Chauffeur and Personal Executive Assistant

It is everywhere. In every conversation with my fellow mom friends. We are exhausted. We are stretched thin. We are barely hanging on by the tips of our fingernails.

There is no particular way to quantify and measure the energy and effort and physical and mental and emotional cost of being everything to everyone within the family. Where is the village that is supposed to back us up? Yes, we make our own villages and yes we create our own communities. But the baby and mama groups disperse over time, the infants start walking and taking gymnastics and little league and dance and soccer. The significant loneliness that hits in mid motherhood, is so commonly experienced and so infrequently discussed.

For me, a lot of the community and village has dispersed as the activities increase. We went from women trying to survive the 24/7 spit up and feeding, diapers and doing the standing bounce, to chauffeurs and schedulers of activities. Coordinators of multiple social groups and plans. Most of my friends have literal color coded spreadsheets in their calendars of the activities and plans for the members of the family.

And it is not something that can simply be dropped or simply not done. First, if the mom does not do it, in the majority of heterosexual families, there is no one else who will do it. Second, a lot of the moms that I know actually do like to schedule things and coordinate things and organize things. Most of the moms I know love to serve their families. But it is so constant. Never ending. And they are met with confusion and opposition when they express that verbally out loud to their partner. What I constantly hear is either that I should just not do it if I'm so frustrated by it, which is frankly not a solution or to be told a version of "I thought you liked it." One thing I have thought as an analogy is, imagine for a moment that a parent loves to bike or hike or play basketball, and they have introduced that love to their child and they often bike or hike or play basketball with their child. Their weekend outing or their regular but not constant participation in this activity brings joy and connection and closeness. But if that activity were suddenly to become a 10+ hours a day task, if they would be woken up several times a week in the middle of the night with their heart racing that they may have messed something up with that activity, if they were never able to say "no, I don't feel like doing that activity" without extensive judgment, would they still love it?

To me, this is how chauffeuring and scheduling for my family feels. It is obligatory. It is incessant. It is not optional. There are times when I wake in a panic that I have double scheduled myself to drive two kids to two different places for the exact same moment.

I don't know what the solution is, I'm clearly not in spot where I have solved it. I don't even want to solve it. Solving it would ultimately mean saying no to my kids' desire to try different activities and sports. Which is not something I want to do. But why is this so hard?