Breaking Down the Mental Load of Motherhood

Today’s episode is quick and actionable and will inspire you to think differently about the mental load of motherhood. The mental load is probably a LOT more than you might think and I’ve broken it out into these 5 buckets:

1. Parenting
2. Relationships
3. Work (including household work!)
4. Personal Well Being
5. Meaning and Purpose

Come ready to listen with a pen and paper so you can make a list of what’s taking up space in your own mental load. What can you do to lighten your load or grow your capacity in a different space?

Resources & Links

Did this episode resonate with you? Share your takeaways with Lindsay directly at hello@lindsayroselle.com. 

Learn more about Lindsay’s coaching and consulting services at https://www.lindsayroselle.com or follow along on Instagram at @lindsayroselle and @motherload.pod.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Mother Load, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurial mothers who are navigating the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful when it comes to the relationship between their desire to succeed and their devotion to motherhood. I'm your host, Lindsay Roselle, a serial entrepreneur, growth and performance coach, and boy mama of two. Each week I'll bring you solo episodes, engaging interviews, and candid conversations that expand your capacity to do both things well, help you feel less alone, and hopefully bring a little levity to what can otherwise feel like a very heavy load. I'm so grateful you're here. Now let's jump into today's episode. Hello, and welcome back to the show. I'm so happy that you're here for today's episode. I hope this one is a good one in terms of helping you really put some things into practice and action to start to dig into what I call the mental load of motherhood. And that's what I want to cover today is this concept of the mental load and what are all the components of it. And I've broken down what I think they are, and I'm going to share that with you. And I want to give you a little bit of homework at the end of this episode for you to make a list of what is in your mental load and see how big it is and how it breaks down so that you can start to approach it like something that you have control over and that you have some agency in. And, you know, whether it's about growing the capacity to handle that mental load or it's about lightening the load through delegation or saying no or whatever that might be or asking for help, I really want today's episode to be quick and actionable for you to think differently about what feels big and heavy that might actually be something that could be easier to manage if you looked at it a little differently. So when I started to think about what are all the main buckets of the mental load, and I came up with five, at least in my life, in my experience, and in all the women I've worked with that are mothers, everything that I can think of falls into one of these buckets generally. So the first one is parenting. Everything related to parenting on your mind in the mental load, it's massive, right? This alone, from a mental load standpoint, being a mother and an ambitious mother, a devoted mother, I think parenting is one of the biggest components of the load, undeniably. Underneath parenting, I think of things like child care and just managing child care. Whether you have an abundance of child care or you have no child care, figuring out what the kid is going to do all day long and who they're going to be with and what's happening during the day for your child, and just even thinking about if they're okay or not through that process day to day is a huge amount of mental load. The schedule is another thing that's under this. Like, I don't know how much mental math I do on a regular basis, managing our kids' schedules, who has to be where at what time, what child care provider do we have today, who's traveling, you know, if one of me or RT is traveling, the day-to-day like process of managing the schedule that the kids are on in terms of what happens each day, and then also their schedule, meaning from the time they wake up till the time they go to bed, what their routine is and what all they need to get done in terms of eating and bathing and brushing teeth and learning skills and reading books and all the things that have to the milestones. And you know, I'm just like the mental math of the schedule management, both the family schedule and the child's developmental schedule and their routine schedule, the capital S schedule that a mom talks about. Like, I gotta keep them on their schedule. And if you know, you know, right? Like the schedule, we live and die by the freaking schedule. That is a huge amount of mental load for me. And I'm guessing you relate to that. Milestones I mentioned, that's another thing in this parenting bucket that I think of about a lot in my mental load is what's the next milestone? Whether it's a developmental milestone or like the next big thing that we're the next transition for them, right? If you have young kids, it's like you're just transition after transition after transition in their life between age groups at school or grades once they get into grade school or crawling to walking, walking to talking. Like there's just always some new transition that's coming up and you're you're anticipating or you're working towards. And