Mental Load: Find Healing In Your Partnership & Balance Inequality in Your Home with Kate Mangino
July 18, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Pod Squad, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we shall prove that we indeed can do hard things. What we are intending for this episode, we have humble intentions, which are we want to just change the complete planet with this episode. And we have a plan to do so because a while back in yonder yore, we did an episode called Overwhelm. Okay? And you might remember that episode. It was episode six.
Amanda Doyle:
Wow, that was so early.
Abby Wambach:
The sixth episode.
Glennon Doyle:
It was like, we only have a few things to say in the beginning, and this is one of them. It was so important to us-
Abby Wambach:
… to talk about.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re still talking about it. To talk about overwhelm and the idea of carrying the whole mental load of a family even when you have a partner who wants to be supportive. And it was really just Amanda was exploring her feelings of overwhelm, and it just connected just seismically within our community and outside of it.
Abby Wambach:
And inside this family.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Yes.
Abby Wambach:
I love that episode. It helped me a lot.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And then after we did another conversation with Aijan Pu, who I worship. We really talked about in that episode, which was number 246, about the power structures and lack thereof, that kind of lead to women being the safety net of our households, families, and the entire nation. So those two are the setup for this episode. Now, here’s what we want for this episode. We want you to be able to sit with your partner, listen to this episode, and have mental load explained in a way that is non-accusatory, that is nonjudgmental, in a way that is really helpful to all parties. Because there’s so much shame in it that it’s hard to listen to sometimes. So we really want to take away the judgment, take away my snark, and we want to help get into the houses and help people truly understand so that we can actually make changes in our family units.
Abby Wambach:
So put on your curiosity hats, folks.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Yes.
Abby Wambach:
It’s all going to be okay.
Glennon Doyle:
We are really hoping to do something revolutionary and healing in our conversation today. We’re trying to set this conversation up as a calm, concrete healing conversation for both parties in a partnership. And we’re going to do that with the absolute person that we need to be doing this, which is obviously Kate Mangino, who is a gender expert, and she works with international organizations to promote social change. She has written and delivered curricula in over 20 countries about issues such as gender, equality, women’s empowerment, healthy masculinity, HIV prevention, and early enforced childhood marriage. Kate is the author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home.
Kate, hello.
Abby Wambach:
Solve the issue for us.
Kate Mangino:
Hi. No problem. We can do that.
Glennon Doyle:
So can you start us, Kate, with telling us the story of you sobbing on the kitchen floor? Take us to that moment. And what I want to start with is this idea that what’s going on in these struggles is not usually a bad guy and a good girl. It’s just a mess of confusion and expectations and often love and inability to help each other. Set us up.
Kate Mangino:
Yes. All of that. So my kitchen floor moment happened when my kids were two and five. This was seven years ago now. My husband and I, Evan actually had what I would say, very equitable partnership after the first kid was born. We staggered our work life balance and we had drop off and we had the household. We were a good machine. And then the second baby came and we both changed jobs. And it all fell apart. But it doesn’t fall apart overnight. It falls apart little by little, so you don’t always see it until you’re in it. And it was early November. I was teaching two undergrad classes and my dissertation was due by Christmas. So I had roughly two months to finish it up. And I was the alpha parent. I was the parent that the school calls when there’s a cough, or if there’s a day off, you rework your schedule to figure it out.
And my advisor calls me in for a meeting. And I go in and she says, “I’m really sorry, but my timing has changed and I need your dissertation by Thanksgiving, not by Christmas.”.
Abby Wambach:
Oopsies.
Kate Mangino:
So I was barely getting through the days. And Amanda, I’ve heard you explain it this way too. You’re a hot second away from erupting, because there’s so much you’re doing and you have so much responsibility and you’re trying to be professional. And I was trying to teach and pretend that I knew what I was doing in front of all of these freshmen, undergrads and then trying to do all the things. And I barely could get there if my dissertation was due in two months.
And she backed it up and I think I went into shock and I came home on the subway and I went back to our apartment and the kids were asleep, because it was a night meeting, thank goodness. And I sat down on our floor and just sobbed. Like ugly, angry sobs where you just can’t recover. And my husband, who is a good guy, how many times have we heard our husbands described as a good guy, felt awful and sat down next to me and was like, “I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?”.
Right? You’ve talked about this before. This is not a new thing. And at that moment, I forgot to mention my dissertation is on the intersection of women’s empowerment and masculinity. So I was ready. I was ready. So he says, “How can I help? “And I lost my mind and it was the floodgates opened and my entire lit review came out in verbal form and I gave him all of the statistics about how families across the world were falling into these stereotypical patterns because of our gender norms, and that in households where both parents work outside of the home, it falls into this two third, one third split.
