The mental load of motherhood is real, and it’s heavy. Enter Paige Connell, a Massachusetts mom of four who’s become a strong voice for millions of overwhelmed mothers. Known on Instagram and TikTok as @sheisapaigeturner, Paige an influencer with an agenda. She’s simply starting raw, honest conversations about something researchers have studied for years but families rarely discuss: equitable division of labor in the home.
We featured Paige on Momcast, the Local Moms Network podcast, to discuss the mental load of motherhood, the inequities that exist, and how to close that divide with your partner. Read below for highlights from our conversation, and listen to the full podcast, here.
Your Instagram and TikTok handles have been exploding. Can you describe your mission and how you got to this point?
I’m on a mission to bring awareness to the inequities that exist, specifically as they pertain to motherhood, our homes, how women tend to bear the burden of domestic labor and childcare, how this bleeds into the workplace, and how mothers are disproportionately impacted by the lack of affordable childcare and paid leave.
I am trying my best to not just bring awareness to these topics, but to hopefully help people who follow me articulate this to others in their lives. I think one of the hardest things about motherhood is that we’re experiencing all of this, but sometimes we don’t have the words to tell everyone what it is that we’re experiencing or to fight against it. So my goal is to raise awareness and help people navigate this [equitable division of labor in the home] in their day-to-day lives.
I think it’s so interesting that in the beginning of my motherhood, I didn’t know that the term, “equitable division of labor,” was even a thing. I felt it. I was angry. I was resentful. I was mean. I was crazed. Yet I didn’t know this was an actual thing. So I was relieved when I heard that there was a movement to make moms and dads do an equal amount of work in raising their children. This term that we have is such an important one because it means it’s real.
What was the breaking point for you in your house when you decided you needed to address this issue with your partner?
I started to have these conversations with my partner slowly over time. When you become a parent, you don’t realize how much falls on your plate, but I became a parent six months before a global pandemic. So the tides really shifted quite quickly for our family. My husband worked outside of the home and I worked in the home. When our daycare shut down, I was at home with two toddlers working full time while pregnant. I took on the childcare. I took on the domestic labor. When we started to come out of this fog and people were going back to work and back to school, the work that I was doing never got reallocated. I somehow was still responsible for all of it. After our fourth baby was born, I woke up one day and my husband had promised he was trying his best to do better and do more and help me more around the house. And he had promised he would do the trash and empty the dishwasher in the mornings before he went to work because he gets up before any of the kids were awake.
One day I had my two-month-old baby on my chest. I think I was wearing her. I was changing my toddler’s diaper and I went to put her diaper in the diaper pail and it was full and I was mad. I’m like, “okay, deep breath Paige. Not a big deal.” I go to empty the pail and it’s super full and I’m trying to get it out and the bag is wedged in there. As I’m pulling it out, I cut my finger on the side of the trash can. So now I’m bleeding and my four-year-old and five-year-old are kind of panicking because mom’s bleeding. I’m navigating parenting for children, getting them ready for school, taking out the trash, bleeding. And then I go downstairs and my partner had not emptied the dishwasher. So I had to empty the dishwasher and try to find the kids’ cups for school. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I felt so incredibly unseen and I felt like I wasn’t being valued. I also felt disrespected in that moment because when I talked to my husband about it. He said, “Sorry, I was running late for work.” My pushback on him was, “Well, me too now. Now I’m running late for work because you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain. And you get to wake up by yourself, drink a coffee, listen to a podcast and drive to work by yourself. And I have to do all of this plus the kids and get to work on time. So how is it fair that your life and your schedule get placed above mine in this dynamic.”
I have a loving husband. We had a great equitable partnership before kids. He is a very active, hands-on dad. But he’s not in charge of anything. And so that was really the catalyst for our family. I was done; I was at my breaking point and I said to him, “I cannot continue this way. So we are making some major, major changes or I’m just gonna do this alone. I don’t need you here if I’m already doing it by myself. So let’s have this really hard conversation or have the other hard conversation.”
It’s never about the “garbage” is it?
It’s not the garbage, it’s not the dishwasher, it’s not any of that. You’ve heard those, “Oh, she divorced me over a dish in the sink.” It’s not about the dish. It’s about repeated behaviors over time and what those behaviors mean to your partner and how you show up in a relationship. In that moment, the argument or disagreement or the catalyst for the conversation might be the dish in the sink, but it’s not why your partner is mad.
I will say, when you’re in a partnership that is equitable, when your partner forgets to take out the trash, you don’t get mad. You’re like, “Oh, these things happen. It’s an accident.” When it’s repeated behavior again and again and again, there’s less forgiveness in those situations because at that point it feels personal–it doesn’t feel like a mistake.
