Is the "Mental Load" exaggerated.

[whatnow123]

I know the concept of the "mental load" gets a lot of discussion, so bear with me here. My wife and I have three kids (twins who are 5 and an 8-year-old), and I used to agree that I didn’t carry my share of the mental load. But two years ago, my wife got a big promotion that required her to work away a lot, so I condensed my hours and took over most of the household tasks—cooking, cleaning, organizing, etc.

The first couple of months were chaotic, but soon things settled. Life felt more relaxed without the usual structure: bath times and bedtimes slipped a bit, the house wasn’t always tidy, favorite clothes weren’t always washed, I’d order takeout when family visited, and holidays were planned last minute etc etc Yet, there were no real issues.

Now that my wife is home more, she's stressed about how things are organised and once again the "mental load" is bringing her mood down. She admitted that it seriously annoyed her how lax i was with things, but obviously she wasn't home a lot so had to ignore.

Am I being unreasonable to think that much of the stress of the “mental load” comes from pressures we put on ourselves, and that with the right mindset, it doesn’t have to be anywhere near as overwhelming?

Exactly

From your first op the fact that you just think mental load is the basic household chores means you've misunderstood 'mental load'. It's all the stuff that you haven't even considered was a chore. The ensuring h/w is done/ buying of clothes/ uniform/ costumes/ items for achool and clubs, organising bdays / parties and presents and getting them to parties and buying presents for other kids ! Play dates.

Dentist appointments/haircuts/ taking to clubs. It's all those little things that you keep juggling up in the air whilst working a full time job and keeping the house clean.

So much more than just keeping the house in order. The clue is in the name ' mental load'

I sympathise Op!! There's a bit too much focus on how hard it all is by mums here. Different people have different standards, regardless of whether they are mums or dads. Those with higher standards tend to put greater mental pressure on themselves. Or, if thy are not fair, put greater mental pressure on the person responsible. Families should be a partnership, with an agreement on what standards are acceptable to both.

tbh, I'm in your camp Op. The world won't end if there's a bit of dust, or you have the occasional take-away! You managed the important stuff fine - be proud.

Mental load has nothing to do with dust.🙄

Mental load isn’t ‘a joke’ if you’re the person who bears it. What a silly thing to say.

It isn’t even about who does it the most chores (though it is usually the one who bears the mental who does most). It’s about involuntarily being project manager for the home and having to remember everything. I am this person in our house. My husband does try, but years of living out these roles (forged during maternity leave and ensuing part-time work for me) has left us with this dynamic. In our case it’s also that I am genuinely better at remembering and organising (though I couldn’t say how much of this is societal conditioning).

It means that, although we both work full time, I’m the one who knows what kit is needed on which days, whose club/matches are taking place when, who is going where at the weekend and I come up with all the logistics for these (often complex) plans, as well as keeping an eye on all household tasks (and delegating of course). He will happily do any job I assign, but I have the overall plan in my head and he doesn’t. If I forget something, there’s no safety net; if he forgets, I’ll be there to remember. It is a pressure that never goes away.

There is no time for this stuff if you work full time in a busy job; it has to be squashed in at the edges. Of course it’s exhausting.

I agree with a pp; OP has come on here to shit all over women. Well done super dad.

You said ‘all was fine’ but it clearly wasn’t fine for yr OH.

If I ran a tight ship (as I kind of imagine she did) then handed the baton to my OH, I would expect a similar standard of planning, house work etc. and I would be stressed by the lack of planning that you mentioned.

I’m not sure if other people have already said it, as I have not RTFT, but if so I haven’t spotted you picking up on it in your responses OP….

and that is that part of the task when running a household includes considering your partner and the stress they are under, especially when you are doing more parenting/working less hours.

The example you gave about your last min holiday to Butlins is (reading between the lines) probably a great example. There was a row about it and your take-away is that, in the end, the kids had a great time. But perhaps, assuming your wife was also on that holiday with you, she was wanting a break with elements she would have enjoyed more. Of course, holidays are often child focused when you have a family, but I can completely relate to the idea that if you’re working abroad and long hours and you have a week off with your family you might want to be in a place that feels like a bit of a treat for you too. Perhaps you might even want the chance to reconnect with your partner a bit.

