The Mental Load Katlynn Pyatt and Angie Cantrell

How the mental load takes over women's livesHow not to lose yourself in motherhood"I resent the fact that you (dads) get to maintain your individuality, while I do not."
The Mental Load often takes over women's lives leaving us feeling unfulfilled and like we lost ourselves in motherhood. It's a form of identity theft that nobody warns us about.
When you become a mom, everyone starts to view you as "{insert kid's name} mom" while dads don't become {insert kid's name} dad". Men get to retain their individuality while women are taught to only look at the positive of motherhood. That kids are a gift and you should feel blessed...all the time. And nobody prepares us for this identity theft that happens immediately. We're swallowed into motherhood and suddenly find ourselves lacking time and energy for anything but mothering. Which leaves us struggling to feel like we haven't lost ourselves.
In today's episode, Angie and Katlynn explore why, when we take on the mental load, it feels like we lose ourselves because:
We have less time to think of and anticipate my own needs so I feel blindsided by them (KP)We have no time to think freely or do something that feels luxuriousThere's no more time to do my own personal hobbiesOthers assuming that our only role and source of satisfaction is our childrenWe start feeling guilty that I have this huge privilege of raising kids but harboring this “secret” that we want more out of life than just being a mom

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The mental load and mother's dayFor men: Why moms care so much about Mother's DayJoin Katlynn from the Mental Load Podcast in this Mother's Day hot take.
Attention dads! Mother's Day for moms isn't necessarily about how big you celebrate it. It really comes down to being recognized for work that we feel is usually ignored.
The holiday's usually fall into the mental load category because there's invisible labor that goes into planning them:
- coordinating
- planning the logistics
- buying the gifts
The thing about the mental load is that it often breeds resentment because it's invisible. Mothers feel unrecognized, under-appreciated and undervalued. When the dads out there present us with last minute, not so thoughtful gifts, wait for us to tell them what to do, or put it on us to plan, they're essentially validating all the negative thoughts we have around the mental load.
Dads, Mother's Day is your time to step it up and own the process from start to finish. Don't promise her a "day off" where you half-ass or don't do the chores so she's behind when she wakes up Monday morning. Don't put the planning on her. Take the time to recognize her and while you're at it, take the time to plan the logistics if you celebrate your own mom. Don't assume your wife will coordinate and shop for gifts on your behalf. Your mom wants to feel appreciated and recognized by you. The mental load here is for you to own.

Preparing for maternity leave and the start of the mental load.Career coach to help moms navigate a career and children.Women deal with a lot of emotions and roadblocks going into and coming back from maternity leave. How do we better prepare ourselves, our workplaces and our partners so the mental load at home and at work isn’t as bad? We had a great episode a couple weeks ago with Sarah Reeves about how to help shape the workplace into one that is more supportive for caregivers, so today’s conversation I think is going to be a nice follow-up to how to prepare yourself for the changes that come with becoming a mother and taking on more of the mental load both at home and in the office.
Today's guest is Lauren Gordon. Lauren is a dual-certified life and career coach for working moms, and a former senior leader in human resources at a global financial services company. She specializes in helping working moms fully enjoy life with a career and children, without trading happiness for a paycheck.
Lauren runs her own coaching practice where she works one-on-one with working moms who are navigating a wide range of personal and professional challenges. Lauren's areas of expertise include helping women to overcome feelings of stress, guilt, and overwhelm; ending imposter syndrome by growing their self-confidence; addressing people-pleasing and perfectionistic tendencies; navigating career decisions; and more.
 Lauren lives in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with her husband, Eli, and their three young daughters, ages 7, 5, and 3. When Lauren isn't coaching and teaching working moms, you can find her taking Peloton classes, reading, and continually trying to improve her cooking skills to keep up with the other members of her monthly cookbook club.
Visit www.laurengordon.com to learn more about how to work with Lauren, and follow her on Instagram @workingmomcoach for tips you can begin applying to your life today.
The mental load isn’t just something that shows up at home, it’s also something that creeps in to our work lives. In the workplace, women spend more time on “non-promotable tasks” than men, which is unpaid work related to social or administrative “office housekeeping.” These types of activities are vital to maintaining company culture and strengthening team connections, but are not valued as strategic — and therefore come with little to no recognition, appreciation, reward, or career advantage.
In this episode, we explore:
Where the mental load started for usWhat emotions women are facing personally and professionally going into maternity leaveWhat the mental load looks like professionallyHow we can better prepare women for maternity leaveHow the mental load perpetuates the stereotype that women are distracted or somehow not as good at their jobs after they have kidsHow men prepare for maternity leave and how it looks different than womenHow to prepare to return from maternity leave
Mentioned in this episode:
Joy School Affiliate Link
https://thepathtojoy.thrivecart.com/melissa-blooms-joy-school/partner/

