It starts with a discussion in the car, prompted by the washing up. It wasn’t done that morning. The laundry needs hanging up, too, and someone has forgotten to make the packed lunches. We need to pay the dog walker, fix the broken bath panel, work out why our toddler has started waking in the night and book our youngest in for a haircut. Then there’s a half-planned playdate to confirm, meals to plan and all those family WhatsApp group messages that need a response.
Historically, women in heterosexual relationships have carried the heft of the mental load, also known as cognitive household labour. This is the behind-the-scenes work, often intangible, that goes into running a household. It’s not just the jobs: it’s thinking about those jobs. The true extent of this work, invisible and embedded as it is, can be hard to define; an iceberg of tasks concealed beneath waves of tradition, expectation and stereotypes. It’s not just the doing, it’s the remembering, the realising, the anticipating, the assigning. It’s not just making packed lunches, it’s getting food in, making sure it’s nutritious, checking the lunchboxes are washed and ready. It’s knowing the toddler has gone off bananas and the baby can’t eat chunks of apple yet. This work is unpaid, unseen and, often, unappreciated.
