The ‘mental load’

Agree.

It’s the doing, the thinking, the expecting, the observing, the remembering, the anticipating, the considering for the entire family that keeps things running.

Indeed. And I'm the one who has organised every party, birthday and Christmas celebration for the past 25 years.
If he did something "equal but different" it wouldn't be so bad.

We’ve just done some insurance renewals and it really did not take five minutes - more like hours. And how does writing your Christmas cards take five minutes?

The usual issue is that, for example, if two people have full time jobs and only one of them ends up doing all the admin and organising for a family, then that actually IS a significant amount of time and effort.

It’s not just renewing the home insurance. It’s all the financial stuff plus making sure everyone has everything all the time, from kids’ clothes and school uniform and presents for parties and confirming the flu vaxes and making sure the ingredients for food tech are bought and ready and school trips are paid and lost clothes retrieved from lost property and piano lessons are booked and babysitters organised and flowers sent to granny who’s had a minor op, etc. etc., and to do ALL of them, whilst someone else scrolls on their phone or whatever, is fucking annoying and unfair.

I really like what people call the mental load. I enjoy all the detail and feeling on top of everything, having my lists and spreadsheets. I think I’d find it quite stressful if I wasn’t across it all- must be the control freak in me.

No I don’t cringe at all. It was a revelation to me when it first started being discussed when I was a young working mother. It allowed me to challenge my DH and enabled me to get him to do more.

No I think it's good recognition of how too often women carry the burden of remembering and organising more than men.

Yep. The mental load, otherwise known as "life".

Absolutely not!

Mental load = unpaid, and underappreciated domestic labour, usually performed by women

Who cringes?

That's the question

No, the mental load is a good term for something that can feel horrendously stressful. It's having 100 tasks, many involving complex steps like 'make friends with X's mum', to remember and execute on top of, in many cases, a full time job. It's a great catch all term for all the work, thought, planning and effort that goes into a family life.

@WhereIsMyLight nails it - this is what it feels like. Also working full time. While an awful lot of DHs go to work, maybe do a hobby, but have no fucking clue how everything else gets done. It’s exhausting.

No. I think it is a very reasonable term.

I am semi running 2 households at the moment and it is a lot to juggle.

It isn't so much reactive tasks, as ones you have to be proactive about.

If the load is below your threshold it is easy. Once you get full/overloaded it becomes burdensome.

Some people use the mental load incorrectly to say “I can’t book a holiday”. Or probably more accurately they’re saying “I don’t want to book a holiday because I’ve also meal planned every meal for the last 20 years and organised every extra curricular and every child’s party and every set of birthday presents and when the children outgrew their clothes I bought more and when it was PE day I made sure they had their kit and organising buying the teachers and teaching assistants end of term presents and researched family activities for the weekend and packed toys when we’ve travelled and made sure the nappy bag always had enough nappies and change of clothes. I’m tired, feel unappreciated and I would like the other person in my “partnership” to plan one thing to contribute to our life.”

Let’s be honest, it’s often not just at home that women are carrying the mental load, it’s at work too. Who is decorating colleagues desks before they leave to get married or have a baby? Who is circulating cards and keeping track of milestone birthdays? Who is remembering things like MacMillan coffee morning? Who is making sure guests in the office have a drink and knows where the kitchen/toilets are? Who is making sure meeting rooms are prepped?

It’s not about understanding it, it’s the fact that it’s yet another everyday occurrence that’s been given a special name and dressed up to make it sound more important.

It’s like people who claim they have ‘mental health’, we all do and we all have a mental load, just some are better/worse than others.

Some blokes really are rubbish though 🤣

No because I have a hard mental load . People who have a small mental load might mock it.

Yes, and? It's something that needs to happen that one half of a parenting couple tends to do, with all the bits the pp listed, whole the other had no idea it involves all that and is oblivious to all of it, so doesn't understand why the organising parent gets pissed at them when they dismiss the effort involved or want to go out until 30 mins before.

You don't know any single parents?

This nails it for me
Its not always about the doing
Often its about never being able to switch off and always having to think ahead to manage everything
Someone once described it as having 100s of tabs open at once.

No. Yabu is it just because it is women that discuss it that’s bothers you?

What's it called then? For example at a kids birthday when one parent (usually the mum) researches party venues, finds out classmates parents numbers, sends out invites, chases them up, remembers all the kids dietary needs, books the venue, sorts out lifts for kids whos parents are busy, orders or makes a cake, organises party bags, buys and wraps presents, remembers candles and matches, sorts out decorations, and the other parent turns up, hands over presents and sings happy birthday?

None of those things on their own are time consuming or difficult (also perwonally i find the mental enegry nweded to remember everything is a lot on top of working full time in a very demanding job). I don't think it's wrong to want a word to describe the work that goes into things like that, which some people (the parent who turns up) just doesn't 'see'. And overall I think it's positive that people are starting to talk more about this previously invisible 'wife work' and want some recognition for it, the same way that paid work outside the home is seen as being a valuable but mentally draining contribution

Yes I do. It's just life and to be honest a lot of people like to over complicate their lives and then moan about it.

Will add that my view may be tainted by the fact that I was a single parent for years, although I'm not now.

Absolute nothing to do with me trying to be a 'cool girl' or being super organised, because I'm definitely not either.

No, I think it’s a very useful term to describe the weight of managing and remembering everything.

No I don’t. It’s a perfectly accurate phrase to describe the juggle of life, and to some degree, everyone has some kind of ‘mental load’. But as others have pointed out, what that is varies vastly from person to person, depending on many factors. It’s all relative, like so many things. I also think people react to what other people describe as mental load based on what sort of mental load they’re having. If you’ve got a lot going on (and I mean properly going on) listening to someone saying they haven’t had time to book a holiday and what a big mental load that is, that’s very annoying.

But I’d also say be very careful before you judge people. The other day, I was sitting alone in a cafe with a coffee, in the middle of the day, no kids with me, on my phone. I’m quite sure someone looking at me might think, ‘wow, she’s so lucky, not working, sitting with a coffee and no kids.’ What they wouldn’t have seen was that I was having the most stressful day and my mental load was at an all time high. Without giving too many details, things are not good at all, and I have never felt the mental load so heavily.

Also, as others have said, it does also depend on your partner and how much mental load they take on.

I would also say that some people do sometimes make too much of stuff that I would consider more day to day life than mental load. But again, everyone’s ability to cope with things and organise things varies. It’s complicated.