And I said, “You probably understand why this is painful for me because I’m already pushing back from work because of all of the stuff that I have to do at home. I’m already not volunteering to take on something new. I’m already not putting my hat in the ring for the promotion. I’m already not volunteering for the work trip. I’m pulling back from the professional space. That’s only half of it. You’re losing two because I see you leaning into work and I see you pulling away from the personal space.” And I said, “Eventually the kids are going to grow up and I’m going to recover and I’m going to be okay. But you’ve got one shot. You’ve got one shot at little kids. You’ve got one shot at being a dad and connecting with them and being authentic and having this life of a parent. And you will wake up someday and it will be over and you will not be okay.”.
“So we need to make changes right now, not for me, but for both of us. And it’s not either of ours fault. We both grew up in this messed up gendered society. And we’re both responding to the cues that we’ve been given our whole life, but we have to intentionally make a change now.”
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. I’ve never heard anybody describe it so beautifully about the cost for both. It’s always like, “No, let’s just do this to help the women.” But no, no, no, no, no. So at the core of it’s just we’ve been taught to love differently. Women have been taught to love by connect and men have been taught to love by going out.
Kate Mangino:
And I think at the end of the day, men feel that old myth of the stay at home Donna Reed household, which actually didn’t exist for very many people, but that myth of perfection. Men are supposed to go out and earn an income and that income is to take care of their family and women are supposed to stay home and do all the things to take care of their family. Provide. You’re supposed to provide for your family. And I think men implicitly know that means with money.
Abby Wambach:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
So we’re going to help the men too because this deep loneliness or disconnection from the family is something that you don’t recover from.
Abby Wambach:
Well, I think about it in a way that is so relevant in my current life. When I call home where I was raised, I only call my mother. It might feel like such a small thing.
Glennon Doyle:
No, it’s huge.
Abby Wambach:
Because I don’t live in the place that I grew up. I’m away from my family of origin, so I literally don’t have a relationship with my father and that is because of this structure. So if you are sitting with your partner listening and you are what one would call the breadwinner, the one that goes and makes and earns the living and takes care of the family in that way, think about that. Think about 20 years from now, 30 years from now, what kind of a relationship you want? Do you want your kids to call you? That’s kind of the simplest way I can think about it.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s beautiful.
Kate Mangino:
That’s a great example, Abby. And I would say these are just roles. These are outside of gender identity. All kinds of people play the roles of doing more and doing less. And we now have data that shows us that even in mixed sex partnerships, when the woman earns more money, she still does more in the house. So economics don’t really back this up. It’s about if you have been socialized to think that the best contribution you can make to your family is by bringing home money, maybe rethink that. Maybe there’s something else you can give. Maybe they also want your time and your love and your care and your patients. They probably need those things just as much if not more than your income.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
The moment where… And we are setting aside for purposes of this podcast, the rage element of this phenomenon.
Kate Mangino:
Because there is one.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh yeah, Kate. Sure is. However, there is something to unpack in that, because I think for many partners who are good people and contributors to the household, the rage is confusing, and they don’t understand it. And so when your husband said, “Just tell me what I can do,” and he was desperate to help you but was powerless to because he didn’t know what to do and you felt enraged by the question, I think we need to set the table so people understand why that question hits so close to the bone for people who carry the cognitive load. Because the world seems like all this gender progress, all this gender progress. Can you set the table for us from the major shift, 65 to 85 and then what happened since 85 so we can understand that?
Kate Mangino:
Sure. So we have… Sociologists have been keeping chore journals since the mid-sixties, which is fantastic. Not so fantastic that they’ve really only been working with different sex couples, but we’re working on that now and getting new data from 1965 to 1985, typically you saw women doing 85% of the work in the home, men doing 15. This probably tracks with our memories of our parents and grandparents. In the mid-eighties, we saw a huge shift and it got bumped up to men doing 33%. So a huge shift in a small amount of time, which also mirrors women entering the workforce in large numbers in the eighties and the economic situation of the 80s. Since 1985, we’ve only moved from 33% to 35%. So right now we are stuck. We’re basically plateaued since the middle 80s, of one person in the relationship doing a third of the work and one person in the relationship doing two thirds of the work. Both people working outside of the home and this is only tracking physical chores, washing dishes, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, changing the oil in the car.
This is not tracking cognitive labor, which is, you’ve talked about this before in the pod, huge and tremendous and that can be what I think makes people feel trapped. It’s like I think of spinning plates in the circus when I close my eyes and you’re keeping all of these plates spinning and you go to sleep at night thinking about what you have to do first thing in the morning so that your plates don’t fall. And it’s exhausting. And if one person in the partnership is spinning 50 plates and the other person is spinning two, okay, let’s do two thirds, one thirds, let’s say 20 versus 10. There’s obviously a huge power imbalance. Imbalance and free time imbalance of cognitive space and balance of just how you spend your life.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. And there is a difference between cognitive load burden and chore burden. Chore, I don’t spend the day worrying about how I’m going to mow the lawn. What am I going to use to mow the lawn? What’s going to be the effect of mowing the lawn on my ecosystem? So if you are in charge of the lawn mowing, the lawn mowing constitutes mow the lawn. If you’re in charge of say, are the kids going to need a tutor, because they’re struggling in school, the actual going to the tutor is 1/100 of the work. That’s right. That goes into that. So can you walk us through an example of the stages of cognitive load showing how the actual doing of the thing, when someone says, what can I do to help dropping off at the tutor? Dropping off at the piano lesson actually constitutes a tiny fraction of the load that you’re carrying.