that occupies a big space in your mind. And then the last thing I have in this bucket that I wanted to touch on is kind of the combination of all these things. And I called it like upcoming needs. And I feel like this takes up a huge amount of my mind when I'm thinking of like, okay, you know, Sawyer starts school at the end of August. So I'm gonna have to pack him a lunch every day. I should do some research on the best things that you can send to school for your kid to eat that are easy to make in the morning and that five-year-olds like to eat and, you know, isn't super messy and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I'm gonna go spend an hour on Pinterest. And I'm like, oh my God, what? I don't have an hour to spend on Pinterest on this. And why is my mind, you know, why am I thinking of this already? You know, and I could do that on the day before he starts school and he can eat peanut butter and jelly for a couple days. Like he'll be okay, you know. Why am I thinking three or four weeks out that I need to go spend a bunch of time doing research on school lunch options, you know? But that upcoming need and the motherly instinct to make sure that they're gonna be okay and kind of future cast into what they're gonna need at a future date is something that I spend, I at least for me, I spend a lot of time in that space, like thinking ahead to the future. Like, okay, when Wesley moves up to the preschool class, now that he's three, he's gonna move up to preschool. Like, okay, they're gonna have a different routine, they're gonna eat lunch a little bit later, they're gonna go down for nap a little later. He's got different activities. I'm like, okay, why? Why am I thinking about this? It doesn't happen for another month, you know? But that anticipating upcoming needs and the preparatory thought that has to go into that before stuff even takes place is a huge part of the mental load. And, you know, if you've got babies or young kids, you're you're living this day by day because it's literally a transition happening monthly, you know, okay, we've got to get the house ready for them to be crawling, we've got to be ready to wean, we've got to introduce this kind of solid foods. Like there's just so many milestones and upcoming needs that you're constantly anticipating. And so, and I don't have teenagers yet, but I imagine that's a whole next level of the same thing. So in this parenting bucket, I'm sure I'm not hitting everything. Like I just came up with the top five things I could think of in each bucket, but parenting and the mental load, massive, right? Like that's a hundred percent of the mental load, and we're not even, we're only one bucket in. The second bucket that I wrote down that I feel like takes up a lot of my mental load as a mother is the relationships in my life. So my relationship with RT, my partner and my co-parent, you know, he there's the co-parenting aspect of our relationship that's on my mind a lot, which is stuff like, is he gonna discipline them the way I would have done it? You know, if he's the one that they act out at, how does he handle it versus how I handle it in the moment? And, you know, like I'm traveling this weekend, and so he's gonna have them alone this weekend, and I'm how much preparation do I need to do to help him out? There's just a lot of that co-parenting that's on my mind a lot. Then there's he and I's actual, you know, romantic partnership relationship that has its own whole world of thoughts in my mind, you know, and and he and I talk a lot about that in our episode. So we'll have context there. But, you know, if you're in partnership, you're in relationship and you're parenting, whether that's, you know, you two's biological child together or it's some type of co-parenting relationship and a second primary relationship, just the mental load of the mother managing everything else and then also trying to show up in her relationship with a partner, huge, right? Huge. That's probably 90 episodes of a podcast in and of itself. There's probably a whole other podcast just about that. That's not even to mention friendships and family members and all the other aspects of relationship that we manage as humans day to day that can have an impact on how we parent and how we mother and how we think about our children, but also on our own personal well-being and how that impacts our ability to show up in these other roles. So those are the first two buckets, parenting and then relationships. The third bucket I came up with was work and everything related to work. Whether you're a business owner or you work for someone else, there is this massive bucket in the mental load of work. And if you don't work or you, you know, you don't work outside of the home, there's still a work bucket, I think, because there's still so many other things that have to get done to keep the train on the rails, so to speak, even if work is at home for you and it's making sure the house is tended to and all those things are maintained, that still is labor. It's the labor of the mother doing other things besides raising the children, right? So no matter what your context is for work, this exists for you. And for some of us who also have a business or we work outside of the home or we work for someone else, and we're also in charge of keeping the home on the rails, that work expands even more. So in this work bucket, it's yeah, it's