The Invisible Mom Strike

I was raised in a family that was strongly pro-union. My paternal grandparents, both NYC-born children of Jewish immigrants who found fulfilling careers in social work and education, were staunch and unmoveable Marxist lefties. As the child of the Boomer they accidentally raised to be fiercely ambitious and capitalistic, I was reared with both a strong sense of this loyalty to labor and a complete lack of comprehension about what any of it really meant. All the same, I was taught never to cross a picket line, and not only to respect a boycott but to freely wage my own very tiny, personal boycotts against businesses that had wronged our family. A supermarket sold moldy berries and refused a refund? Boycott. An ice cream shop owner got into a verbal altercation with my mother over proper sprinkle distribution? (Temporary) boycott. A shoe store on the Upper West Side didn’t let my ailing, elderly grandfather use the bathroom? Lifetime boycott carried across generations. Nobody messes with our access to a toilet.

(A funny aside which has nothing to do with this, really: there is lore in my family that my paternal great grandmother was once employed as a seamstress at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Despite her acute need for a paycheck, she quit her post on the spot when the floor foreman denied her request to use the facilities during her shift. Not very long after came the devastating fire that wiped out 146 people. Had my great-great grandmother had a stronger bladder or a less principled view of her right to relieve herself when necessary, I wouldn’t be here today.)

It is with this dogmatic upbringing that I recently made the decision to go on strike. To be clear, I am still not gainfully employed. This was a Mom Strike. You know, like all those regular concepts that are re-branded as cute and sassy and probably a little (very) uncool when you put the word “mom” in front of them? Mom drinks, mom dinner, mommy blog, mom friends, mom rage, etc, etc. Sure, I’m unpaid, and yes, my bargaining power is somewhat undercut by the fact that I’m a union of one and this job is one of those lifetime appointment gigs. Not to mention that one could argue that I’m not only labor but also management. It’s not necessary to parse this out so finely, okay? The fact is that sometimes a worker has no choice but to teach The Man a lesson the hard way. And by The Man, I obviously mean two young children. And one man.

It began like most other mornings, Matt and I milling around the kitchen completing various tasks in an effort to get both kids out the door on time. The kids, for their part, were not doing their part, which is par for the course. As we were filling water bottles and packing backpacks and reminding our school-aged progeny that two socks are required for leaving the house on two feet, they were bopping around dropping random items on the floor as they went, staring blindly into the mirror for minutes on end, and drawing chickens with eagle wings (not bad, but you were supposed to be brushing your teeth). My pace quickened to compensate, and I fired out instructions as I worked. It was then that we began to run down the day’s agenda, which included a redo of an organized activity that had mistakenly been planned for the wrong day earlier that week by one of the moms in charge of the group.

“Why did [name redacted] plan it for the wrong day?” my 10-year-old daughter asked.

“Well,” Matt replied, “she’s involved in like a thousand different things all the time, so it happens.”

“Yeah,” I chimed in while I dug around for a Tupperware that would fit the half a hard-boiled egg I’d been asked to preserve. “Moms do a zillion things at once, so sometimes we get some dates mixed up.”

My daughter looked at me and dryly added, “you’re not as busy as [name redacted].”

I turned around to stare at her in disbelief, momentarily stunned into silence. My eye may have been twitching slightly as I turned my gaze to Matt, who was standing very still. Was she kidding me?

“Are you kidding me?” I said.

I could tell that my daughter had gone for the zinger out of a love of the game more than any strongly-held knowledge or conviction. But it didn’t matter. Shots had been fired. I remembered a moment a few weeks earlier when my 7-year-old son had accused me of being “lazy” because sometimes I take a tidy, precise seven-minute nap sitting upright in an armchair to gird myself between the homework fight and the “I don’t wanna go to taekwondo” fight while in the throes of a middle-aged hormonal maelstrom. I thought about the quadrillion intricate machinations I arrange over the course of a day or a week or a month to allow our kids to lead vibrant, interesting, enriching lives while attempting not to impose too much extracurricular responsibility on my husband. I thought about the fact that though said husband is dutiful in doing his share of household chores—laundry belongs to him, for instance—he also is very fond of sighing loudly and heavily during these tasks and announcing how much laundry he’s done, which I tend to read as a sly (perhaps unconscious) way of pointing out that I am not the one doing it. Or at the very least, he’s fishing for a hearty “thank you,” which I provide.

All of these thoughts swam in my brain in a very short amount of time. I set down what I was doing, backed away from the kitchen counter to take up more space in the room, and without much deliberation declared that: “effective tomorrow, I will be going on strike. Mom strike.”

The kids both laughed. “Yeah,” said Matt over his shoulder as he wandered away, “we should go on strike!”

“Not you!” I yelled after him. “This is me! My thing! Nobody in this household seems to think I do much of anything, and you’re as bad as they are!”

I kept this up, albeit with a smile on my face, and the kids and Matt laughed and laughed. Was I kidding? Sort of. But also not at all. Nervously, Matt took a glance at my paper calendar that lay open on my desk and started reading aloud the entries for the upcoming weekend. Later that morning, Matt texted me to say that he’d talked to our daughter on the drive to school about withholding her sassy comments.

“She’ll learn the hard way,” I wrote back. And then: “So will you.”

I waited a beat and then threw in a GIF of Dr. Evil with a pinky to his mouth to soften the threat, and also to keep Matt guessing.

