You’re not burned out, you’re over-responsible

Because the question itself is the problem.

Visualize this. It’s the end of the school year, two years ago. I’m in my dining room at 10pm, and Denis walks in and asks me the question that’s supposed to be the nice one. What can I help you with? And something in me just stops. Because in that exact second, my whole brain just dumps the list on me at once. We’re about to move to the shore for the summer, which means we’re packing up an entire household to go live somewhere else for two and a half months while turning the Hoboken apartment over on Airbnb the whole time we’re gone. There are four birthday parties packed into about 10 days on top of that, and Denis is standing right there trying to be a good partner. And I can’t get a single word out. Because the question itself is the problem.

Welcome back to Unscripted, a Momtoring podcast, the show for the ambitious working mother who is everyone’s default and is finally ready to hear her own voice again. I’m Andi Salcedo, I’m a coach, a working mother, and the founder of Momtoring, which is a coaching brand and community for working moms behind this show. If you end up wanting to go deeper after listening, momtoring.com is where you’ll find me.

Today I want to talk about something that shows up in almost every working household, usually wearing a very reasonable disguise. What can I help you with? It sounds generous, but it is not as generous as it sounds. And by the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly why. I’m also going to walk you through a short exercise that’s going to show you on paper exactly what you’re still carrying, and it’ll partly explain why you’re so tired even after a good night’s sleep.

So, back to that dining room and the big innocent question. What can I help you with? On paper, that’s a good question, right? It’s definitely better than what a lot of partners ask, which is nothing at all. Denis is a good partner, and he really means it every time he asks. This isn’t a Denis problem. This is a language problem.

So think about how we normally use the word help. You help a friend with her move, you help a coworker with his presentation. It’s always someone else’s thing, and you are pitching in. So when he offers to help me, he’s already telling me, without meaning to, that this is my job, and he’s being generous by picking some of it up. The word help implies whose job it is. Say that word enough times, in enough dining rooms over enough years, and it stops being a word. It becomes the arrangement. That’s the part nobody tells you about language. It doesn’t just describe who does what in your house, it builds it.

But the language problem isn’t even the real problem. The real problem is worse than that. Because even if he stopped saying help, even if he just started doing things, I’d still have to be the one who noticed something needed doing in the first place. I’d still have to be the one explaining to him what that something even was. And if I have to stop what I’m doing and think about what to hand him, that doesn’t help. That’s an extra task. Now I’m not just holding the load, but I’m also holding the job of managing him through it. What I need is different. I need him to notice. Not me handing him a list, him seeing it before I do. That’s the part that took me years to be able to say out loud. And that is the source of working mom’s exhaustion. It’s not just about getting enough hours of sleep, or the excess workload, or even the second shift at home. It’s the constant, relentless, automatic ownership of everything that needs to happen at home.

So let me show you what this looks like, because it’s easy to nod along to that and still not feel it. Every time I traveled alone for work or visited my family back in Argentina and left Denis in charge, I would leave before I left. Wait, what? What do you mean by that, Andi? What I mean is that before I ever got on the plane, I had already figured out how the house was going to run without me, every single day of it.

I would put together one printout with everything Denis needed. The school calendar day by day, drop off times, pickup times, half days. Sofia had violin at school before the day started and Girls on the Run two afternoons a week, and I’d written out which days and what she needed for each and the address of wherever it was happening. Eilis had swimming classes once a week. Everything was mapped out, every single detail you can think of. And there were birthday parties in there too. I had the gifts bought, wrapped, ready by the door. I am not kidding. Really.

And even with all of that, even with a plan detailed enough to run a small company, Denis still forgot to bring one of the gifts to a party. And guess whose problem that became? Once I got home and saw it there, sitting right by the door where I left it. Mine. So I reached out to the birthday girl’s dad and agreed to deliver it myself later that week. Do you know why I did that? Because I took responsibility for that. For me, not bringing the present to a birthday party is unacceptable. I know, it’s my belief. I can own it.

And that’s a pattern, isn’t it? The one who cares takes the responsibility. When we get an Airbnb ready for our guests, Denis cares about welcoming them well. So he’s the one thinking about the welcome wine. I care about the house being clean, well stocked, and the guests enjoying their stay. So I am the one managing all of it. It’s not that he doesn’t care about anything. It’s that I care about almost everything and he cares about a few things very well. So guess who ends up holding the whole house?

And that’s what overfunctioning working moms do. Let me correct that. We don’t just take responsibility, we take over responsibility. I used to do even more than that, if you can believe it. I used to lay out the girls’ clothes day by day for the whole time I was gone. I stopped doing that one eventually. That one I let go of. They can wear whatever they want. But the calendar, the addresses, the who goes where and when, that one I never stopped holding, even from another continent.

It took me a long time to find language for what was happening. So let me give it to you. Because once you have it, you’ll see it everywhere. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. That’s the beauty of personal growth.

There’s the noticing. We are running low on milk. The kids’ shoes are starting to feel tight. The camp registration is coming up and slots go very fast. The calendar needs to get built in your head before it exists anywhere else. Nobody assigns you that. You just carry it. Then there’s the figuring out, the how, the when, the which store, the what time. That’s a whole invisible project, and it happens while you’re doing five other things, probably at the same time. And then, way at the end, there’s the doing. The only part anyone sees. Someone shows up and does the thing, and that’s the part that gets called helping, which is normally the part that gets recognized.

