Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte

Rowe-Finkbeiner interviewed more than five hundred women for her book, The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy, and discovered the majority felt feminism, in pushing them to be ideal workers, was out of touch with the complicated reality of their lives.

“That’s when I realized we had it backward. It was the law, the workplace, and these outdated family policies that need changing. The fact that we as a society fail to value the work of caregiving, that’s what’s really holding women back.” And men.

“The next wave of the women’s movement has to include men. It has to include families.”

So Friedan wrote The Second Stage and argued that family was the new feminist frontier. Radical feminists were apoplectic.

So MomsRising is taking a different tack. They are politically agnostic. “Finding common ground is extremely important. I have friends in the Christian Coalition and we agree on all the Motherhood Manifesto issues,” Blades said. Nor are they dogmatic. “There are paid family leave policies in over 170 countries and no two are alike,” Rowe-Finkbeiner said. “We’re not arguing to import something from somewhere else. We want to come up with our own policies that work for our nation.”

And in doing so, Sheridan and his cofounders hit upon the very keys to wresting the moribund American workplace out of the 1950s: Don’t just write a policy or spout off a slick-sounding mission statement yet still secretly expect people to work the same workaholic way. Don’t come up with a program for flexible work or reduced hours to “help” working families but really expect only mothers to take advantage of them and, if they do, see them as less committed and less intelligent, and shunt them to the side. Instead, think big. Start fresh. Include everybody. The saner twenty-first-century workplace means total transformation.

And who knows how pressures like a changing global economy, technology, an aging workforce, climate change, extreme weather, and public health scares will reshape work?

Wow, prophetic!

Independent telework can give workers the uninterrupted time to concentrate on bringing a creative idea to life. Or unsupervised employees can spend their time farting around. The key is defining the mission, then deliberately crafting the motivation 3.0 work environment to best accomplish it and establishing metrics to measure success and feedback loops to course-correct.

Tom and I had done pretty well dividing chores fairly when it was just the two of us. But once we had kids, the scales started tipping, and though we’d tried to right them every now and then, usually after I’d lost it, I always ended up feeling like I was in charge of everything. Forget having it all, it felt like I was doing it all. Even though we both worked full-time and earned about the same amount of money.

It had gotten to the point where I didn’t want to feel so hostile and resentful all the time, so I had made a weird lopsided bargain: I would do most of the kid, house, taxes, and drudge stuff. And all I asked for in return, I told Tom, was this: “I just want you to notice, and say ‘thank you.’” That bargain is a big reason why my life splintered into unsatisfying, distracted, and fragmented time confetti.

And once, when Tom was reporting in Afghanistan for a month, he e-mailed a photo of himself in the dusty nowhere of Forward Operating Base Ramrod outside Kandahar. He was sitting in filthy clothes, holding a cup of watery instant coffee and a laptop outside his “bunk,” a giant metal box like those stacked onto container ships. My reaction shocked me: I was jealous.

The “third path,” DeGroot explains, is for couples who want to share their work and home lives as full partners, each one with time for work, love, and play. She doesn’t deny it’s difficult. “Change is hard. The answers are not easy. They take work and sometimes they take awhile to put in place,” she said. “But there really are families who are doing it differently and making it work.”

Traveling the third path herself helped her see that to right listing family systems like mine so precariously off balance requires challenging enormously powerful cultural expectations of who we are and how we’re supposed to act: the work-devoted ideal worker, the self-sacrificing ideal mother, and the distant provider father.

“When couples are angry with each other, standing in their living rooms fighting about ways to create more time and not seeing any, they don’t realize that there are these other invisible forces in the room with them,” DeGroot said. The ideal worker, the ideal mother, and the provider father are right there, pulling the strings. “They’re the ones creating the stress.”

With dedicated time and space with DeGroot to think about their work and lives, Anna came to see that, as much as she wanted James to be a coparent, she was too often undercutting him—criticizing what he did or scolding him for what he didn’t do. Social scientists call this “maternal gatekeeping,” a common but largely unconscious behavior that flares because the ideal mother norm that is nestled deep in a woman’s psyche holds that mothers not only know best but should always be in charge. James, instead of backing down, as he usually had, began to tell her to back off.

One survey in the U.K. found that women spend as much as three hours a week redoing chores that they think their partners have done badly.9

For women, however, home, no matter how filled with love and happiness, is just another workplace.

the phenomenon is called “divergent realities.”15 Research has found that even when a family is engaged in the same activity—eating dinner—the mothers tend to feel frustrated that they aren’t doing enough, while the fathers are proud of themselves that they’ve managed to get away from work to be there at all.

women’s time is “contaminated.” No matter where they were or what they were doing, the women in his studies were consumed with the exhaustive “mental labor” of keeping in mind at all times all the moving parts of kids, house, work, errands, and family calendar. That, he wrote, only intensifies the feeling of breathless time pressure for women.

Gay couples tend to resolve conflicts more constructively. And research has found that, unlike in heterosexual couples, where one partner may be happier than the other, gay partners tend to be equally happy.20

“The biggest difference we see between heterosexual and gay couples is the trait of openness. And because of that, gay and lesbian couples tend to be more egalitarian. They’re much more willing to share power.”

I discovered that Tom thought we really had divided things fairly. He was angry that I was angry all the time and felt I didn’t give him credit for what he did do, which was so much more than his father had.

Academics say intensive mothering is a white middle-class phenomenon. Middle-class mothers, researchers contend, practice “concerted cultivation” and invest time in their children as if they were high-yield bonds with long-term payout. Working-class mothers parent in a more hands-off “natural growth” way.