You had these small conversations over time with your husband. How did you get him to buy in?
I want to call out that it sucks that women have to get buy in from their partners to value their worker to see them, or to participate in the work that is required to manage a home and children, especially when most women are in dual -income homes. But when I think about having this conversation, I like to say the first thing that you have to do is take inventory of you and your partner. Is your partner willing and able to have these conversations and to change? Does your partner have good intent and your best interests in mind? Does your partner care about your happiness? Does your partner care whether or not you’re fulfilled? Those are hard questions to ask yourself, but I think having that internal dialogue helps going into the conversation. Because if you believe you have that, when I really do think change is possible, I think you can course correct all of this if you have that in a partner. Unfortunately, not everyone does. And so I say that because people come to me all the time and they’re like, “My partner just tells me that I made all this up, it doesn’t matter and they don’t care.” I can’t fix that. Nobody can fix that for you if your partner genuinely doesn’t care about your well -being and your happiness and isn’t willing to have the conversation.
A lot of what you discuss comes from Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. How did this influence and work in your conversations?
Fair Play was the book that was kind of my light bulb moment. It was the first time I’d heard the words and understood the inequities. Eve did an amazing job of just painting the picture of what was happening. You can also buy her card game or get it on her website for free. It’s a really helpful jumping off point because it makes the invisible labor or just the labor in general visible. It puts it on paper. If you own a task, you own all parts of the task. It’s called standard of care. There’s often this conversation which is, “your standards are too high, so I’m just not gonna do that thing.”
I think about standards all the time because so much of how we view these standards is based on how we were raised, how we might have been conditioned to view ourselves and our value and how we provide value to others, it’s the idea of a clean kitchen being a reflection of you as a wife and a mother and a green lawn being in a reflection of you as a husband and father. It’s this idea that we’ve been taught that this is how we provide value, this is where we should spend time, this is how we’re being judged by others. When my kids go to daycare and they wouldn’t let me put their hair in a ponytail, people might be judging me as a mother. If my husband does that, they’re, “Oh, Dad dropped her off, haha, so cute.” It’s a different expectation, different standards.
Do you need to hear appreciation? How do you feel acknowledged?
It depends. Prior to working towards equity in our home, I would have been pretty frustrated that I wasn’t getting acknowledgement. And I think now maybe not as much.
But I have different expectations for my kids than I do for my partner. I want my kids to show appreciation for the work that people do. With my husband, the way I think about it is, I probably don’t thank him every time he cleans the pool, because that’s just a daily task that he’s doing in the same way that he doesn’t thank me for dropping the kids off at school every single day. But showing appreciation does matter. When you go above and beyond, like planning our family trip to Disney, and I’ve mostly owned this Disney trip, then yes, I want my husband to acknowledge all of the work that went into this.
Can you touch a bit on the idea of invisible labor?
Yes, the people who benefit from the invisible labor often don’t see the work, but they see the end result. When they come home, they see dishes put away, they see clothes in a closet, they see clean floors, a clean counter. They don’t see the mom or person who has washed those counters four times that day after snack, breakfast, lunch, snack, snack, dinner. They see lunches in the fridge made for tomorrow, but they didn’t make them. So they come in and they don’t see any of the work, just the end result and they benefit from the end result. They don’t even see the fact that they can go into the shower and wash their hair every single day and never wonder where the shampoo comes from. Invisible labor often looks like nothing. We say this about stay-at-home parents all of the time and it’s so incredibly frustrating because even in this conversation, just because you’re a stay-at-home home mom does not mean you can’t ask for equity at home when it comes to domestic labor.
What are the chances that you’re going to become full-time influencer never go back to another so-called nine to five job?
I think they’re pretty high. I’ve been excited to find an area where I am really excited and passionate. When I think about what I’m doing, I don’t actually think about myself as an influencer or necessarily a content creator. I want to explore opportunities that provide value in many different ways, and a lot of that will probably happen outside of social media. I went to the White House this summer and I’m going back in December to advocate for things like affordable childcare and paid leave. I’m pushing those efforts forward because they disproportionately impact women. I want to do so much more outside of this content creation, but ultimately, my goal is just to provide value and right now, that’s what I’m leaning into and I’m hoping that it can be something that I focus on in the future as well.
Listen to the rest of our conversation with Paige on our podcast, here!
More from The North County Moms:
Meet a Mom: Chamber of Mothers CEO & Co-Founder Erin Erenberg
Meet a Mom — Bestselling Author & North County Mom, Renée Carlino