How do countries outside America support families and therefore lighten the mental load?What do nordic countries do to support families:
Baby boxes with important newborn items to set families up for successPaid parental leave In Norway, parental leave is paid at full pay for the first 44 weeks or at 80% if parents opt to take 54 weeks. To encourage both parents to play their part, fathers must take at least six weeks' parental leave or risk the family losing payments for the same period.Free universal childcare from 18 mo - 7 yearsCapped childcare costsStrong gender equality in the workforce:Gender quotas legislate for a 40% female presence in the country’s parliament and on business boards, resulting in a strong female presence – Norway’s prime minister, minister of finance and minister of foreign affairs are all female, while women make up 41% of the C-suite.
What happened to America?
"Ronald Reagan: by 1980 the Moral Majority, the main Evangelical lobby, had almost half a million members (Diamond 174).2 These new activists had three priorities, and they were directly related to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the issue of women’s rights: the denunciation of homosexuality, the fight against abortion (which was famously declared constitutional by the Supreme Court with its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973), and the rejection of the ERA (the Equal Rights Amendment) (Martin 162-166, 193-194). In the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan quickly understood the incredible electoral potential of the Christian Right."
These policies all hold women back economically by making childcare unaffordable (which means we have to puzzle piece it together).
Once covid hit, moms were spending five hours a day more on chores than menHit women of color especially hard bc there are stricter gender norms
When we’re faced with this onslaught of policies that harm more than they help, we decide to leave the workforce. 
The nation loses a major economic factor:
Household earnings therefore spending go downCompanies lose more workers and therefore innovation
Why don’t we view it as economically beneficial to support families?
America’s lack of family support rests on a false assumption: that providing help discourages parents from taking responsibility for their children.
And while other wealthy countries spend an average of $14,000each year per child on early-childhood care, the U.S. spends a miserly $500. Underlying each of these bleak truths appears to be the same, misguided belief: that government support for parents is at odds with parents being responsible for their kids.
Helping parents is not the same as parenting, and support does not replace real-life parents.
Why do we think tough love is good for families as policy?
Treating parenting with punitive punishment
What are the good things to come from supporting families and why should we care?We know that in countries with greater gender inequality just closing the gap in women’s labor force participation could increase economic output by an average of 35 percent. 
New Mexico used $77 million in American Rescue Plan Act dollars to create the Competitive Pay for Professionals (CPP) program to fund $3/hour pay increases for an estimated 16,000 child care staff.37 Iowa used $30 million to provide $1,000 and $2,000...

The mental load of meal planning.Why families struggle with meals and how it creates invisible labor for women.Meal planning, it's a bitch, right? In this week's hot take, Angie, discusses how her family of six has tackled meal planning. And, if we do say so ourselves, it's kinda genius.
Instead of meticulously planning out each meal and the ingredients or making everything on the weekend to simply reheat on the weeknights, they've picked a theme for each night, so the guess work is less and the kids know what to expect.

Maternity Leave and the mental loadMaternity Leave isn't a vacation. In fact, it's where the mental load really starts and becomes one-sided.
Today we discuss how Employee Resource Groups can help support and lighten the load for not just moms, but all caregivers, joined by Sarah Reeves.
Sarah is a girl mom to Ella 8, Norah 5, Husband Aaron of 13 years. She's the Director of Product Management at one of the largest internet companies to date. After her first child, she co-founded a global employee resource group for parents that evolved to include caregivers of all kinds. Sarah loves to swear, especially during passionate discussions.
What is the issue? 
Modern parenting expectations set women up even before the birth to carry the majority of the mental load. And that load continues to avalanche in from pregnancy into maternity leave.
Gaps in community/village supportTwisted perceptions (mat leave is a vacation) and the additional pressures put on parentsInternalized expectations, maternal gate-keeping, martyrdom Why you can’t comparing maternity leave to vacationYour body is restoring itself after a traumatic event, not recovering after cocktails on the beach.This is prime time for cocooning, not for indulging your social butterfly side at the cruise ship dinner buffet.You don’t need an alarm clock because the baby is the alarm clock, not because you’re going to actually sleep in.A new family member means added mental load, not a break from your to-do list.You need real capacity to deal with the unexpected, and I don’t just mean flight delays into Aruba.
What are the effects?
Men who take paternity leave are less likely to get divorced, and a Swedish study found that when fathers were offered up to 30 days of flexible leave while their partners were on maternity leave, their spouses are less likely to be on anti-anxiety medication in the postpartum period.Relationship Equity - Women whose partners take on an equal share of the MENTAL load have higher libidosLow female sexual desire affects more than 50% of women and is difficult to treat.Study findings suggest low desire is not a problem, an internal problem for women to resolve solo; effort needed from both partners.Need more than just the physical load - where wife/mom = project managerHomosexual partners handle relationship equity better on averageChildcare deserts - women are disproportionately impacted: 23-75% of families across the US report having a struggle finding childcare. Disproportionately affecting communities of color and rural and urban areas impacted more so than suburban families.  States with fewer ‘childcare deserts’ see less women in the workforce.We just went off our childcare cliff with expiration of federal funding started during the pandemic to aid families in the cost of childcare. The average family spends 27% of their income on childcare, DHHS says for it to be considered “affordable” it shouldn’t exceed 7%. Over 3 million children are at risk of losing childcare because of this with a projected $10.6 billion in...