Glennon Doyle:
And let’s just describe this in a way that someone who’s never heard of cognitive load might… In case someone’s listening that is in that position would get it.
Kate Mangino:
You got it. So let’s use the tutoring example. I think that’s great, Amanda. So let’s follow up on that. You’re a parent and you notice grades are slipping in math over the course of, I don’t know, the first semester and you-
Amanda Doyle:
Step one: you’re noticing the grades. That’s a lot of logging in.
Kate Mangino:
Noticing the grade.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s a lot of conversations with teachers. That’s a lot of touching base with your kid and opening the folders in the book bag that come home.
Kate Mangino:
So you have to check the homework that comes home. You have to check the report cards. You might send an email to the teacher. You talk to your child. “How are you feeling about math these days? Is it harder for you? Is there something different? What’s going on?” You set up a parent teacher conference, you create the space in your schedule to go into the school. Then you find out, okay, we should probably get a tutor. Everyone says that’s what we need to do. We’ll get a tutor. Well, okay, then I have to text 10 of my parent friends to see if they have math tutors and if they recommend any math tutors or maybe you call the community center, you check with the school. So you do all this research to figure out where the tutors are and how much they cost and can it fit within our budget and what times do they have available?
Oh, this tutor’s only free on Saturday mornings. That doesn’t really fit our family schedule, but this one can do Wednesdays at five. I think if I leave work at 4:00 and I race home and I pick him up, I can be there at 5:00. And I’ll bring a granola bar on the way so that I’m not starving. These are all of the things that we think about in our heads. It’s not about taking your child to tutor at five o’clock once a week. It’s like mountains of work that have come before it. Allison Daminger has done a lot of work around cognitive labor and what she found is that couples tend to come together at the decision-making phase. So when she has a spreadsheet and has done hours and hours and hours of work and sits down and says, “Honey, what do you think we should do?”
And then he spends 10 minutes skimming over the spreadsheet and then they make a decision together, somehow when that story is told to friends or family members, “Oh, I have such a good husband, he’s always with me. We really share in the responsibilities.” But we can see in this scenario that he did 10 minutes of work and maybe he also takes the kid to tutoring every other Wednesday. Maybe you split that up. Awesome. But there’s just so much work that’s happening when you’re in the shower, when you’re driving to your commute, when you’re falling asleep, if you have time for exercise while you exercise.
Anticipating needs, identifying options, so doing the research, making a decision and then evaluating it. Hey, are the grades getting better? I got to schedule another parent teacher conference. Is it working? Do we need more tutoring? Do we need less? Oh, my kid is happy. He doesn’t necessarily hate tutoring, but he doesn’t like this tutor, so now we have to switch tutors. It’s just it’s never ending. It’s never ending. We all know that.
Glennon Doyle:
Two things. Why does on the… I say bathroom floor, because that’s where my moments usually are, but on your kitchen floor, when your husband says, “What can I do to help?” Taking into account everything we’ve just said, why does that question illuminate the entire problem?
Kate Mangino:
Because giving someone a task like a manager in a workplace, or in a household takes more work. I would have to sit down and think, what can you do that I’m going to delegate to you? But then I still have to track it. It’s still on my plate. You’re just maybe taking the kid every Wednesday, but then every Tuesday night, I have to say, “Remember, tutoring is tomorrow. Can you make it? Oh, you can’t make it. Okay, I’ll switch my schedule. You can make it? Great.” It’s still on your cognitive load. So what I think all three of you have done in your relationships, from my understanding and what came out of my book research is what we both need to do in a partnership is you both need to find a way to do physical labor and you both need to do cognitive labor, so that both of you have the same number of plates spinning. At times in your life when you have small children or elderly family member that you’re taking care of, you’ll both have more plates.
Life might still be exhausting for both of you, but at least you’ll be in it together. You’ll be a team working together to get through something with mutual love as opposed to one person doing more and feeling bitter and resentful towards the other person.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. Can we linger at bitter and resentful? Because one of the things that’s… Welcome to my town. No, one of the things that I think is really important about your work is that it really illuminates how both sides are bitter and resentful and they don’t understand. If you see yourself in this, you say, “I sit down with a spreadsheet, I help pick the camps every year. I do the drop-off just as much as she does the drop-off. I don’t understand why she’s so upset. My wife is just a control freak. My wife just wants it the way it is. She’s just going to redo it if I do it.” Can you talk to us about some of these phenomenons that occur in relationships, where both sides feel resentful of the other because of what happens here?