Each one of us is ensnared in guilt and compelled to compensate for the phantom life we’ve forgone.

The cult of intensive motherhood, I was discovering, runs on guilt, fear, and ambivalence.

Time studies now show that mothers’ time with children has been climbing steeply, at the expense of sleep, personal care, and leisure, ever since … 1985.

As she began interviewing mothers, she realized that the lofty ideal mother standards they all sought to meet were so unattainably high, they were mired in guilt no matter what they did.

The massive social upheaval of the latter half of the twentieth century that sent women to college and propelled them into the working world of men was so profound and came so fast that no one is sure what a “good” mother looks like anymore.

When the CDC asked people to respond to the statement in a national survey “It is more important for a man to spend a lot of time with his family than to be a success at his career,” more men than women, 75 to 68 percent, agreed or strongly agreed.11

When Huggies aired a new ad showing an inept father trying to change a diaper, a group of very adept new dads organized a protest against the outdated stereotype until Huggies removed the ad and apologized.

Adolescents with more involved fathers are more likely to have better self-esteem, self-control, social competence, and life skills—provided the father is not overly controlling or authoritarian.

Middle-class parents are now so “child-centered” that they may be fostering a “dependency dilemma” and raising youths who can’t think, make decisions, and venture out on their own.

Where a generation ago, as Karen Graf’s mother recalled, children may have roamed freely for miles and spent hours outdoors, making up games and playing pickup ball games, today, many children’s zones of independence extend no farther than the end of the block,7 and only 6 percent of children between the ages of nine and thirteen play outside on their own in a typical week.8 Organized sports leagues have become so structured that there’s little room for fun. Kid participation peaks at age eleven.

Today’s overhelicoptered children, bred on parental overpraise and the worship of self-esteem, are entitled, spoiled, self-centered, value being rich, have inflated egos, and feel … miserable.10 They feel they don’t have the power to control their own destiny, Twenge reports, so they tend to be cynical and feel easily victimized. And having been so programmed all their lives, they hit young adulthood and aren’t even sure of what they like, much less who they are.

That’s because achievement, all that showy résumé building, does not necessarily lead to happiness. Instead, she says, feeling positive and happy in the first place is what fosters achievement.

Teach them to try new things, she says, to take risks, follow inklings, see if they turn into passions, work hard, maybe master something, maybe make mistakes, but love the journey itself, not the reward.

The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. —Robert F. Kennedy

But there’s a reason why play is hard for women. Nadia and Sara are not just taking on America’s worship of work, productivity, achievement, speed, and busyness. The two women are pushing against the freight of human history that can be boiled down into three powerful words: Women. Don’t. Play.

Throughout history, the ladies who lunch, the women with time on their hands, were part of the wealthy elite. Their “forced idleness,” leisure scholars contend, came as not a conscious choice but rather an unconscious conspicuous display of the high social status of either a husband, a father, or some male relative. If time is power, her free time showed his power.

Sure, some play golf, pick up a new hobby, or make time for friends. “But so many retirees have a hard time transitioning into leisure and taking time for themselves, because they feel people will regard them as lazy,” she said. “So they fill their time with all this busy stuff.” And many retired women are busy—still doing the bulk of the housework.

Henderson and other scholars say women taking time for themselves, deliberately choosing leisure without children or family, is nothing less than a courageous—subversive, almost—act of resistance.

Robinson also counts as leisure any residual time that, like leftovers, doesn’t fit neatly into other prescribed categories like “work” or “personal care.” That’s how he could analyze my weekly time diary and come up with twenty-seven hours of bits and scraps of crappy leisure time.

But talk to any leisure researcher, and he or she will say the true test of leisure is not what the activity is that fills a certain block of time but how that time feels.

Just as the overwhelm is the result of unpredictability and a lack of control, true leisure, researchers say, is the result of feeling both a measure of control over the experience and also choice, free from obligation.

Leisure time for women, studies have found, often just means more work. Women are typically the ones who plan, organize, pack, execute, delegate, and clean up after outings, holidays, vacations, and family events. And in addition to being physically taxing, leisure for women can be mentally and emotionally draining, Gibson and other researchers have found, because women tend to feel responsible for making sure everyone else is enjoying the leisure activity and so are constantly taking the emotional temperatures of all involved.

the reason women tend to have the ongoing tape loop of tasks yet to get done, responsibilities, and worries that play in the head like an annoying and hard-to-shake jingle, which contaminates the experience of any kind of time.

Women tell Nadia and Sara that they feel they aren’t entitled to have leisure time. They feel they have to earn it first by getting to the end of the to-do list. Which never comes.

Often, women tell Nadia and Sara that they’re too exhausted to do much more than collapse at the end of the day and turn on the TV.

Yet the relationship between TV and leisure time is far more complicated than it looks. Yes, we watch a lot of TV. But time-use researchers who look not only at what people are doing but also how they’re feeling and what else they’re juggling at a given moment have found that people often turn on the TV because they feel too exhausted to do anything else. And for many people with a lot to do, TV really does function more like a blank wall, perhaps with a bit of distracting colorful wallpaper on it.

But TV brings up a deeper issue. If true leisure is all about choice, sometimes TV is simply the easy choice. It’s right in your living room. It’s cheap. Turning it on requires no effort. Yes, sometimes we choose TV because we’re too tired for anything else. But sometimes, leisure researchers have found, we choose it because we’re unsure of what we really would like to do in a moment of unstructured free time.