Conception, planning, execution. That’s what Eve Rodsky calls it in her book Fair Play. And once she named it for me, I couldn’t stop seeing it. Noticing, figuring out, doing. Three completely different jobs, and most of the time only one of them ever gets shared.

Denis executed plenty. He drove, he showed up, he’s a hands on dad, and I want to be fair about that. But he was executing a plan I had already conceived and already built. The noticing was never shared, the planning was never shared. He just did the last step of something I’d already done most of alone in my head while managing everything else in the house.

So when people say, just delegate more, here’s the thing they don’t see. You can hand someone the execution all day long. And if you’re still the one who noticed it needed doing, and still the one who figured out how, you haven’t put anything down. You’ve just added a management layer on top of the load you’re already carrying.

And here’s the part that makes it exhausting, in a way sleeping in doesn’t fix. Even on the nights I’m technically off duty, sitting on the couch, nothing due, nobody needs me right this second, that tracking doesn’t turn off. What’s due Friday? What we’re low on, what’s still unconfirmed for next week? It just keeps running in the background, like a browser with 47 tabs open even when the screen looks like it’s off. You can rest your body for a whole weekend and still never put your mind down.

And if that’s true, if execution was never the heavy part, why do so many of us keep handing off the doing and holding on to everything underneath it? Because there’s a belief running underneath all of this, and it’s not a bad belief, it’s a smart one, which is exactly why it’s so hard to catch. It sounds like this. In the time it takes me to explain it, I might as well just do it myself.

And when your kids are babies, that belief is basically true. Nobody else knows the routine. Explaining it would take longer than doing it. So the belief gets built early, and it gets built for good reason. But here’s what nobody tells you. That belief doesn’t come with an expiration date. It just keeps running. Your daughter is seven now, and you’re still the only one who knows where the permission slip goes. You’re still the only one who knows which week your daughter has a swimming camp. And some part of you has decided that explaining it one more time out loud, patiently, is more expensive than just holding it yourself.

What feels like efficiency in the moment is more of a trade. You save 20 minutes today, you pay it in years. Because every time you decide it’s faster to just do it yourself, you’re also deciding without meaning to, that nobody else gets the practice of learning how.

At work it’s the exact same mechanism. The person who cares most about the project quality is the one who ends up doing the extra pass nobody asked for. The one who cares about the team not looking bad in the meeting is the one who stays late fixing the deck. Caring and carrying the never ending to do list gets tangled up so early and so quietly that most of us never notice they are two different things.

Now I want to be careful here because it would be easy to make this into a story about men being incapable, and that’s not true. And it’s not fair either. I have a friend with what I like to call a unicorn husband. When he left for a two day work trip, he made sure there was homemade food ready in the freezer so she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking while he was away. She likes to say they have reversed roles, and I love that example, because it proves the point. This isn’t biology. If it were biology, there wouldn’t be a single household anywhere that worked differently.

This is practice. Simple as that. Our partners have had years and years of reps at work, noticing what needs to happen before anyone tells them, planning around it, owning the outcome. Nobody handed them that, they built it through repetition. At home, they’d rarely been given the same repetition, because someone, usually us, kept getting there first. The competence gap is real. I’m not pretending it isn’t. But it was built by imbalance, not by wiring. Let me repeat that. The competence gap is real, but it was built by imbalance, not by wiring. And the only way it closes is if someone else gets the reps. Which means we have to be willing to let something be done differently or late or not perfectly, long enough for the noticing muscle to grow.

Here’s what that looked like for me. I tend to take over responsibility. My mom used to say I suffered from the Wonder Woman complex. I’ve been shifting this for years, and there’s still room to grow. Now, take the COVID vaccine for our girls. Denis cared about getting them vaccinated more than I did. I usually handle everything medical for the girls, but this one I wasn’t fully convinced either way. So instead of doing what I normally do, researching, deciding, scheduling, I handed him the whole thing. Find the place, check their calendar, book it, take them. And he did it. Because he is capable. He has always been capable. He just needed the chance to build the noticing and planning muscle instead of me building it for him.

And that’s the shift. Not handing over a task, handing over the whole thing. Conception, planning, execution, and trusting him to run with it. That takes a different kind of responsibility from the one I’ve been talking about this whole episode. Not the responsibility of doing it all. It’s the responsibility of stepping back on purpose so someone else finally gets the practice.

So here’s what I want to leave you with. Not an answer, but a question. What are you still mentally managing right now that you never consciously agreed to own?

Before you go, get a pen or your phone. I want you to do something simple. Take 60 seconds, maybe more, and write down everything currently running in your head. Not the big things necessarily, the small ones, everything. Everything that’s quietly open in your head right now.

Now look at your list and next to each thing, write one letter. C if you are the one who noticed it needed to happen. P if you are the one who figured out how. E if you’re the one actually doing it.

You’re going to see a lot of C’s and P’s next to things where someone else has the E. That’s not an accident, and it’s not a coincidence. That’s the whole episode, right there on your list.

Pick just one of them. Just one. And this week, try handing over the whole thing, the C, the P, and the E. Not the task. The whole ownership of it. And notice how uncomfortable it feels to let it go.

That discomfort you just noticed. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s the sign the load is finally moving off you and onto someone else, and it’s allowed to feel strange for a while.

If this one landed for you, the best thing you can do is leave a review wherever you’re listening, it’s the single biggest way another working mother finds this show. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, send it her way.

And make sure you’re subscribed to Unscripted wherever you’re listening.

I’m Andi Salcedo. This is Unscripted. And I’ll see you next week.