Ask any woman who find themselves cohabiting with anyone else and they’ll be able to describe to you, in intimate detail, the various negative effects that the mental load has on them. Up until my generation (those of us fence sitting uncomfortably between Gen X and Millenial), the mental load has been the world’s best kept secret. Now though, we are doing all we can to lift the lid on what it’s really like to live with the constant mental ticker tape of jobs that range from the eternally mundane to the potentially life saving.
In recent months, the internet has taken to referring to the mental load as ‘kinkeeping’ – a term I reject wholeheartedly and passionately. Apart from sounding intrinsically like something the ‘women’ should take care, it also places a warm and cosy lens over what is anything but warm and cosy. Managing the mental load is the domestic albatross around many women’s necks. It does serious damage to their mental health, their physical health and often, their relationships.
I should know. Five years ago I decided to separate from my husband. It wasn’t all down to the mental load, but there’s no doubt that played a central role. His lack of support or even recognition of the mental load made me resentful and angry and sad and that fed into every area of our relationship. I felt alone, unheard and so I decided that it would be easier to do life on my own. If I was going to be responsible for everything domestic, I may as well live by myself on my own terms, right?
Fortunately, we made it to couples therapy and it saved our marriage but I learned a lot in the process. I learned that he wasn’t willingly ignoring the mental load and leaving it all to me because I was the woman. He simply didn’t understand that it existed and our therapist encouraged us to identify why this is. I knew my husband wasn’t a dick, so why couldn’t he step up in this area?
Quite simply, it was because that responsibility hadn’t been passed down to him by his parents. He’d observed his mother take that responsibility on and subconsciously believed that wasn’t his role. Most sons look to their father as a blueprint for behaviours and if they didn’t see their fathers stepping up to shoulder some of the never-ending To Do list of life, then they learned to believe that wasn’t their role. On the flip side, women grew up observing their mothers and thus we subconsciously took on the responsibility of the mental load.
This, I realised, doesn’t make the men in our life bad people. If they don’t know, we can’t blame them for not getting it, right? That’s like getting mad at our kids because they don’t just ‘know’ the twelve times table. They need to be shown so that going forward they can impress dinner party guests by knowing that 12 x 7 is 84 (because let’s face it, in this day and age, no one needs to know their times tables by heart…and yes, I used my calculator to get the answer). In the same way, we as women need to put our eye rolls aside and instead of using our time to lament the uselessness of our husbands to our girlfriends over a glass of Chardonnay, accept that we need to speak up for what we want and need in terms of support with the mental load.
Before you add *teach husband about mental load* to the mental load list, remember this. It’s an investment. If the discussion is done honestly and vulnerably, it’ll lead to a much more balanced division of the mental load, one that becomes part of how you operate as a team rather than one that needs to be managed by you forever. The first step in having this conversation, and arguably the hardest, is to accurately convey just how heavy that load is (spoiler: trying to do this when you’ve lost your shit because you’ve had to pick up the socks again isn’t the best time!)
So, as an experiment, I decided to create a comprehensive list of the regular mental load items, the things that, over a week, rattled through my head. Firstly, I did this for me and my husband and then, as I talked about it on social media I had more and more requests from people wanting to be able to purchase it. This led to The Mental Load List which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be 47 pages long. The response was unbelievable. It’s sold over 2,000 copies and is still going strong showing that women really are at a point of desperation when it comes to trying to figure out how on earth to get their partners to understand.
When I showed it to my husband, he was shocked and gracious enough to admit that he’d never even considered well over half of the things on the list. He also gently noted that there were perhaps lots of things on the list that weren’t as urgent as I thought they were, and he wasn’t wrong. Just as he was willing to accept that he needed to step up more, I needed to be willing to approach the list with a healthier and less controlling perspective.
Because, that’s the other problem. I’m a control freak and I know that so many of you are too, especially when it comes to the domestic domain. I’ve complained about the mental load and when someone suggests I ask my husband to help, I’ve double down on the martyrdom and replied with things like, ‘He does it so badly, it’s just easier to do it myself,’ or, ‘By the time I’ve reminded him to do it, I may as well have just done it myself.’ While these things may feel true, they’re not. If we really want to balance the mental load, we as women, have to accept that things may not get done the way we would do them. At the end of the day, would you rather be right or happy?
The Mental Load List now has pride of place on our fridge. Every Saturday morning at breakfast, we go through it as a family and allocate jobs to everyone. We decide when those jobs need to be done by and we get on with it. Of course, the kids try to shirk any chores and that’s a constant battle, but do you know who doesn’t try to shirk chores? My husband because he gets it now and accepts it as part of his responsibility because after all, it’s not just my house or my kitchen or my laundry…it’s his house and his kitchen and his laundry too.
And just in case you’re starting to wonder whether I should change my Instagram handle to So Smug Now, please know that it’s not always plain sailing. There are times when both of us don’t do our part, often because we’re tired or busy or forgetful, but mostly because we are human and that’s ok because writing down The Mental Load List has given us the language to talk about it and work it out without losing our shit.
Cat Sims is on Instagram @notsosmugnow. You can purchase The Mental Load List here.