That doesn’t mean you should have spent all day at home with the marigolds on, in order not to disappoint your wife. When she was away abroad then, on a day to day basis, of course there’s more leeway - there are people to consider day to day. Maybe your wife did not do anything to make your life personally more pleasant or easier when you were working more hours, so you feel it’s just a quid pro quo.

However, relationship maintenance is also part of mental load and an important part of sustaining family life. So if the best you can do for your partner is a last minute holiday to whatever is available, regardless of the fact you know her preferences, it doesn’t surprise me that she was upset. If you factor “holding your partner in mind” into your list of essential tasks, I think you’d soon find you had more to think about - and perhaps agree you missed a trick when you were on duty.
Even getting a cleaner in on the occasional Friday so she walked off a plane and into a clean and tidy home would have said “I know you, I care about your feelings and I want to welcome you home and create some space for you to relax”.

But perhaps you did that all the time and just didn’t mention it.

Because the OP believes as a man that he is right and that women make it hard for themselves and a man would never do that.

He's right, men never make anything hard for themselves. They expect women to though

almost everything you describe is physical load. perhaps forgetting to wash favourite clothes is mental load. and not planning a holiday is mental load.
the mental load is remembering short, mid and long term things and planning in time...
this is the mental load that springs to mind. Are these things shared? Do you have a system where you can pass the reigns between each other easily? do you both know passwords and your filing systems (whether paper on on a cloud)? If one of you has bad flu for 3 weeks (yes, old fashioned bad flu) would the other one know where to pick up?

short term: family and school friends gifts for parties, packed lunch stuff in the fridge on a sunday night, booking afterschool club, paying the parking ticket, not getting a parking ticket because you read the signs in Lidl, homework, reading record, passwords for the supermarket shop account, a quick check of the credit card statement so that all transactions are recognised, paying the window cleaner, going to the cash point to make sure there's always £30 in the bedside drawer

mid-term: house insurance, date of MOT and car insurance, dentist appointments, half term plans for childcare, school uniform purchase before they outgrow it, plan the kids own parties and send out invites, budgeting by month, knowing incomings and outgoings by month, knowing when large payments or instalments are due, the best deal on HP cars, or buying outright, holidays, passwords to login and book parents evening, clearing out things for the charity shop, house improvements, house maintenance, servicing the heating, putting away the garden furniture

long-term: pensions, life insurance, mortgage rates, savings, aspirations, secondary school catchments, moving house

OP I am really worried that you don't know know what mental load is. And if you don't know what it means, it means you're not aware and engaged with all of family life and its structures and people's needs. If you're coming here and naming a load of physical tasks as mental load, I fear you're not living in reality and you're trying to convince (gaslight?) your wife that "mental load" doesn't exist.

If you're not aware of anything I've listed above, its highly likely your wife is doing all the above and more. And your brain is stuck in some kind of invented reality that what you do is enough because you cook and clean?

This is it exactly. Thank you. I carry the mental load in our house. It's fucking heavy. Sometimes my partner will innocently ask a simple question - "Shall we go to the Co-op before or after the kid's party?" That was today's question. I lost it. I get furious because I am required to do ALL the brain work, make all the decisions, manage ALL the logistics. It's a huge burden and I say that as an organised, efficient person who is good at dealing with authorities and managing complex projects. My partner does shopping, cooking, cleaning on an equivalent level but that isn't what mental load is.

I stand by that 90% of the stuff on these lists that keep being posted is complete bollocks and over management. A list earlier included a load of Halloween rubbish such as buying a pumpkin, pumpkin carving tools, costume, snacks, decorations. We got a cheap plastic mask as kids and off we went with a carrier bag, parents did bugger all towards it. Just drop half the shit you think kids need to do with clubs and stuff. Emails remind you of most things like mots and services, dentists contact you for appointments etc. Family life has become so micromanaged, parents didn’t used to care that much and it worked fine.

I’ve just read a list where one of the entities was fucking ASPIRATIONS! What the hell, I’m done!

I find it odd that this list doesn't mention anything to do with work. My DP works an administrative role which has zero stress and absolutely no call on free time outside work; I work a managerial role where I have to manage a large team and all the shit that comes with people, plus how am I going to manage the inevitable budget reductions and cuts that are coming our way, which means early mornings/late nights/weekend shifts, and making sure the mortgage and groceries can still be paid. If you're not equally sharing the mental load associated with work and earnings it cannot be expected that the domestic load will be equally shared.

This👍

Too people = Two different ways

Mental load stress gets pushed onto the kids.
OP didn't seem incompetent just not nitpicking perfect or just did it his way.... he's the parent too.
Plumped cushions, wallcharts and all meals made from scratch adds very little to childhood....now Butlins and a holiday will be remembered ☝️

Sorry Butlins and a good take Away....a well I'm only hoomin

Must say sounds like OP has done a good job. Why should everything be a show home / have the perfect elf on the shelf plan.

Why can't people accept that people are different and have different standards and it is not directly correlated to female = perfect thoughtful being, male = hopeless slob always trying to cut corners.

I was the one taking the main ML for first 10 years and DP has taken the main ML for the last 8 years (IE switched from 80/20 to maybe 30/70).

Some things stressed me out, some things stress him out, they are sometimes the same but frequently not. Overall the house runs better now, maybe we had more fun then....

There are many men (well documented on Mumsnet, and sadly still probably the majority) who are totally crap but there are also many men who get it, and pull their weight.....and dare I say there are some women who are stressy / competitive / controlling.....

Sounds as if your wife trusted you to do the household tasks to a decent standard and u just ran a sloppy mess. Not cool OP. Not cool at all.

I think you've misunderstood my list. The mental load of the family was all I wanted to list. Work is a different topic.
I am all too aware of your situation. I am the main earner, and the person who carries the mental load too. My husband doesn't even know how to log on to the bank, who our mortgage is with, if we have life insurance, how to book after school club, how to turn on a washing machine, what I earn, what he earns, etc he regularly gets parking tickets at Lidl as he can't manage to remember to scan his receipt. Doesn't matter how many times, his brain resets itself like a goldfish. I live in a constant state of anxiety whilst I am working a bloomin heavy-responsibility job of all the things he's forgetting and losing and all the fines he's getting, and how I might be able to text him to prevent such things whilst on some important Teams call whilst presenting etc.

Did you half-arse it because in the back of your mind, you knew that her absence was temporary and she would be back to sort things out eventually? The thing about those things that you mention, they can go on for relatively short periods and nobody dies, but try living like that indefinitely. When appointments are continually missed, school stuff forgotten, birthdays overlooked, party invitations missed, kids are grumpy/acting up in school because they are tired due to regularly slipped bedtimes, teased because they are dirty/smelly/in dirty clothes/greasy hair because of missed baths, that's when you truly understand what the mental load adds up to.

That’s a ridiculous response. They are married and live together, so one person’s finances affect the other’s. This also reminds me of the excuses/simplistic thinking I hear from parents when neither of them has remembered to, eg, consent to their child going on a school trip. Some appear to think it reasonable to argue it’s not their problem, because it was the other parent’s turn or responsibility to remember to to do it. They don’t appear to care it’s always their child’s problem and, as people who both have parental responsibility, always their problem to think about. Why is the default always to ape the most selfish attitudes in society? Have we not had enough of emulating men, yet?

what's the problem? people's aspirations are part of the mental load. things each partner would like to achieve one day are important. aspirations the kids might have about studying or learning are important, aspirations of the family are important, a place they'd all like to visit, or a skill they'd all like to learn. For some things its possible to plan and save. In a partnership its respectful to understand your partner's aspirations. In a partnership its respectful to understand you may have an aspiration that's not possible right now (do an ironman), but there's nothing wrong with doing a few things in the short and mid term (a sea swim, a 10K) to one day get there, even if its 20 years away.

I'm sorry but this is totally a "you' problem. You don't need to do this so why do you?

I honestly think a lot of women enjoy it secretly, even if only so they can moan as about it afterwards

EXACTLY this. Planning, coordination, conception, formulating, etc are 90% of the work and execution is 10%.

so the OP only focused on execution (and not well at all, bedtime routines should NEVER slip) and is wondering why his wife is upset about having to take over the mental load.

oh please do mumsnet yourself off here and stop being such a twat. go and drink another glass of cheap plonk from the corner shop and bore someone else. She does need to do it. how else does her family function? how else do her kids get the safe and organised space they are entitled to live in?

It all needs to be done. I do it. That’s the issue.
What don’t you get?