Kate Mangino:
And so going back, and I’ll give credit again to Dr. Allison Daminger. She did fantastic research and came up with this theory, which is when people sort of have this inkling that maybe their beliefs are not matching their behaviors, they have three options. They can either change their beliefs, which isn’t likely to happen for someone to be like, “Oh, I guess I don’t believe in gender equality.” That’s not going to fly. They can change their behavior, which takes a lot of work and a lot of time and is hard, or they can reframe the issue to make it look like their beliefs match their behaviors. And I think that’s what a lot of us do subconsciously, and there are all of these reframing tactics, as I call them in my book, of how we perpetuate this level of inequality in our life. One of them is the economic excuse. I make more money. I spend more hours at work, and so my partner is going to pick up the slack at home.
Maybe that works within one household, but if you look broadly, we know that women who earn more than their male partners still do more in the home than her male partner. So men aren’t stepping up no matter who’s making the money. We also see imbalances in same sex relationships. The third part of that is that we have something called the wage gap in our country and other countries as well. And so there’s this cycle that if men think, “Because I make more money, I do less in the home and my female partner is going to do more in the home to make up for that because she doesn’t make money equally to her male counterparts in the workplace. She’s now overburdened with household things, so she has less opportunity for continued education, for asking for a raise, for putting in overtime hours, so she’s unlikely to make more money in the future.”.
He has the time to climb the corporate ladder to work overtime to put in for a manager position, and so the cycle just continues and she makes less and less and does more and more in the home where he has the opportunity to do more professional things and less household things. So the economic argument doesn’t really hold water, but I hear it a lot. The other thing I hear a lot, which you mentioned, Amanda, is it’s just her personality. She’s just better at multitasking than I am. She’s a control freak.
Would anyone ever say to their boss, “I’m sorry, I just can’t manage that project. I’m not good at multitasking.” Would you ever say that to your manager or your supervisor? Would you ever say, “Well, you’re kind of a control freak, so I’m just going to let you manage this project and you just let me know how you need my help.” When you look at it at a work perspective, it’s laughable. I don’t think that women are control freaks or that we have specific personalities. I think it’s a coping mechanism. I think that we know what our reality is going to be, and so we learn the skills for survival and to cope, and that is multitasking, and that is keeping track of all the little things, and that is being selfless and giving up our own time so that we can care for those people around us. It isn’t because it is our personality choice.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Abby Wambach:
And we’re taught that from the time that we’re children, right? My mom specifically taught me how to wash dishes and how to do a load of laundry, whereas she never did that with my brothers.
Glennon Doyle:
I’ve been in a mixed gender marriage and a same gender marriage. I found in my last marriage, the bridge between the male experience and the female experience and how it conditioned us both was unbridgeable for me. I couldn’t do it. The difference in conditioning. I find mixed gender marriages to just be completely unnatural lifestyle choices, okay?
God bless all of you. Now, my question for you, which is like… I don’t know if it’s an appropriate question, but what I feel like makes us control freaks is the deep fear that when we are in mixed gender marriages, that the other person cannot love as well as we can. The loving, what is it besides noticing? What is it besides paying close attention, noticing and then caring enough to do whatever it takes to make it better?
Do men have many of them been conditioned so deeply to not notice? Do they care as much? Do they notice as much? Is this something that’s teachable? Because I know I can teach a spreadsheet. I know I can make a spreadsheet. I can take it to you and say, “If you don’t do these 50% of these things, we’re going to have trouble.” Can it be taught? Just pay attention to their little faces, to what their teachers are saying, to our home? Is that doable?
Kate Mangino:
The short answer is yes, I believe it is doable. There’s two things I think you’re talking about. There’s the skills. Washing dishes is a skill. Abby learned how to wash dishes and do laundry. It’s a skill. It doesn’t matter what your gender identity is. Everyone is perfectly capable of learning how to do the dishes and do laundry. Then there’s also this deeper socialization of love and responsibility, and this is where Evan and I have been working on this stuff for years together, and we’ve nailed physical tasks and we’ve nailed cognitive labor and where we are now, what we keep getting stuck on is he has realized that I feel responsible for everyone’s happiness in my family.
I have been socialized to feel responsible. And when someone in my family is sad, I feel sad and I feel responsible and I did something wrong and I need to help fix it. And he does not feel responsible for the happiness in our family. He’ll be like, “One of the kids is sad. I’ll help them process it. I’ll do what I can, but it’s not my fault. How can you possibly think it’s my fault?”
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. So that’s healthy. That’s healthy.
Kate Mangino:
That’s what we’re working on now. It’s how do you get through that? And I think that I’ve been socialized to accept that responsibility and he’s been socialized not to accept that responsibility. I would say the magic is somewhere in the middle. I don’t think either one of us are right.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s Debra Levy’s quote that we ourselves as the architects of everyone else’s wellbeing, that your plans and your drawings, you are building their wellbeing or you’re failing to build the wellbeing of everyone around you. And that is a 24-hour deal if you take it on.
Kate Mangino:
If you take it on.
