A British Horizons report recently found that 72% of working moms feel it’s their job to stay on top of kids’ schedules, and 52% are facing burnout from the weight of these responsibilities.
I remember preparing for our first trip with our daughter. She was 6 months at the time and I had a thousand things running through my mind. Packing her diapers, ordering enough boxes of her formula, packing her bottles and bottle cleaning brush, putting in a few daily-wear clothes, outdoor clothes and a few sets that would keep her warm, remembering to buy her first bathing suit along with a floating tube…the list seemed endless. While I was preoccupied with packing my bag and making sure I didn’t forget anything important that my daughter would need, my husband was mostly concerned with packing his own.
When invisible labour spills over from home to work…
While women are used to doing the grunt work at home, most women don’t realise that they subconsciously end up picking up other’s slack at work too. How many times have you found yourself providing emotional support to a colleague? Do you often help your co-workers navigate work/life challenges? According to an article in Harvard Business Review, women leaders are more likely to be exhausted and chronically stressed at work as compared to men in similar roles – because of invisible labour.
It is no secret that women are greater supporters of emotional and mental wellbeing, diversity, and equity and inclusion at their workplace. However – despite our qualities – for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 86 women are promoted. And yet, women get 44% more requests than men to volunteer for “non-promotable” tasks at work. A “non-promotable” task can be as monumental as organizing your company’s annual fundraiser or as offhand as researching and reserving the right place for a team dinner.
And once we are home, the cycle continues…
Check this out – One evening, my husband and I returned home together from our respective work places. When I stepped in, I knew I had to make dinner, sit with my daughter to understand what she did at school that day and check to see if she’d been assigned any homework, put the dirty pile of clothes for wash and fold the laundry. The list was endless. My husband, on the other hand, plopped himself in front of the TV, kicked off his shoes, and waited for me to serve dinner.
The scope of invisible labour extends far beyond house chores. When you are a parent, your kid’s schedule needs to be managed, it’s important to research classes and schools to attend, arrange playdates, remember their friends’ names, their parents’ names, their birthdays and make sure to get a gift for their birthdays. Who is weighed down by this mental load? It’s mostly the mother in most cultures. How often do we see fathers taking the onus of communicating with the teachers, keeping track of all the upcoming holidays, and making sure the time is filled with holiday-themed activities? If you are lucky enough to have help, the recruitment of such help, scheduling and delegating of tasks becomes a part of the mother’s workload. Everything goes on a to-do list, and the act of running this to-do list is exhausting.
Share the load…Now…
There came a point where I was about to crash and burn. It happened when my daughter was about 1.5 years old. I realized it wasn’t healthy for me to go on like this. So, I did what I should’ve done from the very beginning – I told my husband that we needed to share the load, and not just the tasks, but the management of them. After explaining to him what I had been taking on and how much it was affecting my emotional and mental well-being, he stepped up. It happened gradually, but I can say we’ve reached a point where if we both enter the house together, no one’s plopping themselves on the couch anymore until all the ‘invisible work’ is done!
Here are three things that have helped me better handle invisible labour.
- I understood and internalised that everything does NOT have to fall on my shoulders. I now take on only as much as I can.
- I prioritize and take rest. The to-do list is never going to truly end. There’s always something new that’s going to crop up. Just because my task list is never-ending, doesn’t mean I have to work in a never-ending fashion. When I feel overwhelmed – at work and at home – I take some time off to just be.
- I ask for help. At home, I’ve asked my husband to look into our daughter’s homework and clean the dishes after dinner. At work, I get co-workers involved to help me with tasks that fall outside the purview of my job description.
Don’t let the monster called invisible labour get the better off you. After all, even wonder woman can take on only so many monsters!
Munira Rangwala
Motherhood comes naturally to most. It didn’t come naturally to me. But that doesn’t mean I love my baby any less for it. Hi, I’m Munira and I’m from India. I love to travel, read, and dance and I can’t wait to explore the world with my world, my daughter.
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