all the stuff at home. For me, and I included this in work because I manage it like work. Like I manage all the lawn care and the, you know, like our washing machine smells funky. So I had to call the appliance repair guy. And I'm like, okay, I gotta manage that, you know. I got to know when he's coming. I got to tell him what's going on. I got to be here to show him where everything is. It's the cleaning people, it's keeping the dishwasher emptied and filled and emptied and filled and all of the things. It's vacuuming and sweeping and got the dogs. I we have two dogs. There's constant dog hair, even though they're supposed to be non-shedders, you know, like that takes up space in my mind. So there's a lot of work at home, managing home. Then there's work outside the home, business work, whether you're doing that for yourself as an entrepreneur or you're working for someone else. I think those types of things are, you know, tasks and projects that are constantly on your mind, whether or not you're actually in working hours. If you're like a lot of us super ambitious women, you could work 20 hours a day if you wanted to and not necessarily get everything done. And so whether or not you're currently working, the mental load is occupied by the knowledge that there's tasks and projects that need done. For me and my work, I spend a lot of time thinking about my clients and their lives and what's going on with them, because part of what I do is like life and business together, you know, it's coaching and consulting. And so I'm invested in caring about my clients. And if they're going through something or I'm helping them with ideas or expansion in their business or their life, like those ideas come to me, not necessarily the one hour a day that I'm on a call with them. It's on a walk with my kids, I'll have an idea. And that now is occupying space in my mind because I need to share that with my clients. So, however that applies to you, if you're thinking about your customers or your product or whatever it might be, I think oftentimes we're spending time and our mental load on other people in the work environment, whether they're our clients or our product or investors, whatever it might be, and their needs. Another thing here is the trajectory, the general trajectory of our work, whether it's our business's growth and scale and everything that the strategy for that or our career and what we want there and all the positioning and maneuvering that we need to do to advance in our career. That takes up a big part of the work-related mental load. Employees and management. If you've got any employees in your business or you manage anybody, you know there is always something, always something that you're thinking about related to that. And for good reason. I mean, these are people that work for you and or work with you, and you want them to be fulfilled and happy and help you grow in your career and your work. But also for many of us, especially if you're a business owner, you know that having employees means this often sometimes possibly dealing with drama. You're dealing with people's needs that are not things that you can help, but you're affected by. And after COVID, you know, we're dealing with all kinds of employment-related things that take up a huge mental load for business owners. So there's all of that. And then I put notifications as my fifth thing on this list because, you know, if you're like me, I actually have gotten into the practice and we'll maybe do an episode on why notifications are the devil for the mental load, but turn off all your notifications. I try to do this and I still feel like I am just haunted by notifications constantly. Like I can never catch up on DMs or emails in my inbox or, you know, all the masterminds I'm in and the coaches I have and all my clients, like there's always somebody whose boxer or messenger now I need to get back to. So that weighs on me. So we've now covered the parenting bucket, the relationships bucket, and the work bucket. Or three out of five buckets in. And I, if you're like me, you're reading this list or you're listening to this, going, okay, just those three things and all the sub bullets she's listed off, like, holy crap, there's so much on my mind. And I haven't even gotten to these other two yet. So you just wait. So the next one is health, like physical, mental, emotional, personal well-being. You feeling good about yourself as yourself, in yourself, right? Huge one. Huge one. Not to go too far off topic here, but I've recently been pondering this because I turned 40 here right away. And 40 is such a milestone for some reasons. And in my mind, you know, it's like I don't really feel different than I felt at 25. It's weird, but it seems old because my frame for it is my mom at 40. And my mom at 40, I was a teenager. I was 16 already. And so she seemed old to me, you know, and she's from a different generation. And so in looking at feeling good and the mental load of feeling good and personal well-being, I personally have really been spending cycles on this recently in my mental load because it's like, okay, I'm turning 40, like my metabolism and the supplements I need to be taking, and I need to lift heavier weights and do less high-intensity cardio. And, you know, like, man, I've got like weird body dysmorphia that I blame on 17 magazine from my teenage years in the 90s. And but like social