Hola Reader,

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Ok, so no late nights this week! Back in a bit of a rhythm and happy to share a piece on a topic that is both profoundly personal and socially relevant. Please let me know what you think!

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Reflection

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Back in June, my family embarked on a 3 day trip to San Jose that had been postponed in March due to the arrival of COVID-19 in Costa Rica. Sensing a window of opportunity as Costa Rica’s economy re-opens, but before the borders open and the situation potentially becomes complicated again, I set about planning our capital city excursion. I rescheduled doctors and dentist appointments, planned work meetings, gathered shopping lists and requests from friends, and bookmarked vegan restaurants we’d been wanting to try.

I love planning. I get a lot of joy out of researching restaurants and feel accomplished when I craft an efficient route through a day of errands. This skill set is particularly important in San Jose. You must have a strategy and a lot of patience to navigate this city. One of the trade offs for the “Pura Vida” of living in Costa Rica is efficiency and ease of errands. There is no quick trip to Target and Whole Foods and you’re done. Acquiring specialty food items, supplements and high quality home goods can sometimes mean traversing the city and visiting a dozen stores. This obstacle has a silver lining in that it hinders mindless consumption. The effort required to do a big shopping trip means less trips and more intentionality about where we go and what for. Nonetheless, it can be exhausting.

As we headed to lunch at a vegetarian restaurant on our way out of town, I celebrated the fact that we had acquired and accomplished nearly everything on our list, aside from a few herbs that I had doubted I’d find anyways. My partner off-handedly replied “Yeah, and it felt pretty easy—-at least to me”.

God bless him, my partner drove the 4 hours each direction to the big city and did 90% of the driving through San Jose’s crazy intersections and myriad one-way streets. He was also champion Papa, tending to the snack needs and boredom of our toddler and finding fun ways to keep her engaged during my work meetings. This formed a very significant contribution to our experience. I literally do not think I would have survived that trip if I had attempted it solo.

Now here is where things get interesting. My partner had put forth a pretty monumental effort on behalf of our family, and also remained pretty patient with my occassional hangriness and anxieties about our packed schedule. And to him, the trip had been easy.

I meanwhile, felt completed depleted. I was incredibly tired, patience worn thin, and just overall spent. I had intended to work on the car ride home, but the most I could muster was to read a chapter of my book and take a psuedo-nap.

If we had made the same “vueltas” (spins) around the city, why was our experience so different?

The answer comes down to a concept that is increasingly making waves in the media: Emotional Labor and Mental Load.

Emotional Labor

It wasn’t so much the actual movement that tired me out, though carrying a wiggling toddler through a mall (and other assorted Mama gymnastics) did take its toll. It was more the mental responsibility for our itinerary, the accounting of our spending and budget, keeping track of different shopping lists, and serving as navigator….all while staying on top of work emails, reading stories to our little one, and trying my best to remain a pleasant human being to be around.

Often, in relationships and families, women shoulder the majority of this kind of “emotional labor”. The experience is unique, but also parallel for all sorts of women. Stay at home moms are often holding the invisible and emotional labor of the household as well as serving as a sort of defacto Household Manager. For working moms, it can be hard to shut down the tendency to manage once we walk in the door.

Now, I’m particularly blessed that my partner is a stay at home dad who takes great pride in caring for our daughter, our home, and our animals. It takes a great deal of work off of my plate and creates more freedom for me to work efficiently, parent with joy, and care for myself. Nonetheless, there are still moments, like this trip, when the scale tips and I feel overwhelmed.

There is a finger trap in this situation. I could, in theory, off load some of the mental load to my partner by getting him more involved in the planning, etc - but I’d have to invest energy in that transfer as well. I happen to know the city better due to regular work travel and I have a better sense of what stores have the best selections and prices. This kind of ingrained knowledge is hard to transfer.

50-50 is a Lie

So what’s the answer? Maybe it’s not about perfect balance 50-50. Brene Brown claims that 50-50 in a marriage is a lie, and that most often it looks like 60-40 or 80-20 in one direction or another…or sometimes, 30-25. That’s where clear communication and collective strategy come into play. I recognized on that trip that I can acknowledge the toll the city takes on me —the noise, the movement that is so different from our rural life — as well as the energy required to orchestrate our trips. Instead of trying to engineer some way to off-load that pressure, maybe we can simply work together to design a less taxing trip - spread out over more days, followed by a day off at home instead of immediate return to the office.

Gender roles have indeed started to blur, but the truth is that women are carrying more. Studies show that women today do as much domestic labor as women did in the 1960s. It’s just that we now also work 40+ hour weeks as well. Add to this the mental load of managing the family schedule, remembering birthdays and planning holidays and myriad other mental to-dos and you’ve got an incredible amount of unpaid labor. All exacerbating the gender pay gap at work. The tangible labor - washing dishes, getting kids dressed - is becoming more visible at last, but the emotional labor still remains largely unaccounted for. Now it’s time for us as a society to have a broader conversation - in parallel to the conversations that must happen within each relationship - that helps us bring the invisible into the light. Time to seek ways to build stronger supports for all families, lessen the load and create more equity.

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Audio-Visual Landscape

I've been digging the sounds of the Colombian electro group Black Mambo. Fusing Afro-Colombian and folkloric rhythms with deep house beats, they serve up an intoxicating and subtly psychedelic cocktail that always gets me grooving.

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Dot Connecting

I am a few days late for Native American Heritage Month (November in the United States), but it's never a bad time to learn 100 Ways to Support—Not Appropriate From—Native People.

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Personal Eco-System

As we head into holiday season and the accompanying consumer frenzy, I'll offer an alternative: Clothing and Book Swaps. While you may want to limit these just to your bubble, or hold off for the time being until social distancing isn't necesary anymore, these gatherings can be both fun and fruitful.

It's simple: everyone brings clothing items or books -or both!- that they no longer use, then you swap! For clothing swaps you can get fancy and hang everything up for a "shopping" experience or just dump it all on the floor and have fun sifting through the pile. For book swaps in small groups I'd advise each person bringing one book, speaking briefly about why they loved it and want to pass it on, and then drawing numbers. The person who draws #1 gets first pick from all the offerings, and so forth...

This kind of event is great becasuse everyone gets a nudge to declutter and then goes home with something "new", plus you can always donate whatever is left at the end!

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In Service,

Kate

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