Back-to-school season is almost upon us. As summer draws to a close, it’s time to dig out the kids’ lunch boxes, hit up Staples for brand-new school supplies, make sure everyone is enrolled in extra-curriculars for the fall… school isn’t even in session yet, and it’s enough to make a person’s head spin.
And let’s be honest: that person is usually the mom. In most households with heterosexuals parents, women are the ones who figure out the logistics of family life. Moms are the ones who are constantly doing mental gymnastics, figuring out how they’re going to manage everyone else’s schedule on top of their own. If you have school-aged children, this responsibility can feel especially heavy. How is my kid going to get to hockey practice after school? When’s their next dentist appointment? What should I pack them for lunch tomorrow? What are they doing on the weekend?
This mental load is year-round—but things really intensify during the back-to-school rush. Just being a mom starts to feel like being a 24/7 project manager. All of this work often goes unacknowledged and unappreciated. And studies have shown that it comes with significant impacts for women’s physical and mental health.
Daily life, end of life: Not so different
You might be wondering, right about now: what does any of this have to do with Aging & End of Life Planning? It should go without saying that planning for the (eventual) end of your life, and planning for the current reality of your and your family’s day-to-day existence, are pretty different tasks. But one of the things they have in common is the built-in gender inequity.
As we have often said, Aging & End of Life Planning is a women’s issue. There are many reasons for this, including systemic barriers that make it harder for us to accumulate the same wealth as our male counterparts. But today, we’re focusing on another big contributor: the uneven distribution of labour in Aging & End of Life Planning.
Just as women are so often left to manage their family’s daily needs, they also tend to be the ones who are left to plan ahead for the long-term future—especially wherever caregiving is involved. On top of raising young children, dealing with household chores, and attempting to have a career, many working mothers are also trying to take care of their aging parents: checking in on them, monitoring their needs, researching care facilities, and much more.
Beyond requiring a whole lot of time and energy, this kind of responsibility carries a lot of psychological weight. It can be mentally exhausting to stay on top of so many people’s health and well-being. Every waking second is spent scanning your memory to make sure you’re not forgetting about something important; you worry constantly about whether you’re doing enough to take care of your loved ones; and when you’re inevitably faced with situations where you can’t meet everybody else’s needs all at once, it can create major feelings of guilt.
In recent years, we’ve started to see a lot more dialogue about mental load when it comes to topics like parenting. People are talking more and more about the gendered burden of “mom guilt,” the cultural phenomenon of the “adult toddler husband,” and the importance of redistributing housework to be evenly shared between both partners.
But we need to take this conversation further—and extend it to Aging & End of Life Planning. We need to talk more about the burdens of caregiving and how women are increasingly “sandwiched” between two generations in need of support. We need to share strategies to care for ourselves as well. And frankly, we need our male partners and loved ones to do more.
Dear reader, if you’re a mom preparing for the fall, then consider taking on this challenge: treat this back-to-school season as a practice run for your family’s longer-term future. Don’t just take stock of everything that needs to happen to get your kids ready for the new term; also take stock of how you feel when you think about all that responsibility. Consider whether your own needs are getting met. Ask your partners to step in and take on some of the work, and see that they respond to that request.
By now, we’re all familiar with America Ferreira’s monologue from the end of the Barbie movie. Women are constantly asked to do everything, to be everything, all at once. As great as it may sound to imagine that we could keep up with such an impossible demand for our entire lives, the reality is that we’re human too—and we shouldn’t have to take on all this labour by ourselves.
Whether you’re planning for your kids’ day at school tomorrow, or for your own long-term financial and medical future, you don’t need to do it alone. You deserve to put down some of that mental load.