media really has helped with some normalization of bodies, but also like, damn, there's a lot of like really fit 23-year-old Instagram models. You know, like, hello, I just gave you a little preview of my mental load, the wizard behind the curtain. The mental load that I feel like a lot of us women who are mothers, high-achieving mothers, ambitious, successful, we've put ourselves out there to go do something in our lives. And we're really devoted to motherhood. So we're really conscious of the messaging and the mindset that we present to our children. A lot of us, like me, I feel this really, really strongly right now in this moment in time. I spend a lot of time in my mental load thinking about my personal well-being, good and bad. You know, like I want to live a long time. I want to be around for my kids. I want to optimize my health. I want to lower my chance of disease. And I'm never satisfied with how I look. And I like sugar and I know I shouldn't. And God, I have a lot of caffeine and I don't sleep very well because I have young kids, and like all these things are constantly on my mind around how I look and feel. And I think that that I'm sure I guarantee you I'm gonna talk a lot more about that because I think a lot of us are going through that, becoming mothers because our bodies change, and the body changing is just something we have to kind of like accept and roll with and keep going because there's no time to slow down and address that. But it's one of the biggest things that changes, that's like obvious change after you become a mother that does not go back. Like, I don't care if you're 20 when you have a kid and your body quote unquote bounced right back, you're still gonna have some evidence that you had a child. Somewhere on your body, you're gonna feel that. And so for all of us who have birthed the child that we have, the body is different. Even if you didn't birth your own child, but you've now been their mother for a while and you've suffered from sleep deprivation and the stress of having young kids and all the other ancillary things that affect well-being, right? Like, you know, it changes your physical body and that changes your emotional well-being. It changes your mental well-being, your spiritual well-being. It brings up all of that and presents it to you constantly, daily inside your head. So it's a massive part of the mental load. So these are things like what food you're eating and your thoughts about that food and the assignment of good or bad that you make to them. And if you're in this elder millennial generation like me, you know, you probably have some body dysmorphia and some food issues because of the generation we were raised in. Fitness and strength and all of the like physical activity and moving your body and feeling good about how you, you know, when you physically move, pain and discomfort. This is something that as you get older, you know, you start to realize, like, oh yeah, like I do have kind of like nagging back pain. Or ever since I had kids and I nursed, like my shoulder's kind of funky or my wrist is funky. There's just, I can't tell you the number of moms I talk to who are like, oh yeah, my wrist has never been the same since breastfeeding because of how I held the kid, or like, yeah, during birth, I like strained something in my hip and it's just never been the same. Like, we just manage this stuff. Like, we just go on about our day and our lives, not being fully in optimal health or optimal feeling in our body, and we just take it, you know, and and how much does that weigh on our conscious and subconscious brain in terms of the mental load? So that's another huge thing. And then illness and sickness, like how we can't not talk about that after the last few years. But one of the things that I think I spend a lot of time on is like trying to be well, you know, stay well, take the supplements, get the kids their supplements, make sure we're all getting water and sleep and brushing our teeth and vitamins and washing our hands and all these things. And there's so much around illness and sickness from a prevention and like a well-being standpoint. And then there's also what happens when someone gets sick. Because if you're a mom, you know that you cannot avoid the bugs. Like eventually you're gonna have just eight months of solid runny nose. Like maybe more, maybe less if you're lucky. But sickness is one of the most frustrating things as a mom from a mental load standpoint because it just amplifies everything. It like comes in and just blows everything up. You're like, oh, cool, that schedule you were already stressing about. I'm gonna make a sick kid blow that up. Like, oh, that work deadline you have, sick kid, gonna blow it up. Oh, that gym routine you wanted to stick with, you're gonna get the same bug that the kid got, and you're not gonna go to the gym for two weeks, you know? So illness and sickness is a huge part of the physical, emotional, spiritual, like feeling good in and of your body that weighs on the mental load that I don't think a lot of people realize if they're not moms, like, oh yeah, I got the sniffles for a few days, took a couple days off, and now I'm all good. I'm like, cool. When you have kids, it goes through the house three times and everybody's sick, and everyone wants mommy when they're sick, and on and on and on, right? So illness and sickness. If you know, you know. It's