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Sharing the Mental Load with Friends
More mindf*cks of motherhood
For a few weeks, one of my best friends is staying with us. She flew here from the east coast with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and after a year of semi-isolation, their energy in the house feels like a gift. They’re sleeping in my daughter’s room and my daughter is sleeping in my room. “It’s like we’re having a sleepover every night,” mine told me, as she stuck a bookmark in her copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret the other night. It feels like nature really is healing, as the internet would say.
But with a toddler in the house, the labor of motherhood is more visible. My kids are now 12 and 9 and they need me much differently and (some days) much less than they used to. The presence of a two year old reminds me of how it used to be: the cuteness and also the constancy, the snacks and naps, mini-emotional storms and tiny toys, the long stretch of afternoon during which one must submit to a certain ennui, cycling through games and songs. All day long, this precocious child makes us laugh, but the tiredness at the end of the day is bone deep. Yesterday, my friend’s daughter helped me bake, standing on a stool beside me in the kitchen, giggling as she slapped the bread, dough and I had a sudden thought.
Do you think any fathers have ever done this? I asked my friend.
Baked with a toddler? Yes, she said.
No, stayed together in a house with their kids like this, I said. I’m trying to imagine it: one dad with older kids and another dad with a toddler, just…hanging out.
She laughed, and we continued the conversation, marveling at the fact that it was near impossible to imagine fathers sharing the labor of parenting this intimately, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning, folding laundry together while children banged on pans or did their homework. Surely fatherhood is a part of some men’s friendships, but is it ever shared like this? Why not?
These questions are part of a much larger inquiry for me, a lifelong curiosity about how gender shapes our experiences of life. I’m particularly interested in the work of motherhood, in the ways that the cult of the ideal mother looms over us all, ensuring that women take on the brunt of the work involved and…
