You know that quiet hour after bedtime when the house finally exhales? That’s when I’ve watched you most—standing in the glow of the fridge light while rearranging leftovers into tomorrow’s lunchboxes. Your pencil scratches across the grocery list as you mentally rearrange meeting schedules around school plays. This dance you do—this constant recalculating of everyone’s needs—it deserves more than spreadsheets can capture.
The world calls it ‘mental load,’ but I’ve learned to see it differently. To our children, it’s the invisible thread weaving through our days—teaching them that love looks like anticipating needs before they’re spoken. And maybe that’s the lesson we’re still learning together.
The To-Do List That Never Sleeps
This morning’s chaos played out like jazz improvisation—you were explaining photosynthesis to wide eyes at the kitchen table while finding matching socks through pure muscle memory. All before your first sip of coffee. ‘How does Amma do seven things while blinking?’ our youngest mumbled. Out of the mouths of babes comes greater truth than any parenting manual.
That study about working mothers carrying 65% of household management? It misses the poetry in your practicality. The way you turned yesterday’s milk spill into a surface tension experiment while calming a scraped knee via phone during your lunch break. Experts diagram task distribution, but they can’t measure how you hold the emotional weather patterns of our family—knowing who needs sunshine today, who needs shelter from storms.
Sometimes I wonder—does your mind work this way because parenting demands it, or does love gift us superhero vision?
When Partnership Looks Like a Pop-Up Book
Remember planning that weekend getaway surprise? You orchestrated it like a secret agent—booking pet care during commute time, researching rain alternatives between Zoom calls, packing allergy-friendly snacks in color-coded containers. Then the forecast changed everything overnight.
What stays with me isn’t the cancelled plans—it’s how you transformed our living room into a blanket fort cinema by dawn. While economists calculate unpaid labor in cold numbers, I measure yours in the warm glow of flashlight stories told between client emails. Holiday prep might appear as calendar blocks, but I’ve learned it’s really love in disguise—weaving joy into life’s fabric through sheer force of care.
Finding the Phone Booth
Last Tuesday I found you asleep mid-sentence over baby monitors and monthly reports. Your laptop glowed with another article about parental burnout. I want to say I swooped in heroically, but truth? I stood frozen remembering your advice from early parenthood: ‘Look for the gravity shift.’
So I brewed that ginger-mint tea you love, warm tumbler traded for your cold coffee. When you flinched awake ready with ‘I’m fine,’ I handed our toddler’s latest refrigerator art—a stick figure Amma wearing a cape made of crayon scribbles. ‘See? Even he notices your superpower.’
Maybe this is what sharing the load truly means—creating space where falling apart isn’t failure but invitation. Where glitter-covered ‘happy shoes’ become sacred reminders that being seen matters more than doing it perfectly.
The Beautiful Rehearsal
Family isn’t about perfect balance, but knowing someone’s always noticing when the weight shifts.
Watching our kids play house reveals everything. Our daughter lines up stuffed animals for school while ‘checking emails’ on her toy laptop. Our son alternates between stirring imaginary soup and typing importantly in his notebook—the perfect homage to your multitasking magic.
But here’s what catches my breath: When his teddy bear ‘forgets’ the lunchbox, she immediately declares, ‘Don’t worry, Appa Bear will bring it!’ Out of their play blooms our truth—they already understand that family isn’t about perfect balance, but knowing someone’s always noticing when the weight shifts.
These days, I measure progress in different ways. The lunchboxes I pack without being asked. The pediatrician numbers now saved in my phone. Subtle shifts transforming chore charts into love letters written in lunch notes and calendar reminders.
Studies may still say we’re figuring it out. But I prefer our daughter’s metric—her drawing of our family with four hands each, ‘so Appa can borrow Amma’s when meetings get loud.’ Your greatest strength was never in carrying more, but teaching us how to carry together.
Leave those emails, love. The moon’s hanging ripe outside—let’s watch its slow arc while our tea cools, reminding ourselves that in our children’s eyes, this messy balance already looks like grace.
Source: Education summit at CU maps future of AI-driven, inclusive higher education, Indian Express, 2025-09-30