Glennon Doyle:
What is blowing my mind about this is what Kate is saying, I think is like we each men in the way that they approach family and women in the way that they approach family have something to teach each other. I just thought I have something to teach my ex-husband.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
But through my obsessive noticing and my obsessive caring amount-
Abby Wambach:
Co-dependency.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s a codependency to it that maybe is not completely healthy either.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Kate Mangino:
Yes, we have something to learn from each other. And if we set the bar too low for men, we’re robbing them. We’re eliminating the chance of deep joy. Yes, caregiving is work and hours. I love being a mom more than I love anything else in my life. It brings me a sense of joy that I don’t get from anywhere else. I’m not saying you can’t have joy without having kids. I’m just saying I love being a mom. I love caregiving. I just helped care for my father when he was passing away.
I care for a brother who has cognitive and physical disabilities. I care-give a lot in my life and I love caregiving. I get just as much from those experiences as the people who I’m giving care for. I’ve learned empathy and patience. I’ve learned to find beauty in everyday things. So I think if we set that bar too low for men, if we assume they’re not capable of having those kinds of connections, we are negating that opportunity for them to have that joy in their life. And that makes me feel sad because that’s half of the population of the world.
Amanda Doyle:
We’re getting to another piece of the cyclical issue of this over time and how this develops and compounds. You wake up one day and you’re like, how did this happen? And the maternal gatekeeping, and I think for me, in my relationship, the work that John and I have done since episode six has really revealed a lot of the maternal gatekeeping that I was doing. And I think it would be a mistake. There is so much pain for women everywhere who feel so lonely, so scared, frankly. When you feel like you are the only one thinking about and worrying about your family at all times, you can’t stop doing that because you’re the only one doing it. And it’s so scary and lonely, and people around you make you feel lonelier because they resent you for worrying so much. And they resent you for your overwhelm and your anger at being the soul carrier of that.
And they call you a control freak, and they call you bossy and perfectionist, and really all you’re trying to do is not let your family be something that no one’s thinking about. So there is that deep pain. And also I have come to understand that there is a deep pain on the other side, which is this perception that it doesn’t matter what I do. It won’t be good enough. It doesn’t matter what I do. She’s going to just redo it. She needs it to be her way anyway, so the hell’s the point? So I might as well withdraw from doing those efforts because they’re going to be undone and redone anyway, which then polarizes both parties back into their positions of I am a passive observer of this family and I’m an overburdened overtaxed only one doing something person. So can you talk about that?
I really want to dig in there because I think that a lot of women think, “Yes, I am going to redo that. And that’s because you don’t have the same standards and quality that I have, and these are my children.” And a lot of men are like, “What the hell? You don’t let me do anything because you need it to be this quality, and it actually doesn’t need to be that. It just needs to be done by a parent who loves them.” So what the hell do we do and how do we keep from shutting down the other partner so that they just stop showing up altogether real quick?
Kate Mangino:
That’s a big question. Okay, real quick. So yes, we are talking about maternal gatekeeping, which does have a long history of the fact that historically, women didn’t have any power in the professional space. And so we exerted our power in the domestic space, because that’s what we had. And now little by little, yeah, we’re in the professional space, but we’re still fighting for power in the professional space. We’re not totally there. Let’s be honest. So if we give away our power in the domestic space, we got nothing. So maybe this isn’t happening. This is probably in the back of our mind, all kind of confused with gender norms. I don’t think people are actually thinking through this process, but that’s where maternal gatekeeping comes from. So I get it. I don’t want anyone listening to this pod think we’re blaming women for gender inequality or that we think women have to fix anything.
That is not what we’re saying. We’re just saying we have this socialized pattern that comes from a history of power imbalances. And that can manifest into, “You put the baby in that outfit, didn’t you check the temperature? She’s going to freeze. Give her to me and I’m going to put a sweater on her. What are you thinking?” Those little kinds of comments over time where you’re asserting your power, you’re asserting the fact that you know what’s best and you’re putting your partner down, that’s not great, and it’s not going to lead to a loving, long-term mutual relationship. So what can we do about it? First of all, recognize it when you do it. Try to stop. Okay, I’m maternal gatekeeping. How can I rephrase that? “We’re first time parents together. I think it’s kind of chilly. Can you check the temperature? Maybe we should pack another layer in the diaper bag?”
Reframe things so that it’s about us making decisions about our family and less about what I have to do to protect everyone. The other thing that comes up a lot when I talk to couples is when the person doing all the things is in the space all the time and doing all the things, there’s no entry point. “Can I do this? Oh, you’ve got that. Okay, can I help here? Oh, you’ve got that. Okay.” The person doing more. And this is really, really hard to do, but you almost have to step back to create the space for other people to come in and find their way. You almost have to say, “I’m going to take a month off of laundry. Can you do laundry? If you need help, you let me know. I have some tips, but I’m going to take a month off.” And let them figure out how they do laundry.