a big one. So that's the fourth bucket is feeling good in your body, emotionally, physically, spiritually, all those things. And then the fifth bucket that I came up with is meaning and purpose and fulfillment, whatever that word is for you. For me, it's fulfillment, it's meaning, it's that sense of like something beyond me, the thing that I'm here to be and to do in my life. And for some of us, and and I feel this too, you know, for some of us, it is like I'm here to be my kid's mom. And I'm here to create great kids. And that is valid, and I feel that too, but that's not enough, right? Like you are also you. You had a path before you became a mother. You had goals and dreams and visions and ideas of things you wanted to do in the world. And that stuff still lives inside of you. Like one of my mentors, Amber Lilstrom, always says, if the dream is in you, it's for you. If you've dreamed of it, it's you, it's for you. And sometimes, often, a lot, all the time, moms I speak with have put aside something that they once dreamed of doing or being or wanting to experience for becoming a mother. And so this fifth bucket is the place that I think warrants time for a lot of us where it's asking this question of what's living there, whether it's conscious or unconscious, on your mental load of the thing you want to go do, but you feel like you can't, or the thing you want to go do and you are pursuing, and it's adding an immense amount of load onto the system and you're struggling under that weight, or the big change you want to make, or the big adventure you want to go on, the goals and the dreams. Like, what are those things and how do they play into this equation that we're talking about of the mental load and the capacity to handle it all? I really feel passionate about this bucket specifically because it's the one that I think the most of us set aside to get the plane off the runway. And you're like, well, uh, we're too heavy, folks. You know, the captain comes on, like, hey, folks, bad news. We're cleared to take off, but the plane's too heavy. We're gonna ask, have to ask like eight of you to get off and we're gonna remove your bags. It's like, okay. If you're the mother and you're sitting here thinking, like, okay, of all of these bags we just talked about, you know, and all these buckets, which ones are we going to throw out so that we can get the plane off the ground? Well, it's not going to be the parenting. It's not going to be the relationship. It's not going to be the work, right? It's most likely hopefully not going to be your personal well-being, although that's the second thing that we tend to throw off. But I think the first thing a lot of us throw off is like those big dreams we had, the big adventure we wanted to go on, the business we wanted to start. Whatever the big vision or goal or thing that you dreamt of doing or that you were have started working on but aren't making as much progress on, like the meaning of your life. That's the one a lot of us are like, you can you can just take that one off. That's fine. I'll go back and get it later. You know? And then the second one is the physical ability. It's like, okay, yeah, you can kick that one off too. Like I'll in two years when I'm sleeping again, I'll start going back to the gym, speaking from experience. So I bring these up because I really am passionate about these are the buckets I've thought through and and that I've kind of condensed from years of working with high-achieving moms who are managing entrepreneurship and leadership and work, and also are really devoted mothers. And these are where most of the things we talk about, they fall into these buckets. And ultimately it's that like purpose and meaning bucket that I feel suffers the most and is the heaviest part of the load at the level of when you die, you know, like what's your legacy? The thing that we might not attribute so much of the day-to-day to, but at the end of our lifetime and throughout our lifetime, it's the stuff that really matters, you know, and it's the meaning, it's the thing that we create with our life. And yes, of course, part of meaning and part of purpose is our children and they're thriving. So we can just lump that in and assume that that's part of yours. Beyond that, what else is there? And I would argue, based on my experience with my own journey and with my clients that I've worked with for years, is that the thing that makes the mental load really heavy is when that bucket, that purpose and meaning bucket, is not being attended to. When it's the weight dragging behind that you're not aware of. Because then not only is it heavy, but it's got a lot of friction because you're dragging it. So what I want you to take away from today's episode and some steps that you can take, I want to give you something actionable to do. I would say take a little bit of time. Listen, you can play this back or you can pause right here and take a little bit of time and write down on a piece of paper or in your phone these five buckets. So they are again, they're parenting, and the subtopics I put in parenting are childcare, the mental math of the schedule, milestones, and kind of tracking everything that's needs to be accomplished, and then the upcoming needs. So always anticipating like the next thing the kid is going to need. The second bucket is relationships. So that's your co-parenting relationship with a partner