The Mental Load of Motherhood: An Adelaide Counsellor's Perspective

You’re holding a sleeping baby in one arm, scrolling on your phone with the other, trying to remember whether the dishwasher has clean or dirty dishes in it, when your eyes catch on the kitchen calendar and you realise it’s your nephew’s birthday tomorrow and you haven’t bought a card.

That isn’t disorganisation. That’s the mental load — the constant, low-volume background process of remembering what needs remembering, anticipating what needs anticipating, planning what needs planning, and noticing what nobody else notices.

It’s one of the most consistent themes that comes up in counselling with Adelaide mums.

What it actually is

The “mental load” — sometimes called the “invisible load” or “cognitive labour” — was named most clearly by French sociologist Monique Haicault in the 1980s, and popularised more recently by Emma Clit’s 2017 comic “You Should’ve Asked.” It refers to the management-layer of housework and parenting, not just the doing of it.

It’s not “I emptied the bins.” It’s “I noticed the bins were full, planned when to empty them, made sure the recycling went in the right one, remembered Tuesday is collection day, and rewrote my own week so the bins-out chore would fit.”

For most mums in heterosexual partnerships, this load lands disproportionately on her, regardless of whether both adults work, regardless of how supportive her partner is, regardless of whether they’ve “split everything 50/50.”

This is not a personality flaw. It’s a cultural pattern that does enormous, mostly-invisible work on women’s mental health.

How it shows up in Adelaide mum life

Some things mums tell me, often after a long inhale:

• “I’m furious with him for asking ‘what’s for dinner?’ when I’m the one cooking it.”
• “I appreciate that he helps. But I don’t want a helper. I want a co-pilot.”
• “The minute I take a weekend away, I spend three days writing handover notes for him to be able to function as the parent he is every other day.”
• “I daydream about being hospitalised for something not too serious, just so I could lie down without anyone needing anything.”
• “I’m holding it all together and falling apart at the same time and I don’t know who to say that to.”

The last one is the one I most often hear in the Adelaide Hills.

What counselling can do with this

Counselling doesn’t redistribute laundry. (I wish.) What it can do:

• Name what’s actually going on. Most women have spent so long minimising the load that they can’t quite see it clearly. Saying “I am managing the cognitive labour for two adults and three children, and that is a job, and it is exhausting me” — out loud, to someone who doesn’t argue — is often the first step.
• Make space for the anger. Anger is information. It usually points at something that needs to change. The work in counselling is to listen to it instead of shaming it.
• Untangle “what’s mine” from “what I’ve been handed.” Some of the load is yours to carry. Some of it has been quietly placed on you by a culture that thinks “good mothers” do all of it. Working out which is which is genuinely useful.
• Hold the grief. Underneath the rage is usually grief — for the partnership you thought you’d have, for the self you used to be, for the rest you don’t get. That deserves a place to go.
• Prepare you for the conversations you need to have. Counselling can help you go into a difficult conversation with your partner already clear on what you want to say, instead of bringing it up at 10pm after a hard day and having it dissolve into a fight.

Specific to Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills

I work with a lot of women in the Hills who are navigating the particular logistics of regional family life — longer school runs, less neighbourhood proximity for casual help, a partner who works long hours in the city. The load lands differently here than in inner-suburbia, but it lands.

If you’re nodding along to any of this, it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. It means you’re carrying something heavy that often gets invisibilised, and giving yourself space to name it is one of the kindest things you can do — for you and for the partnership.

If you’d like to talk

You can book a counselling session — Saturday mornings, online, $150 — or send me a free 15-min enquiry first. I’m based in the Adelaide Hills, and I work with mums across South Australia and Australia-wide.

The mental load isn’t something you have to keep carrying alone, quietly, while smiling.