It will be very different than the way you do it, and the pajamas might be folded differently and the underwear might be folded differently, but it will get done and you won’t have to do it. And over time, because it’s a skill, your partner will get better at it. I think that sometimes in this conversation, we often focus on the person who needs to do more. You need to step up, you need to do more, and that is incredibly important.
But there’s also this other half of the other person needs to step back. You need to create the space for other people to come in and help, and that you’re not a failure if you step back. You’re not a bad mom, you’re not a bad partner, you’re not doing anything wrong. In fact, you’re doing something right because you’re creating an opportunity for other people to care and to do. And that’s what we need to tell each other. We need to help each other step back.
Amanda Doyle:
And also, we need to recognize that what we are doing right now is historically unprecedented. We feel crazy and frazzled and totally overwhelmed because this is not something people have done in the past. Working mothers today spend more hours on childcare than stay-at-home moms did in the seventies? Yes. Do you hear me? What? Stay at home moms in the seventies did less hours on childcare than full-time working mothers do today. Okay? This is unsustainable.
Kate Mangino:
Because they were like, “Go to the park. Watch TV. Go run around with your friends.” Now it’s like you’re a bad mom if there’s too much screen time. So you have to have an art activity, and you have to have this, and you have… So women are spending a crazy amount of time. Parents are spending a crazy amount of time, hours with children on childcare if you’re out there listening and thinking, but I’ve role modeled my life after what my mom showed me. It was a different time.
Glennon Doyle:
No, she was smoking cigarettes and drinking cab, and playing cards. She did not give a shit where you were.
Kate Mangino:
You can’t replicate that.
Abby Wambach:
My mom locked us out the house. She literally locked us out of the house.
Glennon Doyle:
Before we move on, I have one quick follow-up question about the coat and the baby.
Kate Mangino:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Because I’m already annoyed, and I’m staying in my non-judgmental place for the place we’re all trying to get to, which is progress, but to me it feels… I’m picturing a dad putting his coat on and then getting the baby to go outside without the coat. So why is it the woman’s responsibility to then change how she approached… I was an elementary school teacher. I know how we do that, but we do that with children. We are very careful about what we say. So their feelings won’t get hurt. But why doesn’t he know that it’s cold outside?
Kate Mangino:
That’s a great point. I guess in my mind there was a coat. It just wasn’t, maybe it was a fall coat as opposed to a winter coat. But you’re right. I mean, it comes down to why isn’t it his responsibility? And it is. And I’d love to get onto raising boys, because I think we need to raise boys differently to be noticers and to be caregivers when they reach adulthood. And in the meantime, I think that it’s a hard pill to swallow to be totally honest. And I admit that because if I’m doing all the things and I’m super stressed out, the last thing I want to do is think about my words so that I don’t hurt anyone’s feelings and I can come to a better outcome. And it shouldn’t be on the person doing more to change their words for a better outcome.
It shouldn’t. But it is. I mean, that’s just sort of our reality. If you want to take the judgment away, if you want to approach this with love and compassion, I think that we’re going to have to practice using different words and taking different approaches. And sometimes it might feel like you’re being overly benevolent and it’s unfair. And I hear that and I get that, and I have felt that same way. But that stage doesn’t take very long until you start to see how wonderful it is when you get to the other side of it.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay. I believe you, Kate.
I would love to transition us to kind of concrete, how do you become a noticer? How do you have these conversations if you’re starting from the place that we’ve been discussing? You live there? What are the conversations you can have with each other? How do you begin to get more like these EP40, who are these 40 couples that you found that have equal partnerships and how do we have what they’re having?
Kate Mangino:
First of all, I want to make a disclaimer, because I think this is really important that when we disrupt gender norms, that there can be a threat of violence that can come from that. That’s the world over. When you give a woman land rights or you make a woman a CEO, it opens up the opportunity for violence. So I just want to say to people listening, if there is violence in your home or a threat of violence, or there is any level of fear, this is not the time to have that conversation. These conversations are for partnerships where there is love and trust and no fear of violence, because you are essentially disrupting gender norms. So I just want to say that so that people can make the best decision for their own life. And then I think it’s probably best to have this conversation when you’re just partnering, when you’re just getting married, you’re just moving in together.
You’re just making a long-term commitment. So that’s on all of us who have younger kids, younger cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors. People ask, “How did you meet? And what’s the wedding going to be like? And what kind of dress are you wearing and where are you taking a honeymoon?” But we can also ask questions. Have you talked about cognitive labor? So I think that’s on us socially to sort of nudge people to have this conversation when it really matters, because it’s not sexy to talk about cognitive labor when you’re just getting together, and it’s all about the physical.
Amanda Doyle:
Although I will tell you, when someone pulls their weight in cognitive labor, it is incredibly sexy.
