Oh Crap, It’s Valentine’s Day

This is not the typical Valentine’s Day blog post about the celebration of love between romantic partners. It is also not a post about the feelings of sadness or eternal singleness this holiday can trigger for many. This post is about the love, joy, tradition, and efforts mothers pour into their families on Valentine’s Day that is often dismissed or unseen.  This is also known as invisible mental overload. If you are not a mother or do not know, motherhood mental overload is a real and exhausting phenomenon many women experience where they are constantly juggling multiple responsibilities, such as caring for their children, managing the household, working outside of the home, and occasionally staying up late connecting tiny toy hearts to school Valentine’s Day cards.  

Often mothers take on the task of helping their children create and distribute Valentine’s Day cards to their classmates, which can be time-consuming and stressful. Last week, I helped my preschooler find the perfect cards for her class. I got the class roster to make sure each classmate received their own card. I helped my daughter write her name on each card and attached a small gift. This was a fun and bonding activity to do together. My daughter felt a sense of autonomy being part of this process. It was a way I could express my love and dedication to her. But not without cost. There was the self-inflicted pressure I put on myself to make this memorable for her. The societal pressure many of my fellow moms felt to remember to create and distribute cards. And one more task on my never-ending to-do list that comes with running a household, and a business and *trying* to be a good mother and overall decent person.

Today, I remembered the Valentine’s Day cards. I placed them in the car—one stack of cards for my daughter’s class, the other for my son’s—and told my husband to make sure the cards were brought into our kids’ classrooms when he dropped them off at school…he forgot the Valentine’s Day cards.

In an admittedly heated conversation with my husband, I asked him to poll the mothers and fathers in his office to see who oversaw school Valentine’s Day cards. My prediction: most of the working mothers spent time and effort organizing their children’s Valentine’s Day cards. And the working fathers would probably say, “Oh Crap! Today is Valentine’s Day?” It is this unfair assumption that women must be the keeper of these tasks, and therefore, the weight of the invisible workload continues to drag women down. And the patriarchy wonders why women can’t keep up.

Now, my husband is better than most. He takes a very active role in our children’s care and household tasks. Due to the nature of my work, he is the primary emergency contact at our children’s daycare. When one of our kids is sick, he is the one the daycare calls and who picks them up or takes work off to care for them. His support as an equitable partner, and more so, an equitable parent, has allowed me to dedicate much of my time, energy, and self to Nurture Therapy with the confidence of knowing that our children are well cared for by him. But he also forgot the Valentine’s Day cards today…

Mothers need to have a support system that understands the challenges they face. This clan includes partners, family members, and friends, who offer emotional support to help with childcare or simply be a listening ear. But we also need these supports to be part of the invisible workload behind the magic that makes holidays so joyful for our children. As a society, we can make tasks easier for moms by sharing the workload. Teachers and schools can provide clear guidelines and timelines for Valentine’s Day card distribution, and other school projects and parents can work together to create a system of sharing the workload.

Ultimately, on Valentine’s Day and every day, we should recognize and appreciate the hard work of mothers who take care of their children’s needs, whether that’s helping them create Valentine’s Day cards, packing their lunches, or simply being the person to provide love and comfort. The best way we can recognize and appreciate mothers is to create a society that not only supports and values their contributions but also shares them. So yes, buy her flowers today, but also encourage mothers to prioritize their own self-care and well-being, recognizing she cannot begin to do this until the invisible workload is more evenly divided.

Blog Epilogue (or Epiblog, if you will): My husband said the results of the informal poll were evenly split between working moms and dads helping with their children’s Valentine’s Day cards. And my husband dropped off the cards at my daughter’s school before the end of the day. She was very happy.

So maybe cupid’s arrow is pointing us in the right direction.