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TOMORROW IS MOTHER’S Day. Yes, the day the clocks go forward for summertime, and we all lose an hour’s sleep. You know, because mums are so oversubscribed with sleep that when they were handing out celebratory days, the one with the least shut-eye seemed the most appropriate.
It never ceases to make me smirk, and it’s just one of the many ironic idiosyncrasies of motherhood, where most of us have to work like we don’t have children and parent like we don’t have jobs. If you ask your mum what she wants for Mother’s Day, she’ll usually say ‘Oh, I don’t want anything,’ but of course she does. Although I’m willing to bet it’s not what you think she wants and is almost always not going to be that panic-bought item you got at the very last minute. I can already feel the eye rolls from those generally tasked with buying the presents (cough, *the dads*).
The marketing boffins would have you believe that the things ‘mums will just adore,’ need to have the word ‘mum’ on it. Go into any retail outlet, and you’ll be met with old reliables like a candle with #1 mum written on it, tea towels with #1 mum written on them, and wine glasses with #1 mum written on them. Anything at all with the world ‘mum’ slapped on it is apparently ‘just what she wants.’
Everything from bath bombs to chocolates, and weirdly foot spas are trotted out as ideal gifts for the mum in your life. I could think of nothing worse than my feet sloshing about in some lukewarm water and having it spill on the mat as I watch the TV. Now, a spa treatment? In an actual spa involving a block of time away from the house? That I’d probably take. Or simply a lie in, as in an actual lie in where there isn’t chaos raining downstairs and I get to drink a hot cup of coffee, before enjoying homemade cards and spending some time with my children that doesn’t involve me having to make any decisions or be the bad cop and just have some fun.
And look, I’ve been that soldier trying to figure out what to get my own mum before I was myself a mum, and it was a head melter. She’d say she didn’t want anything, and to be honest, I can see where she was going with it. She probably didn’t want some tat like a tea towel or mug with the word mum on it or a bath bomb that would most likely give her a rash; all things I probably bought her at some point with the best of intentions, sorry mum. What she always preferred and cherished were the homemade cards and the hugs.
It’s only now that I’m a mum myself that I truly understand what she really wanted and needed was to be seen. Given recognition for all she carried without question or complaint and to be given a break, not just for one afternoon either.
No mum is going to reject a gift, (apart from a foot spa), and gifts that are homemade or have some thought put into them are always welcome. Flowers are usually a safe bet, and I adore those hilarious ‘things about my mum’ sheets my small children bring home from school which are equal parts hilarious and scarily accurate, but what most mums crave is a more equal division of the mental load on an ongoing basis.
Research shows us time and again that it is the mothers who carry the bulk of the mental load of the households, as much as 71% in a recent study. Those tasks included everything from planning meals and arranging activities to managing household finances. If you were to write it down, I’d wager most mums would have penned a War and Peace size encyclopaedia on just what the mental load or invisible tasks of motherhood involve daily.
A study from Irish life coach, Mind Mommy Coaching Laura Guckian, who supports mums through all stages of the journey, found that 90% of mums said “their experience is one of an unequal sharing of responsibilities when it comes to carrying the mental load.”
The term ‘mental load’ gets thrown around a lot, but what exactly is it, and why is it so all-consuming? When you drill down into it, it’s the constant low-level worrying, the thinking ahead, the endless planning and decision-making about the children and family. That’s what women need a break from. To be with your family and not have all of that ticking away in the background all of the time.
To be able to borrow that enviable way some dads seem to walk out the door in the morning without having to give a second thought to any of the invisible tasks that somehow must get done for family life to run smoothly. Like whether it’s a random dress-up day in school later in the week, and what things you’ll need to get. Sorting the kids’ dentist or doctor’s appointment, or the after-school activities and play dates.
Things like is the swimming gear packed, what to make for dinner that week, is the uniform clean for tomorrow, do their nails need cutting, and what about the homework? Are they happy in school? How are their friendships, and as they get older, how to tackle the power of social media and smartphones? It’s the constant mental arithmetic and impressive skill in reverse time-counting required to ensure you have enough time to get your children where they need to be every day and hope there isn’t even one small hiccup along the way, or the entire house of cards will fall on you. And that’s before most mums even get to start thinking about their own working day.
It’s no wonder I walk into a room and forget what I came in for, not because I’m forgetful, it’s because I’ve too much of everything else on my mind.
Mums are feeling burned out, and overwhelmingly, many of us need a change. The same academic study from the University of Bath found that fathers were more likely to see household mental labour as equally shared, while mothers disagreed.
There’s a clear disconnect happening along the way. In one sense, I think that men and women are just hardwired differently, and mums can’t fully switch off the worrying and thinking ahead. There is also the other side of the argument, where dads can feel mums are too controlling or won’t let their partners take on some of the mental load. That’s probably a valid point, and ideally, we’ve got to address the balance, divide things up a little more equally and play to each other’s strengths, but in some partnerships there’s no getting away from the weaponised incompetence that creeps in. When present, it means sharing the load results in chaos or added work for the mums.
Things like, “sure, you’ll get a lie-in, but the kids will be raising hell downstairs, so you won’t get any rest”. Sure, your partner can drop the kids off at school, but they won’t leave on time, their hair won’t be brushed, or collars taken out of their jumpers. Yes, your partner will happily unload the dishwasher, but he’ll leave the masher out on the counter because he’s not sure where it goes. Or let’s go out for a Mother’s Day meal, but you’ll have to cut up the kids’ food like you usually do, wrangle the toddler or walk around with a tired baby and end up eating your food cold anyway. And that’s just the mothers who have partners, we need a round of applause for all the single mums out there doing it all alone.
Mums need to put down some of the mental load, but they will only do so when they know it’s going to be carried by their partner in equal fashion. So forget foot spas, that’s a gift every mum wants this Mother’s Day.
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance writer and wrangler of two small boys, who is winging her way through motherhood, her forties and her eyeliner.
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