to resent the 'mental load'

[newnameoldme]

i just read the mental load and it gave a name to what i always feel and complain of.. why I and all the other women i know, even those with partners who take on their fair share of parenting voluntarily - we still bear the responsibility of this weight of constantly having to think about everything.
why is everything only our concerns? I resent it both because it's on my back and in my head every minute of the day whilst men are me are largely unfettered by this mental load. I resent that freedom they have!
It's isolating to bear the burden of all this stuff and the resentment overtime poisons relationships.
Do women naturally care more or do we have no choice as men opt out of being bothered by the minutiae of life

i dont think its gender specific, i think it depends what person you are and relationship you are in

Then why is it overwhelmingly women who take on the responsibility?

If your husband isn't like that, then he is the exception which proves the rule, not proof that it's not "gender specific".

My problem with the mental load is that I don't know how to shift it.

For example - I could say to my DH "have you checked to make sure that DS has enough short sleeved t-shirts and pairs of shorts for summer?" and he'll do it. But that defeats the purpose because I still have to bloody ask in the first place. I don't need prompted to consider those sort of things, I just do it. If I do nothing, it's DS who is inconvenienced.

And I'm still having to project manage.

*same as him not having the burden of knowing when to empty the dishwasher.

When it's full, maybe?*

You're oversimplifying. I had to do a month-long residential course to master the subject.

(Am still on the waiting list for the course on how to use bold face effectively.)

Finn you have to individually bold each paragraph.

gherkin* like this?

No like this?*

Oh it's too complicated, I can't do it, can you just take care of it for me?

Like this.

See?

(Each line has * right next to the first letter and immediately after the last character)

I'm always a bit when people say their husbands do stuff like make sure the car is taxed (once a year and you can set up a direct debit), car serviced (once a year, involves 1 phone call and the inconvenience of 1/2 a day without your car) and pay bills (haven't they heard of internet banking or direct debits, its not 1970) .

My husband is lovely, He will do anything I ask. its the having to ask the same as I have to ask my children.

The other thing that drives me batshit is the constant 'do you know where my phone charger/specific shoes/ipad is? What he actually means is 'i'm lying on the sofa and my phone is out of charge, can you go and put my phone on charge'.

I trust we're al bringing up our sons to be very different in the next generation of husbands and partners?

We are the mothers, and yes it might be even more wifework to make sure our sons understand and learn what goes into running a house and bringing up children, but we can turn it round in one generation if we really put our minds to it, so that our daughters don't have to go through the same.

YANBU OP.

It's the same in our house. In fact, I was only talking to dp about this the other day as while at a BBQ at the weekend he constantly went on about all the little shopping trips I'm making on the bank card, in front of everyone! It got tedious after a while, while he may having said it in a jokey way at first, I eventually didn't find it funny as he does tend to go on and on and he did.

I basically told him that fine, you check the fridge for everyday essentials, milk, butter, sandwich fillers for packed lunches etc. You check the cupboards for staples, you decide what we're all having to eat that evening and the next oh and cook it while you're at it.

He finishes work before me and passes three shops on the way home but it's down to me to make sure or the little things are regularly topped up.

It's also been left solely up to me to make sure ds completes homework and to help when needed. He doesn't get involved. Sorting out everything for school, sorting out holiday childcare etc etc Ds clothes, he forgets Ds is constantly growing and needs a size up occasionally. Again he doesn't have to think about ANY of this.

Dp literally walks through the door and can switch off. I walk through the door and cook, clean, check school bags, check uniform for next day, help with homework, help with showers etc etc

In one respect I'm lucky as I only work part time but in my head I never switch off. Actually the above would still apply even if I worked full time.

Dp does work hard, that's why I don't really kick up a huge amount of fuss (except on here and in my head) but I do wish he'd do more to help some of the time.

It feels good just typing it out.

As you were ...

Agree thedevilmademedoit.

It starts in the home, with the messages we give to our sons and daughters by the examples we set

There I one message in this house...
CLOSE THE STAIRGATE
She just went out with the baby and left it open again cue 2 yr old in her room playing make up!
Also entire packet of baby wipes over the bed.

I've shut the door and left it.....
Sorry all really fed up with it this week, dh is on a worktrip and half term has been a long one.

