There’s a deafening level of noise as school resumes and it’s the sound of moms everywhere. It’s moms making pediatrician appointments, moms scheduling before-school-starts-classroom-meetups at the park, it’s moms getting the letter from school with the class assignments finding the other moms so their kids will know whose in their class. It is moms updating the master calendar for after school and childcare, and it is moms realizing the kids’ backpacks and lunchboxes from last year are filthy and have holes and ordering new ones before the first day of school.
It’s moms realizing the weather is turning and the kid’s pants are all too small and the only shoes that still fit are their sandals. It is mom cleaning out the closets and thinking about how there will be Labor Day sales this weekend so it might be a good chance to stock up on leggings and underwear.
It’s moms on the school Facebook group and in my texts and emailing me and getting called from the after school program to check on required medical forms. It’s moms in this cyclical season of administrative hell that is getting the entire family up and running for the next 10 months with as much smoothness as possible. It’s moms who are silently venting at the Google calendar that every after school program starts on a different day of a different week, meaning the first two weeks there are five out of seven days when you have no childcare after 2:40 p.m.
I’m admittedly interested-but-bored by the resigned explanations around gender roles and the invisible/emotional labor dynamic. I’ve read so many of the articles that end with a shrug and the suggestion that maybe “mom should just do less” and dad will notice the negative consequences. Or that we should have a visible list that we share and really split those tasks 50-50. Because it… doesn’t work?
I decided to Google “do women have better executive function than men?” and received a hilariously straightforward result:
The side of emotional / invisible labor that I’m more interested in interrogating is the one that’s are based on perpetuation by social structures. So, the ones where even if you put dad down as the contact at school, the administration still calls mom when the kid is sick. The one where whenever there’s a playdate, one mom texts the other mom, even if provided dad’s number. (Or, the one where you do approach the dad for a playdate and he gives you his wife’s number. LOL). The one where even though Jacob texted me to let me know Ada’s class assignment had arrived via email at 3:15 p.m. yesterday, of course I already knew and was texting with fifteen other moms because the moms were all texting about it hours before the letters even came out.
When I hear new-parents-to-be talking about how they’re going to split things 50/50, I also think about how that’s what we thought we we would do. It was explicit, but in our pre-kids life we both cooked and did laundry and ran errands and didn’t really need a master family calendar because we just texted each other our plans or went out to dinner much more spontaneously. Any domestic gender role dynamics affected us in a more limited capacity. Sure, I tended to make more plans with friends. Jacob took the car to get the oil changed. We worried about each other’s emotional well-being — maybe not in exact equal proportion, but relatively so.
But actually doing things 50-50 with kids, especially when a good deal of the doing is emotional/invisible, especially when your children are school-aged, require childcare, or have logistical obligations outside yours and your spouses, requires a deep and persistent commitment to pushing back against the above structures. You have to invite dad to the text group. You have to remind school thirteen times to call dad. You have to remind other mom to text your spouse about the playdate and leave you alone. And frankly, there’s not a lot of social or community validation in this approach, not to mention the fact that if dad does drop the ball (known to happen), the kid can really miss out.
Almost every article or essay I read about gender-based mental load ends up with a pert summary of a man who recognized his ways. Or a couple deeming they’ll communicate more. Or a New Year’s Resolution-like statement about how we can allc commit to changing this hugely problematic dynamic. I’m admittedly not that optimistic, but would like to take this opportunity to remind the dads to read all the papers that come home in the school folders, put the app that the school uses to communicate with you on your phones, open the emails from school, send back the permission slips and emergency contact forms, make your kid’s next pediatrician appointment, know when it’s spirit day, and load up your kids’ friends’ parents’ phone numbers into your contacts. And to remind everyone else to write the school back thirteen times to tell them to stop calling you, so we can unknot this cluster over time. Good luck, y’all.
Recommendations:
To make: Julia Moskin’s Best Gazpacho, but don’t strain it, add 1/2 a peach, and lots of basil and cilantro.
To read: Pretty White Moms in Their Pretty White Houses — a great interview in Culture Study with Sara Petersen, author of the new book Momfluencers
To listen: A Trans Elder’s Final Act: Anna Sale talks to Beverly Glenn-Copeland on Death, Sex, and Money
To listen: The Time To Say Goodbye Podcast talks to Vinson Cunningham (staff writer at the New Yorker), about Trump’s mug shot. Cunningham covers a lot of the aesthetic meanings/presentations of power. Also I <3 Jay Caspian Kang’s always no-BS approach to life.
To eat: The Scuttlebutt sandwich at Marlow & Sons, an homage to Saltie (RIP), obviously
To watch: Telemarketer$, a wild-a$$ documentary on HBO. Report back!
To read: I’m finishing Heidi Julavits’ Directions to Myself, a memoir on motherhood and kids on the cusp of tween-dom, finished Savage Park, Amy Fusselman’s extremely resonant short tome on the importance of risky/wild spaces for children, and also in one afternoon read Red, White & Royal Blue which might be my first-ever romance novel.
What are the good romance novels for a newbie? See you next time!
Jasmine Guillory novels are great, as well as Emily Henry!
Yes to all of this, a thousand times yes.
The Idea of You by Robinne Lee is a great romance novel!