Kate Mangino:
It’s super sexy. Absolutely right. So I would say the best time to have this is you’re expecting a child, you’re adopting a child, you’re getting partnered, you’re moving in together. But it can happen at any point in time, and it should especially happen at any point in change. An additional child, a new job, a new house, a new pet, a parent moves in. Anytime there is a change, it’s a great time because you’re already disrupting your household norms. So you might as well disrupt them a little bit more. Sit down, have a conversation together. Start from that place of: this is not just happening to us. This is happening to millions of households across the world, and it’s happening to us, and I’m aware of it, and I think it’s hurting both of us. So let’s talk about how it’s hurting both of us. Let’s talk about the frustration I feel, and I want to hear the frustration you feel, and then let’s together think of some ways that we could fix it for us.
For most people, it’s domains. You do laundry, you do cooking, you split up the kids, you do daycare conversations, you do elementary school, whatever it is, so that there’s something on your plate that I don’t have to think of. But it’s more than delegating tasks. And that’s why I really encourage people to have those deeper conversations about gender norms. What were you raised to think is important? Tell me about your family growing up.
I mean, Abby has already shared so many stories about her upbringing. Tell me about your upbringing. Do you want to replicate that in our household or do you want to change that? What did you like about your childhood that you would like to continue? And what are some things that you would like to change for the future generations? I think so much of this work and caring and loving in the household comes from the way we were socialized, which a lot of that is gendered. It’s not just about delegating tasks. It has to be deeper. It has to be a conversation about: describe a successful mom. Is that different from a successful dad? Can we agree on what a successful parent is? And then can we split that stuff up? So you kind of have to dig a little deeper. It gets a little painful before you can get to the point where you think; okay, now we’re kind of freeing each other of these social norms, and we can build a family unit that works for us.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re making the invisible visible before it becomes visible anyway. It’s going to become visible anyway, so you’re doing it beforehand.
Abby Wambach:
One of the domains that I work with in our family structure is sports. Obvious. I’ll take care of it. So Emma, right now, she’s starting the process of possibly playing soccer in college. It’s very exciting, it’s kind of my domain. And two things that I’ve noticed so far. Number one, because this is my domain. It’s something that it’s on my mind, and I’m in communication with Emma about this, talking to her about it every so often, traveling with her alone to some stuff. So it’s creating this bond.
But one of the things that I just want to warn those out there about is when you take on a domain, it brings a level of responsibility that is really scary. That’s the part that I share with Glennon. I hope that I’m doing this right because it’s very different than when I went through college in the process of recruiting et cetera nowadays. But it’s also really scary to hold the responsibility of a domain, and that’s the stuff that connects Glennon and I that is kind of transformative. And I’m creating a beautiful bond with Emma, but I’m also able to share the worry of…
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Equal partnerships.
Abby Wambach:
… gosh, I don’t know if I’m doing this right. And it’s kind of led me down the road of I don’t think anybody’s doing anything right.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t know what we’re doing. How am I-
Kate Mangino:
You’re doing it together. You’re doing it together, and that is what matters. And that’s such a good point. With little kids, it’s a little easier. But bigger kids, teenagers, you’re dealing with big issues and scary issues, right? And of course you need to lean on each other and make decisions yet, are we in agreement here? Am I doing the right thing? Could I have done this better? But it’s not on Glennon’s plate. She’s not going to bed at night worrying about soccer. She knows you’ve got that and that you’ll come to her if you need help, and she trusts you, right? Yes. That’s what this is about.
Glennon Doyle:
It has not as much to do with whether she’s doing it right. It’s like laying in bed next to someone who I know is feeling as much responsibility is love. That’s love. It’s like laying next to someone who I know is loving as hard as I am in the way that I think of love. It has nothing to do with anything’s right or wrong, or-
Abby Wambach:
And I think that that’s the most important thing for me. Let’s just talk to the guys listening to this. That I can share my fear of fucking it up with Glennon. And she tells me it’s not about whether it’s right or wrong, it’s just that you’re doing it. That is the stuff that matters more. I know for me as a person who wants to get everything right, that’s the hardest thing about taking on some of the responsibility, is that there isn’t a right or wrong. It’s just like we’re going to decide and we’re going to keep changing our decisions as we go on. But I understand the reluctance of wanting to even jump in the domain game because it’s scary.
Amanda Doyle:
But this is the message, and this is why this is about partnership and bond and love at the end of the day. At the day, we’re talking about, oh, how do we carry the load? But we’re actually talking about how do we stay in love with each other? And the fact that you are tortured by the fear of fucking it up is the bond of love is the only evidence that any of us need that we are in it together. Because the problem is we think we are alone in our tortured fear of fucking this all up, and we don’t think anyone else is worried about it with us.
So the fact that you are, it doesn’t matter whether you do mess it up or not, that is the bond that’s going to keep us connected. And that is what men are missing out on. That bond with their partners. Women are missing out on it too.
We want to be connected in that. That is the deepest vulnerability you can have is be deeply afraid together that you’re not doing it right, and then deeply celebrating that you had a win. That’s it. But we can’t celebrate together, because we don’t feel like we’ve labored together. And we can’t worry together because we don’t feel like we can possibly translate our worry to you because you haven’t carried it. And men and women are missing on that. We’re missing it on our relationships. We’re getting it on group texts with our friends, because we know they’re just as worried as us, but men are alone on this island, and they don’t share that connection, not with their friends and not with us.
