Crunchy Super Mom Show Ep #013 Dealing With the Heavy Mental Load

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This episode of the Crunchy SuperMom show was inspired by all of the work at home parents (and we are including the “stay at home parents” in that group because they DO work!) and their heavy mental load. Often it is the person who manages the household that will carry the invisible burdens and manage the mental load all on their own. It can be frustrating and demoralizing when no one recognizes or appreciates the work you do. In this episode, we are going to show you how creating routines and sharing them with your partner can make all of the difference for both of you.

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The Heavy Mental Load

Just to be up front at the beginning, we are both work at home moms so we will be referencing moms a lot because we are talking about our own thoughts and feelings. However, we feel these thoughts really do pertain to both moms and dads and we don’t want to exclude anyone. Additionally, we could do a whole show on the issues and emotions that a work outside the home mother or father have to deal with. But for today, we are going to limit ourselves and talk about the parent that stays home, does the unseen work, and carries the bulk of the mental load.  We are going to show you how creating routines and sharing them with your partner can bring relief from the heavy mental load.

Mental Load Examples

Just to get you thinking about your own mental loads, I will share an example from my own life. First, because I feel like bashing my poor husband here, I have to say that my husband does so much work around the house and truly never stops working or sits down to relax unless I am relaxing with him. So this isn’t even about an unequal workload. It is simply about how I was not sharing the routines here and how it caused a breakdown in the system for me and a heavy mental load.

I was super pregnant and already rather cranky one day when I asked my husband to start our kitchen towels/napkins in the laundry. How I “start the laundry” vs. how my husband started the laundry that day were very different. He literally just grabbed the laundry, put it in, used the rest of the detergent….BAM! DONE! Being nine months pregnant, I about lost it when I saw that he left rags sitting on the counter and didn’t include them in the laundry, that he left a dirty laundry basket for me to wipe out, that he used the rest of the detergent and didn’t put more in the container we use, and that he hadn’t taken the already dry clothes out of the dryer or even made sure there was a laundry basket readily available to put the laundry in after it was done. I literally felt somehow like he had just ignored every need I had at that moment. Which seems silly now, but it really isn’t. While he didn’t deserve the harsh criticism that I gave him for that, he did need me to tell him and explain to him how simply putting in the laundry wasn’t enough. I needed him to really see, and understand, the whole of what I do and understand that if there is a breakdown in the routine, it causes so much more work later.

Understanding the routines

This example I gave is just one tiny laundry issue that I typically would have never said anything about except that I was pregnant and cranky. But it made me think about how often we don’t really see the invisible work that a work at home parent does and how the work outside the home parent can literally just do a task and never really understand the important routines and mental processes that allow things to run smoothly at home. And because they don’t really understand the routines, they don’t truly know how to help and this means that the work at home parent has to continually ask for help, explain themselves, and just generally try to make their partner understand. And I would say that if you have to even ask someone to do a task, that is a huge mental load in and of itself and you might end up thinking that it is just easier to do it yourself.

Our partner’s need to already know what we need and be willing to truly pay attention to what we do and be able to step in as seamlessly as possible. And for them to be able to do that, we have to be able to explain what we need (we cannot expect them to know or understand without verbalizing it and even sharing examples), develop and share routines, and even assign tasks to each other. If we can do that with our spouses, the mental and emotional load will be shared and that is huge.

Impeding the flow

Not only can a partner not understand the routines, they can also impede the household “flow” which can be critical to keeping your mental load manageable. A personal example of impeding my flow would be throwing dirty laundry in front of the washer instead of in the dirty clothes basket 2 feet away from the washer. Tossing them on the floor removes my walk space so i can’t even get to the laundry machines and it makes me crazy. I literally will not go in there and do laundry if there is a pile in my walkway. Those kinds of things ruin my flow and jam up my brain quickly. Visible disorder slows me down tremendously. In the early years of our marriage when we had one baby it wasn’t so hard for me to manage but now, with more kids, I have to include him in some of those mental processes or it starts to impact our relationship.

 Develop routines to automate your life

It is mentally exhausting to literally feel like you are managing everything AND doing all of the work in a household. This is why you need to develop a routine with your partner that you both know and understand. This will allow you to run your lives on “autopilot” and it will eliminate much of the mental load you were carrying. If you both know the daily, weekly, monthly, etc. routines, you will not have to think about them and it will free you up mentally. It will also allow your partner to step in easily to pick up tasks that didn’t get done without you having to explain what you need to have done.

Delegate

After you develop the routines, divide up tasks and delegate some to your partner and/or your children. Having things that you can literally not have to worry about again can free up your brain tremendously. Having a routine in place that the entire family understands helps us communicate, feel more like we are working together as a team, and can greatly reduce the emotional and mental burden.