflect the unique needs of our families. Moms can’t be the only ones that notice when the milk runs out or that a favorite toothpaste is gone. Ask for more, expect better and see what happens.