Kate Mangino:
And every man that I have interviewed has explained at length how hard it is to perform masculinity in my office, at work, at school, on my athletic team. Men spend their lives performing masculinity. The relief that comes when you have a partnership, and a spouse or a partner or kids that love you for who you are, and you can drop that performance, and in the home you can be your own genuine, authentic self. You can be scared, you can be uncertain. You can feel failure. You can feel all the feelings that the world tells you you shouldn’t feel because you’re a man.
If you can feel that in your home, that’s true happiness. And so all the men I interviewed for my book, when I asked them; what’s in it for you? What’s the motivation to doing more laundry, to doing more housework, to doing more cognitive labor? They all said, without hesitation, “I’m happier. I have a better relationship. I have deeper emotional connections. I can be who I am. I am loved and accepted for who I am.” And that was monumental to all of them.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. Okay. I just feel like that was so unbelievably beautiful. I do want to ask you, and I haven’t asked anyone else about this, but do you think that you might come back with us and talk to us about healthy masculinity and how we raise human beings so they don’t have to undo all of this?
Kate Mangino:
Yes. Yes, that’s where our future is. And all of the caregiving, all of the love, all the noticing, that can start with little boys. And I think we’ve changed the way that we’ve raised girls. We all read our daughters bedtime stories for rebel girls, right? But have we changed the way we’re raising boys? Are we buying our boys baby dolls and play kitchens? Are we reading them bedtime stories for rebel girls? We’re not. And so I think there’s so much work to be done in how we’re raising all of our kids. I mean, we should make it genderless and just say, how are we raising all of our children?
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, will you come back and can we do that conversation-
Kate Mangino:
Happily?
Amanda Doyle:
She’s really worried about locking you in. She’s like, get her on record.
Kate Mangino:
Happily.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s recorded.
Kate Mangino:
Set a date. I’m happy to do it.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s recorded now. Okay. Nothing like learning how to raise your kids when your kids are 21. I’m going to have them back. I’m going to have all the kids back at our house.
Amanda Doyle:
You probably are, so it’s all good.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Kate Mangino:
It’s never too late.
Glennon Doyle:
Kate, you are just… Thank you for the-
Kate Mangino:
Oh my gosh, thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
… world changing work that you’re doing in the world. I’m already so excited to talk to you again.
Amanda Doyle:
And I just want to put in a plug that if you’re worried that you’re too far gone and that you’ve had your relationship like this and you’ve been married 15 years and it’s just, how the hell are you going to do it? It is not. It is not. It is not.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Kate Mangino:
Anytime-
Amanda Doyle:
The last couple years have been really huge for John and me, and we have made so much progress and it affects everything. It’s really, really important.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m divorced from Craig, and I want to do this work. It’s not too late if you’re divorced. I see so much of this in our relationship, even with our family being so different, and I want to heal all of this.
Kate Mangino:
And I think it’s so important that we know the words to use for our kids and our grandkids and our nieces and our nephews, so that when they try to have an equal partnership, they know where to go when they have questions because it might not be their parents, it might be us.
Abby Wambach:
And isn’t it so true that our children, what we model for them is I think probably the most important thing about changing the social and structural norms that we all grew up with? It’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
And to the guys, I see you. I see you. I have compassion for you. I believe my belief about not stepping up because of a lack of generosity or laziness isn’t correct. I feel like there is a level of fear that men have been taught women are the only ones who can do this right, that leads to the hesitancy.
Abby Wambach:
Before we wrap, what made you open up to the idea of me being able to step in as an equal partner? Because that was something that you had to open up to.
Glennon Doyle:
I watched you because I have been trained to be a noticer, and I noticed that you notice that’s it. It’s a noticing. It’s a not waiting. It’s a trust that you are a person who notices and loves and cares and will do anything to make things better.
Abby Wambach:
And also just for the women out there, she used a ESPN ticker analogy with me early on in our marriage. She said, the sports scores that are always running on the bottom of the ESPN channel, she’s like, “That is what I am always thinking about,” with regards to our family, our children, our household.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s how if you have the cognitive load. Do you have a ticker constantly going in your mind-
Abby Wambach:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
That was Reese, actually, that was not-
Abby Wambach:
That was really good for me to understand. That was really good for me to understand, to visualize. And so now she’ll come into the room and she’ll say, “What are you doing?” And my eyes are closed and I’m tickering. I’m tickering. I’m tickering.
Glennon Doyle:
And then I step out.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s make that a verb. I’m tickering. All right. We can do hard things, y’all. Good job. We’ll have Kate back soon. Bye-bye.
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us, if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odysee, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner, or click on ‘follow’. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much.
We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle, in partnership with Odysee. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman. And the show is produced by Lauren Graso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner and Bill Schultz. I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.