As a work-at-home mother of three, my daily life functions like a circus, and I’m the ringleader trying to keep everything in place.
A typical morning for me starts with my youngest daughter, nine-month-old Eloise, waking up hungry for her morning feed. Since I’m still nursing, I try and keep her in bed with me as long as possible, hoping she’ll fall back asleep, even though she rarely does.
I sleepily make my way downstairs, steep a morning tea ,and start to get my older girls ready for the day. I help them get dressed, make breakfast, and pack lunch for my five-year-old daughter Penny.
My husband comes downstairs and drives Penny to school, and I usually try and have a very quick shower, afraid to leave three-year-old Georgia and Eloise alone together for too long.
The rest of the day is a blur of making snacks and lunch, washing dishes until my fingers are red and raw, and putting away laundry. I feed Eloise and put her down for a nap, read some books with Georgia, and answer e-mails for work on my phone. If I’m lucky I may even write down a paragraph for work before getting interrupted. I keep a constant checklist in my mind of things that I need to get done.
Toilet paper is running low, we’ll need to pick some up this weekend. I keep forgetting to get Vitamin D for the kids since we ran out last month. I debate ordering online and decide I’ll just grab some at the grocery store. I Google the benefits of Vitamin D in children, and feel guilty for not remembering during my last trip. I pull out a cookbook and start making a menu plan for the following week, trying to choose things that are easy to make and ingredients that aren’t too expensive.
I check the mail and find a few new bills, I pay them off on my phone app and then realize that I should probably look at our budget for the rest of the month. When I look at our budget I realize I really need to take on some extra writing work, but when will I have the time to actually write? My train of thought it cut off when my phone rings, the doctor is calling to confirm an appointment that I made two months ago and forgot about.
I feel guilty about not entertaining my three-year-old, so we go to the kitchen and bake cookies together. For a little while I forget about the to-do list and enjoy mixing the dough with my hands and listening to the chatter of my daughter. These are the visions of motherhood I had before becoming a mother. I kiss my daughter on the top of her head and she rests her body against mine, and everything feels right for a moment.
Later that night, I read an article about emotional labour and motherhood. I’ve been reading many articles lately about the invisible workload often carried by women, in particular mothers. I know that it’s something many women feel, because it’s a topic that often comes up in casual discussion with friends, and it’s a burden I have felt weighed down by, especially lately.
Tasks like scheduling appointments, researching ways to deal with your child’s anxiety (or simply thinking about your child’s anxiety), managing your time so that tasks get done, organizing meals and preparing them, remembering to pay the bills on time, and buying a gift for a birthday party. All of these mundane tasks need to get done, but they also need to be thought about before they get done.
This is the invisible labour that women often carry.
In our home I do the majority of cooking, cleaning, and the managing of the household, which makes sense since I am home most of the time and my husband is not. But what I find more exhausting than doing is the thinking. The to-do list is constant and weighs heavy on my mind, the laundry that needs to be put away is both physically there, sitting on our room, and mentally and emotionally taking up space inside of me. The lightness I feel when the laundry gets put away is physical, one less thing to weigh heavy in my mind.
The more I try to find ways to ease the emotional burden that I carry, the more frustrated and anxious I get. It’s a discussion that doesn’t seem to have a proper conclusion in our home. I can’t seem to stop my brain from thinking and trying to juggle everything, and I can’t force a man who has never been conditioned to think about every detail to suddenly start.
All I know is that everywhere I look the issue persists. The concept of exhausted women carrying emotional labour is everywhere, you can read about it in Time Magazine, the Huffington Post, and Harper’s Bazaar.
I know I cannot change gender roles with a snap of the fingers, but I am starting to realize that the change in our home may need to happen with me. If I learn to let go and let loose, freeing my mind from the constant strain of remembering every little detail, I may just set an example for my own three daughters. Perhaps I can never be freed from the mental load, but hopefully I can make sure my own children don’t become enslaved to the burden that I seem to feel.
