Two years ago, I created The Mental Load List. It was forced into existence through hot rage and debilitating resentment. I was infuriated, nay, murderous with my husband, yet again, for being apparently incapable of seeing what needed to be done to manage a household and a family.
We’d had the kind of row that makes the neighbours gossip, the kind of row that only ends because you’re both too exhausted to fight anymore. When we both sat weary and spent, my husband said, 'I want to help. I know I should know this shit, but I don’t…help me understand the mental load.'
And so, I started to write it all down. To make it easier, I started by listing all the things that need doing room by room. Then I added people to the list – what responsibilities come with our youngest, our oldest, my parents, his parents. I added institutions – school, work, gymnastics, playgroups, PTA etc. Then I added events and holidays to the list and just kept going until the list was over 40 pages long, typed.
When I mentioned on Instagram that I’d done this, it went viral. For days, my DMs were jammed with requests for me to share the list and so I did. I sold it via my website, and it made £3k in the first weekend. To date, sales of the mental load list have made almost £30k.
I mention this not because I want to brag but to undermine the patriarchy’s attempt to gaslight us into thinking that the mental load doesn’t exist or that being able to have it all means we should do it all. It does exist. It is unmanageable. And, we never wanted to have it all… we simply wanted the choice.
The explosion of the viral mental load list inspired me to pitch an idea for a book. I didn’t want to replicate the mental load list but instead, I wanted to investigate the mental load, look at where it came from (spoiler: it’s a generational hand-me-down) and reveal how my own misunderstanding and mismanagement of it nearly led to a marital and mental breakdown.
The Mental Load Diaries isn’t a self-help book. To be clear, I’m an expert in absolutely nothing! Instead, The Mental Load Diaries is a memoir, perhaps even a love-story, documenting the tumultuous and often toxic relationship I had with the mental load. I wanted it to be searingly honest – to shine a light on my addiction, my fears, my own bad behaviours and how they were affected by my total inability to right-size the mental load – but I also wanted it to be funny, relatable, comforting.
What some of you may not be expecting however, is that the book will challenge women. I am over the narrative that men are useless, and women are somehow more evolved. The sanctimonious approach I see so often on social media from women about this issue is deeply unhelpful.
Quotes like, 'You don’t need a uterus to see what needs to be done around the house,' may be pithy, but they’re also lacking in nuance. Sure, you may not need a uterus, but it’s those of us with uteruses (uteri?!) that have been groomed from the moment we splashed down earthside to bear the weight of the mental load.
That’s why we see all the stuff, remember all the things and make all the plans. It’s like saying You don’t need a medical degree to operate on a patient. Sure, anyone can take a scalpel to an abdomen, but it’s a lot easier to operate successfully if you’ve been extensively trained for many years. Focusing on how crappy men are at identifying the mental load only excludes the men in our lives from a conversation that is constructive and instead leaves only room for constant criticism.
And I know what a lot of you are thinking: I shouldn’t have to write a list. I shouldn’t have to tell him what to do. You’re right, you shouldn’t but here we are. We must accept the world and the people in it the way they are and not the way we want them. Whether we like it or not, we are the generation of cycle-breakers. How we choose to approach this will determine whether our children struggle with the imbalance of the mental load in the future and, if we don’t want that, we are going to have to work with our partners to help them step into a responsibility most of them haven’t been trained adequately for so that our kids can see better now and do better in the future.
Cat Sims is a writer, podcaster, content creator @notsosmugnow and the author of The Mental Load Diaries, out now and available in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats.