3 Words That Shift the Excessive Mental Load of Mothering and Still Coviding

Motherhood burnout has gotten unquestionably worse since 2020. 

• More people at home more of the time often equals more cleaning, food, and mess.

• For a brief shining moment, everyone said some version of, "Wow, this isn’t easy after all." Then, before the validation could even sink in, everyone went back to 2019 business as usual, despite seeing the systemic imbalance in care tasks, raising children, etc., with their own eyes.

• With the return to “normal,” mothers added to their existing load by taking primary responsibility for keeping everyone as healthy as possible (and caring for the sick even when sick themselves). 

• For still-coviding mothers, we’ve experienced all the above PLUS the seemingly impossible task of finding and affording safe help for care tasks or childcare.

But how does burnout since 2020 look according to the largest statistically significant survey of mothers in the country?

Some excerpts across the years of the pandemic:

o   In 2021, 93% of mothers reported feeling burned out, up 7 points from 2020, and 16% say they feel burned out all the time.

o   In 2022, 47 percent of mothers surveyed are primary income earners, meaning they contribute more than half of their household’s income. Many mothers support their families financially, yet they’re also the primary support (or the “default parent”) for their families in terms of invisible labor—as well as the primary income earners.

o    In 2022, 50% of primary income-earning moms still handled most household chores, up from 40% five years ago. Today, almost half (48%) are family financial planners, meaning moms pay all the bills and manage the household finances.

o   Stay-at-home mothers reported higher levels of burnout in 2022 (55% reporting they “always” or “frequently” feel burnt out) than their working counterparts (11% and 38%, respectively). 

o   In 2023, 58% of mothers report they are primarily responsible for the duties of running a household and caring for children, up 2% over 2022

o   In 2024, 66% of moms considered leaving the workforce last year due to the stress and cost of childcare, up 14% from 2023, and 69% of moms under 30 in 2024 are not planning on having another child, compared to 35% of Millennial moms under 30 in 2019

o   In 2024, only 39% of moms get ONE hour to themselves daily

It does seem harder than ever.

Before the pandemic, I had the benefit of being a solopreneur who learned from many women before me how to run a successful business AND a home. I had process maps, job postings, and access to the mindset of women who created villages of support without family support or ample funds. But when my first child was born two weeks before the world locked down, every single part of my scrappy planning went out the window.

Thankfully, that pre-pan mindset I had built around having support as a mom was recoverable.

Language and Mindset to the Rescue

I’m done with feeling like daily life is a never-ending punishment.

If you’ve read any of my other essays, you know that I’m hunting ways to work within Still Coviding constraints to make small shifts that, in their accumulation, make us feel like we are living an extraordinary life.  Shifting my mindset or blueprint of what life is “supposed” to look like and changing the conditions are two things I’m constantly hacking away at to avoid living in suffering. While hunting on the gram in the middle of a long night, I discovered three words I knew would be magic in our home:

Notice and Do

As a blended family, even with the most supportive of husbands I consider the love of my life, I had already encountered some major collisions with the kids regarding our values and habits surrounding home management. It wasn’t working. I was done improving chore charts and the endless work they seemed to create for my husband and me. As I read the content on her Instagram page, Sam Kelly explained exactly why none of my tactics were helping me feel any less overwhelmed.

I was adding to my already overwhelming, invisible, mental load.

Her approach can be summarized as “NOTICE AND DO,” and while it’s simple, it all hinges on changing our words to change our world. What a perfect fit for the constraints I face: I can use different words to have less load AND, most importantly, to shape our children to see the work of the home as a 100% Team Effort.

"I talked to them about the concept of what we call now 'notice and do's.' So, teaching them how to notice what needs to be done in the house, see a need and then to do it," Kelly explained. "I also started talking to them about these bigger concepts like societal expectations for women and mothers in age-appropriate, understandable ways for each of them, and the importance of breaking that cycle for their futures." Nowadays, instead of telling one of her children to "go unload the dishwasher," Kelly might say instead, "Hey, could you look around the kitchen and just pick one thing to notice and do?"- https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/mom-explains-kids-home/story?id=105690660

Shifting the Invisible Load

I am still struggling.

Shifting from chore charts to teaching them to notice and do, calling it  work not help, nor any other combination of words and new habits have created a carefree life for me. However, since I started implementing “notice and do,” I feel a noticeable decrease my invisible load and a noticeable improvement in our relationships.

I now have a 3-word path into a new future.

Every time I use it, I feel better in the present moment. Any teaching and guidance I provide our children no longer feels like tedious “big-brother” style management. It feels like we are in it together and that I’m giving a gift to the partners and children they may have in the future AND to them. Building up both our 14-year-old AND our 4-year-old’s muscles for noticing and doing feels like some of the most crucial parenting I’ve ever done.

Sure, it takes longer, but it’s already been worth it.

What do these three words have to do with Still Coviding?

Still-Coviders are living a NOTICE and DO lifestyle.

This explains a lot of the conflict we experience as Still Coviders.  The absence of a “NOTICE AND DO” approach in our homes, schools, and most institutions is a massive contributing factor to the current “you do you” carefree attitude of the 2019ers.  We have been taught to check boxes and do “exactly what the teacher says” for so long that we don’t even NOTICE what’s happening around us. Instead, we are told, “LISTEN and DO,” which means that an authority will TELL you exactly what to do. Your job is to do it. Not to question it, not to dig deeper, and certainly not to look at anyone else’s experience besides that authority. That is the job of someone else. The labor of NOTICING and DOING is traded for the absolution of personal responsibility.

We lose some of the most beautiful parts of being human.

No wonder we don’t have villages anymore.

I thought about ALL OF THIS again this morning when I walked into a doctor’s office with an N95, and the unmasked nurse led me into a small room without asking if I wanted her to mask. When I asked her to mask up, she agreed, but not without providing commentary on the dangers she believes masking brought her when she was forced to wear them (she said this while exaggerating the struggle she was having donning her baggy blue). I resolved this with the doctor, who ensured that I had a different, willingly masked nurse, but I was left with the thought about how differently it could have all gone.

If she had NOTICED me, and what I was so clearly communicating with my duckbill N95, she would have DONE the masking. But she was obediently checking the boxes she’s been told to check by the CDC, her employer, etc., and probably never once considered that something else might be happening. Perhaps my mask indicated to her that there was something she was NOT NOTICING, which led to the defensive statements even without any provocation from me other than my request.

Not noticing= not doing=damage.

The Damage of Not Noticing and Doing

We cheat ourselves and others.

We place disproportionate labor on one or more humans in any shared experience. Whether it’s the nurse I encountered today or my 14-year-old, who in the past would ignore cleaning the obviously dirty fridge door while sweeping right in front of it because sweeping, not cleaning, the door was the only thing on his old “chore chart”, it all takes a toll.

That same 14 year old will now NOTICE if I’m slowing down and bring me an ice pack to soothe my arthritic hip. Notice and do has shifted our engagement in the house with each other from me assigning chores to working together and noticing the experience of each other and doing what we can to improve it. This doesn’t happen all the time, but happening sometimes counts A LOT. Having him bring me something for my comfort because he learned to notice and do was not on my bingo card. But here we are. And I’m ever grateful.

The impact of this shift can move us from damage to connection.

A Final Word of Validation for Fellow Mothers:

You and I are not the problem at all. WE ARE DOING PLENTY. We may feel inadequate, but that’s because we’re on the front lines of the problem, which means we’re the ones being hardest hit. We absorb the impact of a broken, still-oppressive social structure so that our children won’t have to.

That makes us heroes, not failures.

No, we’re not oppressed in the same ways that we used to be (nor in the ways other women around the world still are), but make no mistake about it:

In the absence of the village, we’re disadvantaged like never before. We may have more freedoms than our foremothers, but our burden remains disproportionately, oppressively heavy.

– Beth Berry

Let me know what you think about these 3 words, NOTICE AND DO. I believe in letting people in as a first step to rebuilding safe villages for the realities we face. I’m also a big fan of using words to lessen the oppressive heaviness of the current load of motherhood.

P.S.

I’m not affiliated with Sam Kelly, Motherly, or any of the links shared here. The results we have experienced in our own home are from implementing Sam’s free content on Instagram and email marketing.  That said,  I plan to enroll in her audio class (doors open now). If you are already using this kind of practice and mindset, please drop me a line, because I would love to learn in a like-minded community. Together we can learn to create strong foundations of support for each other, and the mothers of the future.