When Future Planning is Treated as Instinct Instead of Leadership
Every good CEO or entrepreneur understands the value of future planning and triaging.
When you know where a company is headed, as well as when and how it could get there, you reduce risk. Anticipating problems and identifying the skills, systems and tools you will need, as far in advance as possible (future planning) while still being able to prioritize efforts will help you avoid having an emergency on your hands.
Most people understand the importance of this in business.
So why does this exact same kind of work become invisible and so easily dismissed when mothers do it for their families? What is the cost to our families and communities and ultimately to ourselves economically, relationally and emotionally when we fail to acknowledge the skills mothers possess?
The Default Parent as the Family CEO
The default parent, the one who spends the most time with the children, inevitably becomes the Home CEO. Often, that parent is the mother.
She’ll monitor everything and is quick to notice the gaps, whether it’s something as basic as hanging artwork or more in-depth, like developmental milestones, and fills them in to the best of her ability.
This looks like her paying attention to the environment, noting what needs work now and what will need it later, observing people’s moods and noting what does and doesn’t affect them, researching everything from potential contractors to schools to allergies to home repair, and watching a lot of YouTube as a result.
Now multiply that work by every child, every project, every pet, every vacation, every social outing, every meal, every appointment, every vendor, every contract, etc. for years.
All that information lives somewhere, and most of the time, that means in her head.
What price will we pay?
Like any good CEO, mothers understand tradeoffs.
We know problems will cost something—time, money, energy—no matter what. So, we make a choice:
Do we address it early or do we wait? Both have a cost, but we have to decide what’s important versus urgent and prioritize effort and resources accordingly.
We step up to the plate. We research. We prioritize. We plan. We prevent.
And yet, for some outlandish reason, mothers are still told we’re not doing enough. I mean, you’ve all heard the monologue from Barbie, haven’t you?
I’ve never heard of a male CEO being subjected to the level of scrutiny and second-guessing that mothers endure.
And one of the highest prices we pay is for our vigilance. We constantly assess risk in our environment, with people, even the time of day. We evaluate the temperature of the room, of a public space, of the transit, and always search for the exits if we need them. We know from experience that it’s too risky not to be vigilant. A third of us has or will experience physical violence, sexual violence, or stalking in our lifetime.*
Then comes the mental safety of our kids. Someone is absorbing the news, translating it into age-appropriate truth, and carrying the emotional weight so it doesn’t spill onto the children they’re protecting.
This attentiveness provides safety. The invisible labor saves families money, prevents crises, and creates stability. But it comes at a cost:
It is draining life from us.
Then we’re told to “go have a spa day.”
That it’s “not that bad.”
It’s just how it is, keep going.
The cost of this drain isn’t limited to my family. We saw it all play out on a national level during the pandemic, when women left the workforce in droves, not because they lacked ambition, or skills, or talent, but because the invisible labor at home had no support, and nowhere else to go.
We also see it happen when women are forced out of their careers after giving birth, only to later return (if they do at all) to lower-level positions and fewer opportunities than they had when they left. The economic losses are measurable and growing. Millions of women leaving the workforce in a single year shows us a structural problem.*
It showed up in my own life when my professional value shifted because of motherhood. I was fired for “not being available enough” during my maternity leave. Then, when I tried to get another job, I noticed interview patterns changed, and I was ghosted after companies found out I had little ones. After years of stalled interviews and closed doors, entrepreneurship was no longer a choice — it was the only path left open to me.
What We’re Taught vs. What We’re Not
“If you see a problem, fix it,” and “Don’t wait for someone else to solve it,” were common mantras in my childhood home. So, when finding work became a problem, I fixed it by figuring out how to become an entrepreneur.
Businesses love patterns. I began to recognize a costly one.
The better a person is at prevention, the more it becomes expected of them, and the less their efforts are noticed — until it’s easy to believe there was no effort at all.
For example, we’ve moved six times, mostly for work, since we’ve been together. Each time, I coordinated the logistics (packers, movers, delivery) and rebuilt the family infrastructure wherever we landed: schools, doctors, childcare, contractors, support systems.
The moves went smoothly. The effort behind it all disappeared. It became expected that transitions would just work, the next place would already be livable, and the details would be handled.
The better I got at managing the move’s workflow, the more it was expected that I would handle it, and the less visible it became.
But the cost didn’t disappear. As our family grew and the demands increased, so did the strain. During a recent move, the stress was so intense that for months, my body stopped functioning normally and I had my period every 11–15 days.
Part of the cost we pay for doing invisible labor shows up as stress, anxiety, and overwhelm. The consequences to our health are real, especially for mothers.
We see it at work where women often do the same job for less pay than men.
We hear it in leadership where women’s voices are often ignored for the louder person in the room.
We feel it at home where all planning, coordinating, and maintaining stability is labeled as “instinct” rather than a developed skill.
When the Load Became Visible
For the past two years, I felt myself slowly shutting down, caring less, pulling away more, as the price I’ve been paying settled deep into my being.
This winter, it came to a head.
My husband thought to fix things with a more efficient to-do list. He made one on Trello. But that wasn’t the problem.
I wasn’t overwhelmed by tasks. I was hemorrhaging energy.
I also created a visual list on Trello, but mine was of every open tab in my brain. It showed every category of planning, every ongoing responsibility, every future consideration, and every task I manage.
Seeing it all laid out was devastating but also clarifying.
I wouldn’t have known to do this sooner because I didn’t have the language for invisible labor and the mental load. I had to learn it. And with that newfound vocabulary and examples from his work (the times when he felt mentally drained from anticipating problems), I explained that I had been doing similar work, just not for two years but for twelve.
True, no one asked me to do it (but no one asks the CEO either). I saw the gaps and the problems and stepped in.
And when I finally named all my invisible labor, my husband didn’t fight or contradict me. He listened, not to argue or to fix things, but to understand me. While he didn’t fully agree with my framing, he did see and acknowledge my pain. And he held space for it and for me.
That alone was something I never witnessed growing up.
And knowing I was safe in his presence, I finally began to put some of the load down.
Becoming Co-CEOs
I’m still tired. I still need rest. But talks are happening, tabs closing, and responsibilities are being shared more intentionally. I hope that we are modeling this well for our children so they will have language and tools that we didn’t. I hope they will understand that planning, caregiving, and emotional labor are not gendered traits, but necessary life and leadership skills.
The hardest part now is learning how to talk about this without defensiveness. I was never trying to lessen my husband’s contributions to the family. I was trying to survive.
Sharing the invisible load of the Home CEO with him isn’t asking him to do everything nor to do it all alone. It means acknowledging that even in a relationship where we talked about everything, even the hard stuff – money, work, sex, feelings, kids – there are still conversations we don’t know we need to have. Because you can’t talk about something you haven’t named yet.
It means I have to come to grips with how unhealthy the whole “mom martyr” expectation is. And if I’m being honest, it doesn’t stop at home. I’ve done it at work too. Even now, knowing what I know, I’m sure I’ll fall into the trap again.
You see, when future planning and triaging are valued, at work and at home, it makes everyone stronger.
And when it stays invisible, it slowly breaks the person carrying it.
*Source –
1 in 3 women statistic reference
millions of women reference
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm (based on analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data)
