Invisible Labor

A client of mine commutes to her job while parenting. Not sequentially, but simultaneously. She's in transit, a child asking her for something, and she's also leaving me a voice message about her business. Which means her brain is also running the grocery list, the weekend logistics, the thing she needs to follow up on from yesterday. All of it, at once, in the same hour.

I thought about what her partner's morning probably looks like. He wakes up, gets himself ready, goes to work. If he's working from home, he closes a door. He works. He might be thinking about his next job, his next move, but is he also tracking the rhythm of the household? The appointments, the meals, the emotional state of the people he lives with? In a lot of homes, the answer is no. And we've normalized that so thoroughly that most people don't even notice the gap.

This is what I mean by invisible labor. Not just the tasks, the mental load of holding the tasks. Knowing what needs to happen, when, for whom, and making sure it does. It doesn't show up on a job description. It doesn't get a line item in anyone's budget. It just gets done, usually by one person, usually while she's doing something else.

I know this labor intimately. 

I'm the connector in my family — the one who makes friends everywhere, tends relationships over years, follows up, checks in, shows up. My family teases me about it. But we once sat in a five-story house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in London, staying for free for three weeks, because of a friendship I'd built and kept. My husband's professional network gets us visas and expat packages and work permits. Mine gets us somewhere to stay in London, information, community. 

My client is the same. Her husband’s networking gets them a steady income. Her networking gets them a condo at half the market rate because she’s been gardening a relationship for years, a vacation spot with (literally) million dollar views, community.

Both are real. Both are valuable. But only one is considered legit. The other one is just “girls night,” “ladies that lunch,” “wine with the gals.”

That's the thing about invisible labor, it's not just the dishes and the appointments. It's the relationship infrastructure of an entire family's life. The social calendar, the birthday cards, the knowing which friend needs a check-in and which neighbor to loop in when something's wrong. It's work. It just doesn't look like work, because it's become the expectation for what women are just supposed to be.

My husband and I recently had an explicit conversation about it. I told him: I don't want to go back to a full-time jobby job right now (or maybe ever). I want to be available to parent, to write, to grow my business, to network, to be. I need you to be the primary earner while I handle the household, Izzy, and a handful of coaching clients. That's what this season requires. And he agreed.

What surprised me was how much that changed. Not the labor itself, but my relationship to it. When it's chosen, named, agreed upon, it sits differently in the body. The resentment around invisible labor isn't always about the labor. It's about the assumption. The just-of-course because…well, you are the woman. 

When I laid out the expectations women carry — be in shape, be pretty, be smart, build community, be the parent, keep a nice house, manage the family, and contribute financially, I felt relieved. 

And furious.

You can't redistribute what you haven't named.

So let's keep naming it.