The end-of-year holidays mean many things to different people, but if you’re a mom in a family with holiday traditions, you likely feel the weight of responsibility grow heavier on your shoulders during the stretch of time that runs from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.
In addition to any work you do outside the home, there are the continued daily responsibilities of managing a household — sack lunches, soccer uniforms — which women still take on to a greater extent than their male partners, logging almost twice as much time per day on these tasks in the U.S.
Pile on the additional work of managing merriment — preparing food, hosting gatherings, purchasing gifts — and it’s easy to see why moms feel the pressure. There is simply too much on their plate.
This stress and feeling of being overwhelmed is perfectly conveyed in a cartoon created by Aubrey Hirsch for The Persistant, which bills itself as “a digital journalism platform amplifying women’s voices, stories, perspectives and ideas.”
“We know that women do more unpaid labor in every single country in the world,” Francesca Donner, founder and editor of The Persistant, told HuffPost. “And I just was thinking about how this time of tremendous joy and creating magic for a lot of families is also a time of pure exhaustion, stress, anxiety, spending more money than you want to — and for a lot of mothers in particular, really kind of back-breaking work,” she said, explaining the genesis of the idea for the cartoon, which she approached Hirsch about a couple of months ago.
Hirsch was enthusiastic about the opportunity to shine a light on women’s under-credited household labor.
She called it a “gendering of holiday magic”: the reality that some family members (usually fathers and children) get to experience the delights of holiday traditions while others (usually mothers) instead experience all the stress of putting on the show.
“When you’re the magician, you’re the one behind the scenes, doing all of the work and pulling all the strings to make it happen,” Hirsch explained.
These days, there is also the added pressure of keeping up appearances on social media, which Hirsch addresses in the cartoon.
One of the frames of the cartoon makes reference to “kin-keeping,” a job so devalued and overlooked that few people know that a term exists to describe it.
“It blew my mind when I heard the term, because it made so much sense,” Hirsch said. “You’re the person who sends the holiday cards, you make sure you have everybody’s address updated. You’re the person who checks in with both sides of the family to see when is everyone going to be in town and do we want to get together for Hanukkah? And you’re figuring out what’s on your nieces’ and nephews’ wish lists.”
Though these and other holiday-related tasks are often dismissed as things that matter only to moms, Donner points out that others are quick to lament it if the job goes undone. “It’s ‘important to her’ because that’s kind of the way the system is structured, and she might be the one who is filling the stockings, and therefore it seems important to her, but believe me, if the stockings were empty on Christmas morning because nobody had bothered to fill them, they’d be pretty important to everybody else, too.”
The cumulative weight of all these expectations can take a toll on moms’ mental health.
“They talk about women working the double shifts — going to work and doing their paid job and having a second unpaid job to do, manage the house, taking care of things, all the domestic labor and the mental load. Then with the holidays added on top of it, it’s really like triple shift,” Hirsch said.
In order to divide work more equitably around the holidays, couples can sit down together in advance and go over what needs to be done — with the goal of this task-management being a shared responsibility, as opposed to one partner expecting that the other will hand them a to-do list.
Donner also championed the idea of having a “don’t list,” meaning that you decide which traditions are important to your family and which are the ones you can let go in order to reduce everyone’s stress.
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“The other thing that’s really important is trying to look inwards, to your family, rather than looking outwards to, ‘How is this going to appear on my Instagram grid?’” Donner said.
When families approach the holidays together with intention, it can be a less fraught and more enjoyable season for both kin-keepers and kin.