I recognised this a long time ago and have been pushing back since before DC born. My DH is relatively really good but I could quite easily end up with 90% of the mental work load.
I remember when first DC was a baby & we decided to go out for the day and I asked him to pack the baby's day bag. He stood there lost and asked what goes in it?
I replied 'you are supposedly an intelligent well educated man, try to think of everything your baby might need and put it in that bag'.

I still sometimes get asked what DC is wearing that day, everytime I reply 'whatever you choose'.
Also yes to decision making fatigue especially for dinners. He'll happily cook anytime but won't plan in advance what and will always ask me what I want to eat.

Also if DH says we've run out of something I quite often on purpose not buy that thing-this has now resulted in him doing our shopping online. He did try at first to get me to do the list for it ( which would have meant it was me doing the shopping online) but I told him i'd just check his list and add anything.

We're getting there but it's not 50/50 which is my aim.

TheDevilMadeMeDoIt my ds when he lived at home was completely resistant to doing his share but had an impenetrable tactic of always apologising and agreeing to do any task asked of him..then doing absolutely nothing. His room was a hovel and I was forced to constantly complain and nag him to do anything which I resented and worried about how I had produced such a son too! He has evolved after living with gf a year but is still very much 'this is the level of dirt and mess I can live with, if it bothers you then you're welcome to clean it'.

Now my dds are still quite little but I've tried to make sure understand they are responsible for their own mess and also must share household chores

To be honest am reading this thread with my mouth open as it's pretty far removed from my own experience of any relationship I've had. But that's my own experience and everyone is different. But to the poster who is awake at night fretting about making sure her son has enough condoms for his travels - FFS - great way of ensuring this shit lasts another generation.

It's nice to have a name for something that's been bugging me for a while, but which I couldn't articulate.
When we moved in together and I asked DH to put on a load of washing, he stood looking at the washing machine like it was part of an Alien spaceship, and he was helpless against its complexity.
He's a postgrad highly qualified in Engineering who has responsibility for making sure the machines at his plant don't wipe out our entire County. I said Don't tell me you can't figure out a fucking washing machine.
The other thing that pisses me off is trips away.
His trips away- tell me the date, pack his already clean clothes in a suitcase, walk out of the house.
My trips- get yellow bland freezer food in for meals so he's not overwhelmed with actual fruit and vegetables.
Make an itinery of goings on.
Sort out the various things/clothes/bats needed for the goings on.
Put money needed for the events in little envelopes clearly marked.
Sort all clothes out for the amount of time I'm away.
And about a million other things.
I'm now even going there about the bombsite that awaits me when I get back.
Not sure how I've ended up like this really.
If this relationship ends, I won't be living with another man ever.

Problem is that you get a stand off where the person who cares most about tidiness, healthy eating and just general health and efficency is the one who suffers the most stress and crumbles first

This ^

Also, I haven't found a way to share the mental load because part of the issue is the continual balancing and reprioritising. So it needs to all be in one person's head, as it may well be that returning the library books is now lower priority than taking dd1 for new ballet shoes, because the ballet show is on Saturday and the library books dd2 needs for school aren't until next Monday, and the ballet shoe shop is only open at certain times and is the other end of town to library so we can't do both in the time. I can't see how to share that balancing unless I do a full download of all the minutiae every night to DH. Which would be a waste of both of our time.

Problem is that you get a stand off where the person who cares most about tidiness, healthy eating and just general health and efficency is the one who suffers the most stress and crumbles first

This ^

Exactly and it is further complicated by having DC. For instance, I had a long running battle with DP about cleaning the bathroom - apparently they are "self cleaning" that is what the flush, emptying the bath etc is for. However, once we had a DC I wanted the bathroom etc kept clean and safe for her so ended up doing it.

cindrerellasbroom yes to all you just said. it is all in my head, the constant jostling of prioritising and not in his

does anyone have an answer to how to redress that imbalance?

Bought & moved house at 38 weeks pregnant with placenta praevia (all of which I organised, dealt with solicitors, packed boxes, hired van, cleaned up old flat while I had a chest infection and couldn't see my toes). I then had to organise builders, plasterers, electricians to fix it up with a baby with colic and reflux. Yes I could have left it to OH, but it genuinely wouldn't have gotten done for another 6 months and my wangly baby is about to crawl any day now.

