Motherhood: If Sisyphus Did the Laundry

I was warned against this title because apparently not everyone had a Greek mythology hyper fixation in middle school like I did, but I don't care. The metaphor is perfect and I'm leaving it.

Greek Mythology TL;DR: Sisyphus was punished by the gods to spend all eternity rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down. And then he has to start all over again. Forever. No credit, no rest, no one standing at the bottom going, "wow, great effort today."

Sound familiar?

I may never be as eloquent as Gemma Hartley was in her book, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, but I do hope to convey the reality and unfortunate normalcy of motherhood in the United States with this Sisyphus and the boulder metaphor. I can't speak for other countries, heck, I can't even speak for other regions, but this particular boulder seems to travel well beyond the Midwest.

(I also have very strong opinions on which states actually count as Midwest. I'm looking at you, Ohio.)

The boulder has a name. Actually, it has two.

The term "emotional labor" was originally coined to describe the work done by flight attendants to keep everyone on board happy, calm, and not a risk to themselves or the aircraft. If you've ever worked a customer service job or in food service, you know this flavor of labor. The kind that makes you want to get in your car and drive until you find a beach with a tiki hut.  

You may have already claimed this term for yourself. You may hear "emotional labor" and go: yes, that. That is my entire life as a wife and mother. And you're not wrong. But philosophy professor Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. offers a framework that I think names it even more precisely.

Dr. Anderson splits the load into two distinct types of labor. The first is care labor: the tasks required to take care of others. Laundry, cooking, scheduling, cleaning, the mental list that never fully empties. The second is hermeneutic labor (pronounced her-meh-noo-tik, you're welcome), which is the work of:

• Knowing your own feelings

• Knowing how to articulate your feelings "correctly," whatever that means

• Knowing the other person's feelings

• AND knowing what to do about all of it

Dr. Anderson spends about twenty pages on this distinction, and I've linked her article if you want the full read (my colleagues talked me out of assigning it to my graduate social work students, which tells you something). She also introduces the concept of "normative male alexithymia", or research-paper speak for the idea that we have collectively normalized men not knowing how to identify or express their emotions.

Which means someone else has to carry that, too.

Two boulders. One person. And the hill just keeps going.

Here's where I want to bring this into the room where I actually sit with people.

Heterosexual couples come into my office carrying years of resentment, inequity, and an animosity that nobody fully has words for yet. Women are exhausted from doing the care labor unnoticed — the cooking and the scheduling and the invisible list that lives permanently in their heads. But underneath that, usually quieter and even harder to name, is the hermeneutic labor. The emotional thermostat work. The constant reading of the room, managing the temperature, making sure everyone is okay so that the house doesn't combust.

I hear this a lot: "I can't take a break because my husband isn't patient with the kids, and then everyone gets upset, and it's just easier if I do it myself."

She pushes the boulder. It rolls back down. She starts again. And nobody at the bottom noticed it moved.

A few things I want to name before we go any further:

This is not an individual couple's failure. This is the outcome of cultural norms that have been passed down through generations, quietly teaching everyone their role before they were old enough to question it.

This is also different from weaponized incompetence, where a partner deliberately performs helplessness to avoid tasks. Related energy, different mechanism. (That one deserves its own blog.)

And perhaps most importantly: you don't have to keep doing it this way.

So what do we actually do?

Ideally, you bring this framework into couples counseling and start unpacking how it's showing up in your specific relationship. If that's not accessible right now for totally valid reasons (lack of providers, cost, the waiting lists), here's a place to start on your own.

Do a values sort. You can find a value card list here. Sort them into most important, somewhat important, and not important. Then take your most important pile and prune it down to your top ten. Rank them. This isn't a small exercise, give it actual time and quiet.

Have your partner do the same, separately. Then come together and use what you each found to open a real conversation about expectations, division of labor, and what you're each actually carrying. You may be surprised by what's been assumed versus what's been agreed upon.

Use your values to set boundaries. Not rules, Boundaries. Which means you decide what you will and won't continue to take on, and then you hold that line. If you've decided you're not rescuing bedtime when it gets hard, you don't rescue bedtime. You go for a walk without your phone. (If you have safety concerns for yourself or your children, that's a different and important conversation — please talk to a therapist.) Don't know how to divide tasks up? See my blog "The Dishes are Killing Your Sex Life"

Expect it to feel uncomfortable. Boundaries almost always do at first, especially when the people around you are used to the boulder arriving at the top of the hill every single morning without fail.

Here's the thing about Sisyphus that I keep coming back to: the myth doesn't say he chose the boulder. He was handed it. He was told this was his purpose, his punishment, his forever. And so he pushed.  All day. Every day.

The difference between Sisyphus and the mothers I sit with every week is that they have a choice. The boulder doesn't have to keep rolling. And putting it down, even temporarily, even imperfectly, is not failure, it's the whole point.

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