Mental Load - Part 2
This is my second post on the things I’ve learned about mental load. Read the first part here.
Thanks so much for the warm reception of the first post. I’m continuing to learn and grow and you’ve all help me do that. I’ve seen some great comments and questions on Facebook and Twitter that I wanted to speak to from my perspective. These are just my opinion and thoughts - I’m continuing to learn about mental load - these are all based on my experience.
I classified them in two groups, Problems and Tools.
Problems
ADHD
Although undiagnosed, I suffer from the majority of the symptoms of ADHD w/ Anxiety. I’m on medication for several of these symptoms. I also routinely see a therapist, which has been very helpful - I’d recommend everyone have a therapist!
You can imagine that means that certain things are more difficult or require additional energy to manage. I like to use lists, whiteboards, calendars - any sort of organizational structure is a huge help to me. I’ll go from completely overwhelmed to knowing exactly what the next steps are by focusing in on classification and organization.
Strategic Incompetence
Strategic incompetence is when I make a choice to NOT do something well in order to not be responsible for it. This is something that I do consciously and sometimes not. Here are some examples:
Do a terrible job loading the dishwasher, doing laundry, cleaning, etc
Don’t inspect the restaurant order before bringing it home
I know all the dinosaur names, but I don’t know the names of my children’s teachers or friends.
This is very frustrating. I learned that I don’t need to do the dishes perfectly to get them cleaned. Cleaning isn’t difficult - motivating myself to clean is.
Strategic incompetence allows me to use my time for the thing I want, leaving it up to my wife to get it done. Considering that we both want a functioning household, this doesn’t seem fair.
Invisible Labor in the Workplace
This one really chafes me as a leader. Handling mental load in the workplace is also a thankless task. Tasks need to be managed, notes need to be taken, followup communication must be sent. And there are roles specifically for this. When that role is not purposely filled, it tends to fall to a single person to pick up everyone else’s slack - because “no one else will.”
As a leader, it is my responsibility to make sure that everyone is on the same page, that everyone knows what’s going on, notes are taken, schedules updated, etc. If there is someone on the team who has that as part of their role - great! If not, I’m taking notes. I’m writing follow ups. In general, I try to not let that responsibility be ambiguous, because I know that by default that burden will be placed on someone and remain unrecognized. Ideally, there is someone on the team who is assigned every task, but when there isn’t, I try to not take for granted that someone else will step in. Being conscious about this at work helps me be aware of this at home and vice versa.
Parenting vs Babysitting
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard - “I can’t go out tonight… my turn to babysit”. I’ve definitely said things like this when my kids were little. By referring to myself as the babysitter, I’m implying that my wife is the default caregiver and it’s only on me to step in when she can’t. But we’re both parents and thinking of myself as the babysitter just absolves me of parental responsibility, when we should be sharing it equally.
I found that a lot of times, I was a spectator in my family. Instead of waiting for someone to ask me to do something involving my kids, I should be looking for needs that I can meet and taking the initiative to act.
Tools
Premarital Counseling
I can really only speak from my experience, but I wish we had focused more on creating an equitable household. A lot of the things that we spent time talking about weren’t the things that I feel we needed coaching on. Working on evenly distributing our mental load would have been an invaluable lesson to learn before we were living together under one roof.
Lists
As an ADHD-ite, lists are invaluable. Did you know that you can share an Apple note and both parties can edit it? There are plenty of digital list tools and virtual assistants that can help with this.
A good example of this is a shared grocery list. I’ve tried to stop asking “what do we need from the store?” - I can look in the pantry, the fridge, ask the kids (they’ll know). I can add items to a list as I notice that we need them instead of trying to put a list together immediately before walking out the door. “Alexa, add Doritos to the shopping list.”
Calendar
When my wife said something like “what’s on the calendar?” in response to my questions about our plans, I used to take that personally, as slightly less than passive aggression. Here’s the thing, asking something like “do we have plans this weekend?” would require her to look at the calendar. I was affectively saying “look at the calendar for me and tell me if we have plans this weekend.”
Her asking what the calendar said (or bank account, school schedule, whatever) was her saying “I don’t know this information off the top of my head, it will need to be looked up.” I started taking it upon myself to take the first action. “Hey - I looked at the calendar and saw that we don’t have anything scheduled, so unless you need me here, I’ll be at the fish store.”
