Welcome to the Love, Honor and Vacuum Podcast. I'm Sheila Ray Gregmore from the to love

honor and vacuum blog where we like to talk about how to make marriage into a passionate

adventure and not just a giant to-do list. And speaking of giant to-do lists lists we are talking about emotional labor

and mental load on the blog and all month in the month of June we've had a

podcast about it we've had a ton of posts about it and now we have been accused of man bashing

So I am going to invite my fellow man basher Rebecca my daughter onto the podcast

So that we can talk about how it isn't man bashing to simply ask for things to be

emotionally healthy. Yes, exactly and that you know we actually think that men are able to make things

emotionally healthy and we think it's kind of ironic that that makes

us hate men that we think men can do stuff.

Yeah, I know it is kind of ironic.

Okay, so let's get back to first principles.

If you have not been listening to the podcast or reading some of the

blog post this month I just want to summarize the concepts of emotional labor

and mental load so emotional labor is the maintaining relationships and managing emotions work, like calling your in-laws, sending thank you notes, buying teacher gifts, and soothing meltdowns and target. This work of caring can be some of the most exhausting labor but

providing middle-of-the-night comfort is what makes you a wonderful and dependable

parent. And those are the words of Eve Rodsky who wrote the book Fair Play

which is what I'm basing a lot of my posts on this month.

And here is Mental Load. Ready? The Never Ending Mental To-Do List you keep for all of your family tasks,

though not as heavy as a bag of rocks, the constant details bang around in

your mind, nonetheless weigh you down. Mental overload creates stress, fatigue, and often forgetfulness.

So that's what we're dealing with and the problem that often happens

...