or a co-parent, your romantic partnership relationship with a partner, your family and your friends. There's the third bucket of work, which is encompassing of both, you know, I put housework, because I think a lot of us as mothers, we end up being the default person managing the home. So what's on the list in terms of housework and the house organizational system? And then work work includes tasks and projects, your clients or your products, your services, and like the people you're helping with your business and what they need, your business's trajectory or your career's trajectory and the forward-thinking aspect of that, employees and managing, which is just a huge piece of mental load if you have employees or are managing anybody. And then notifications, just the blanket statement, notifications. Turn them off. Turn them off. So that's parenting, relationships, work. The fourth bucket is personal well-being, physical, mental, emotional. How do you feel in your body, in your mind, in your spirit day to day? And inside of that bucket is, you know, food and nourishment, fitness and exercise, rest, pain and discomfort, physical pain, emotional turmoil, all those things, trauma, your body and how it has changed and your thoughts about that. And then the last one is illness and sickness, which if you know, you know. Illness and sickness is probably the bane of my existence as a mother. It is the worst thing, in my opinion. And then the fifth bucket is meaning and purpose. And this one I really want you to write down. And I want you to write not only what you can think of are your goals and your dreams, but I want you to write down like how often do you really think about those things on a day-to-day basis? Are they an active part of your mental load, which is interesting to me if they are, because that means you're actually giving them some attention. It's like a positive part of the mental load. And if they're not, if you can't really list anything else off of here, then I'm gonna argue they're still a part of your mental load because it's subconscious. Like you may feel resentful or like you're missing something, or you're missing out on something. You've given up freedom or choice or whatever it may be. Even if that bucket is empty on your list, it is still part of your mental load in the sense that now you're dragging that thing behind the plane. You might have unloaded it off, but it's dragging behind. And so you're still carrying the weight and now you've added some friction to it. So, what I want you to do is write those buckets down. Those subbuckets that I gave you are the ones I could think of. If you have more or different ones, you want to call them different things, write them down and just let yourself kind of spend 10 minutes and dump out what's on your mind on each of those things. Just a quick little list. Nobody else has to see it. You can throw it away. And look at that list and give yourself some credit for what's on your mind, what's in your mental load. I'm guessing it's more than what you would think if you just off the cuff told me what's on your mind. And I want you also to pay attention to the balance of each bucket. Is one of them way bigger than the others in terms of how much of your mental load it's taking up? And I think that's an interesting place to do some inquiry around is that the balance or the makeup of load that you want? And if not, what needs to go? What do you need to do to lighten the load, or what do you need to do to grow capacity in that space? And there's gonna be lots and lots of tools coming in the future episodes of the podcast to help you do both those things to lighten the load and to build capacity. So that's your homework for today. Those five buckets, some sub buckets, and then notes on what's on your mind. And I would love to hear if you're listening and this resonated with you. I'd love to have you reach out, send me an email, hello at lindseyroselle.com, or send me a DM either at LindsayRoselle or at motherload.pod, and share what your list is and any insights you had on what's on your mind, you know, what's in your buckets, what makes up your mental load and what surprised you, what excited you, what made you sad. Part of the reason I'm doing all of this podcast and why I'm so passionate about breaking these ideas down into actionable concepts is that I want us to build community around this. I want these things to be something we can talk about and sympathize with each other and have that feeling of like, man, like this is a lot. And I know I'm not alone. I know there's other people out there like me who are managing the same or more or different, and they get it. Somebody gets it. And for me at least, and I assume for you too, just knowing that somebody gets it and that there is that silent communal acknowledgement of a shared experience is a massive gift in terms of managing it day to day. So thank you for listening. I hope this was helpful. See you on the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you love this episode and know someone else that would benefit from today's conversation, it would mean so much to me if you share this episode with them or even share it to your social media and tag me so I can personally thank you. As always, I am so grateful you're on this journey with me. And until next time, remember that even when the load feels really heavy, you are never alone.