What I have done is sacked off all the mental chores that won't benefit me or DD. His family's birthdays? He can bloody well remember and organise a present himself...surprise, surprise, this year they've all had belated cards with a £20 in them! His laundry? I'll stick it through if putting a load on for DD but I'm damned if I'm picking up the pile he's added to the floor because the basket's full! His bread addiction? Seriously, the 5 month old and I are not eating a loaf a day, so if we run out he'll have to go without.

And YY to the sexual repulsion. It's not helped by PND, but when he's getting up 8 or 9 times in the night, when he's covered in vomit, when he's not been able to shower for 5 days; then we'll see how in the mood he feels.

Regarding redressing the imbalance. Did all this change when you moved in together/got married/had DCs? I read a thread a while ago by a poster whose partner seemed to have a personality transplant when they had a baby and I did feel for her as there seemed to have been no previous signs he would change from a sharing the load kind of guy into an absolute bellend.

The first guy I lived with in my early 20s, I remember asking him once if he could clean the toilet. He looked at me genuinely shocked and told me that he didn't think his father had ever cleaned a toilet in his life. I smiled and said not much more but I knew there and then that there would be no future for us, there was no way I was committing to cleaning some man's shit for the rest of my life.

DP does all the cooking in our house, food planning and shopping. I do the dishes. He does all the hoovering. I take out the rubbish. General tidying and cleaning we share. He does most of the laundry as he's home more than me. I supervise DC's homework. We have separate finances so sort our own. He sorts all his family's birthday stuff, I have never started with that. We both have an input into DC birthday planning but I probably do more of that as I enjoy it. He paints and does the garden as I have no interest in it. We both work full time. I attend the DC's school things more than he does as I have more flexible hours.

We didn't plan it like this, it just sort of happened. But he lived alone for 15 years before we met so was used to being self sufficient. As was I.

Really irritated by the "You've let this happen!" brigade.

Clearly, I should have known that when my husband's company sent him to another continent for five years, I should have foreseen the entirely unexpected collapse of my sector in our new country, which meant the new job I'd found to accompany him fell through meaning I became an unemployed trailing spouse by accident. Clearly, I should have foreseen all of that, and divorced him rather than go

Because it's always just that fucking obvious, life, eh?

But, yeah, back in the real world where people aren't clairvoyant, in a society that tells us what women's work is, this shit just keeps on happening. Even to the most ardent feminist. Sigh.

My DH is great and one thing that helps him take on a fair share of the mental load is doing the morning school run 3 days a week (our work patterns mean he does 3, me 2). He prepares the school lunches, if the DC need tuck shop money on his days, he sorts it etc. If he's picking the DC up and I'm working evenings (a fairly regular occurrence), he will sort dinner for those evenings, I just don't take on the mental load at all so he has to shop, plan and cook. The DC will inevitably go to bed later on those days (bc he's not as efficient as me) but they survive.

The only thing I need to 'nag' him about is organising nights out for just the 2 of us. I usually book any holidays and weekends away so I expect him to organise childcare and a restaurant once in a while. He does do it after a few reminders.

IDK if anyone will agree with me here but I see people saying "DH is an engineer with so and so responsibility, don't tell me he can't work out how to use the washing machine" but actually I'm just thinking, I used to work in change management in a pharma company, most of my colleagues and clients were blokes, and there were loads of them who were shit at collaborating and delegating, and really bad at checking, before they did a bit of research, whether someone else had done anything similar. So it feels to me like it's a skill which a lot of blokes are shit at generally. Of course in work they will force themselves out of their comfort zone if they can be convinced it's worth it, but in a relationship I think it's just head in the sand until the divorce papers arrive.

Also has anyone else read the book Wifework? It deals with this sort of thing and there was a figure in there, can't remember it, but it was that a large majority of divorces are instigated by the woman. I was surprised by that when I first read it but 5 years after my kids were born I'm less surprised.

Having said all that I have just texted DH a shopping list for when he leaves work. From here where I am lying, at an outdoor swimming pool, while the kids are at a party. At least if I am still holding the mental load I can make it as light as possible

I'm the bread-winner - DH took early retirement when DS hit school age and is now the at-home parent. DS is in yr8 now, I have very little idea which days his mates usually come round, or when health/medical appointments are booked or which bins go out when. But I am this close >< to writing a list of household chores by day of the week for the little things that add up to big things. Don't leave changing the bed linen because you won't be able to wash it all on the same day - that's why we have a laundry basket. Clean the loo every day. Wipe the kitchen cupboard door handles, not just the doors. Actually, wipe the cupboard doors...