On a Thursday morning in March, my family needed to accomplish three things at exactly the same time.
My husband had to board a plane to return from a business trip in London. I had agreed to moderate a panel discussion about how the cost of child care in New York City is harming the local economy. And someone had to sign our daughter up for a first-come-first-served preschool program that typically fills its seats within 90 to 120 seconds of their online release at 10 a.m.
We had not properly accounted for this overlap through our shared Google calendar.
The school registration required multiple passwords that might have flummoxed various grandparents and caregivers. I wondered if it might be a funny bit for me to take out my laptop and frantically sign my child up for child care during a panel about child care, and then thought the better of it. We decided to let the whims of Heathrow Airport’s Wi-Fi decide our daughter’s future.
After the panel, I called my husband, who sounded breathless, as if he had been running laps. The sign-up page had prompted him for a confirmation code that he had not anticipated, throwing him for a loop. The internet had been spotty. We had gotten the seat, but it felt like a Pyrrhic victory.
Something, we agreed, would have to give.
Our snafu echoes across continents and generations, an age-old problem with a newish name: the mental load.
It’s the tedious, all-consuming work of planning our lives, made all the more tedious when young children are in the mix and free time seems to shrink to fleeting glances.
