Before we became parents the concept of “Mental Load” was largely theoretical as both of us were easily able to manage the everyday logistics of our own lives. With children coming into the equation everything suddenly becomes a juggling exercise - at least that was our experience.
I’ve read in several publications that the mental load or, to use a different wording, the organisation of everyday logistics is often predominantly done by women/mothers.
We try to share all tasks as evenly as possible. We both work approximately the same amount of time. We both earn similar wages. We share costs on a 50:50 basis. We both took the exact same amount of parental leave. However, the logistics of everyday life have, without even trying to aim for that, drifted more towards my wife.
How do you go about sharing this task? What kind of technical/IT solutions do you use to remain on the same page? Is it even necessary to share this task or are there others ways to “specialise” in certain areas of being a parent?
I’d say, try to identify WHY they are drifting towards her, and see if you (both) can change that underlying cause.
In my case no technical/IT solution (and I’m an IT person). We just talked. If we needed more help with something we asked each other. Sometimes you can preempt (e.g. putting in a wash load), sometimes you are just too tired for going with a walk with the baby and so you ask.
We were lucky that I need less sleep than her and we were already in a routine about shopping, admin, cooking etc. But she had more of a view of what kind of baby clothes we needed, because she was in touch with other moms (so they swapped clothes when they grew out of them). That and the health checks (and vaccinations) are the only thing that were pretty much only on her (health checks because the hospital had her contact details, plus health checks were for her too). She had much more parental leave than me (9 months vs 2 weeks!).
Basically if there was anything to do around the house (cleaning, shopping, cooking, admin) that I could do, I did. Stuff related to “baby admin” she did. That is not to say she did nothing around the house, just that when you are surviving in 2hours of sleep at a time it gets difficult!
Tl, dr: talk talk talk
Thanks for the insight! We talk a lot and I would hope we still manage to share a bunch of the load by taking charge of particular aspects. For instance, just like you described, my wife is in touch with other mothers and is therefore much deeper into clothes thanks to clothes sharing. Meanwhile I try to keep track of always having an adequate supply of food for the children. Still, I feel like it’s been drifting more into her direction lately, which we want to rectify.