What would happen if I really went through with this? It isn’t so much about the physical, household tasks, although they would add up eventually. But if I really went on strike, really refused to do all the invisible work that I do in a day to keep our household running and our family happy, what would happen? Things would absolutely fall to pieces, and Matt would not have any idea how to compensate. Over the next four days alone, we had two half-days from school to contend with, multiple playdates and carpools, two parent-teacher conferences, three birthday celebrations, several lessons/classes, and multiple family social plans. Several of these calendar items would occur over the same two-hour time span in three different towns on both sides of the Tappan Zee. I barely knew how I was going to figure it out, but I was confident that I would. They, on the other hand, would be reduced to puddles of confusion and distress and, ideally, solemn, indelible regret.

Did I have the guts?

I spent the morning turning the idea over in my brain, which of course meant that I talked about it to anyone who would listen or respond to a text message. My sample audience was quite varied—their kids ranged in ages and in quantities, their marital statuses and sexual orientations differ, their levels of employment run the gamut, but the reaction was the same across the board: YES. DO THIS. I SUPPORT THIS. PLEASE TELL ME HOW IT GOES.

Everyone had a related story of a time they felt unappreciated, unseen, their love taken for granted and criticized. Everyone wanted to talk about the various unnoticed tasks they do which require immense mental gymnastics in order to keep the trains running on time and the passengers happy, so to speak. About how they only hear about it when something goes wrong. Or about the time they knocked themselves out fully to create a wonderful family experience or to nurse a barfing child, only to be accused of “not caring” the next time a random (likely unreasonable) request was denied. And we all take it, because that’s part of the job we signed up to do.

As mothers, it is our shared mission and our genuine desire to provide a life for our families that allows them all to feel safe, secure, and seen. Inherent in that bargain is a certain amount of being taken for granted. Mostly, we can accept that. Largely, we have become inured to the feeling of putting our own needs last, for better or for worse. Honestly, sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse. But there’s only so much we can take before we need to make everyone check themselves before they wreck themselves, you know? And rather than deliver a lecture no one will listen to or remember, better to make them really feel it. No?

I left my crew to fend for themselves for the evening so that I could join some mom friends for dinner. More solidarity. More validation for my pronouncement. In the morning, I began immediately rattling off the various carpool/pickup/playdate plans that would allow Matt to work from home unbothered for a maximum of hours while I took the day to write as I attempt to reinvigorate my career. I could see everyone’s eyes glazing over as I detailed the schedule, and I interrupted myself mid-sentence.

“You realize this is me working, right?”

Matt looked at me irritably. “Okay, but what do you want me to do?” He then thought for a moment before saying, “Kids, tell your mom ‘thank you’ for planning fun days for you both. He was clearly unnerved by the increasingly real possibility that I wasn’t joking.

“Thank you, Mom,” they intoned, and in that moment, I realized that wasn’t what I was after.

My husband works a corporate job in which he receives varying degrees of feedback. But inherent in his arrangement is a paycheck, which is an implicit statement of appreciation and value. The bi-monthly deposit he receives says: “You do this job, it is worth this much to us. We’ll keep sending you this money because we continue to find your work to be commensurate with this fee.” In the motherhood line of work, our compensation comes in a much less concrete form. Satisfaction, joy, a hug, the feeling of being needed (a double-edged sword if there ever was one), or perhaps just the vague notion that one day we’ll have added a happy and successful and unique human to perpetuate the gene pool. That, coupled with the knowledge that when and if they do reproduce, their offspring will torment and mistreat them as they did us and the cycle will have been fulfilled. These are intangible rewards. You can’t take them to the bank or display them on a shelf, and when the far more palpable and corporeal feelings of anger and frustration come crashing in, they practically vaporize into thin air.

Do I want to be thanked every time I performed a task that benefits my children? Do I want to be thanked just some of those times? Do I want Matt to know that he could also get on the phone and figure out what to do with our son all afternoon so that multiple people’s opposing needs can be met without my having to consider every possible angle and backup plans B through F? Yeah, okay, that sounds pretty nice, I wouldn’t say no to any of it. But the fact that this doesn’t happen wasn’t what was bothering me, wasn’t what was gnawing at me and my friends. (My brethren? Sistren? Matren? Yes, maybe.) I think that I just want to know—to feel—that they know that their lives don’t just magically work because they were born blessed. Their lives magically work because I fucking make magic for them. And sometimes I need a nap, and sometimes it’s okay to leave the dishes in the sink because I need a sit.

Also, and this is crucial: telling me that I am wrong that I think I am unappreciated is NOT the same as telling me that I AM, in fact, appreciated. Partners: write this down, stick it to the wall, scrawl it on the bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker or lip pencil or blood, whatever you have to do.

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t wish to be the long-suffering martyr who ultimately inflicts a lifetime of guilt provocation on her family members. That’s the last thing I want, truly. I just want to inflict a little bit of guilt provocation, occasionally, when they’re being really extra rude. Is that so wrong?

In the end, I didn’t have the heart—or the chutzpah—to go through with my strike. I had to disappoint a lot of my matren (will continue to workshop this) with the news that I caved almost immediately. I’d have loved to have forged a path as a folk hero to underappreciated moms everywhere.

“Did you hear about the mom who went on strike? She just…she just didn’t do the things!”

“Any of the things?”

“She did none of the things!”

“None of the things?! Wowee. None of the things!”

Frankly, I needed the trains to continue running on time. Disrupting the whole operation would have caused me as much grief and stress as it would have done to my husband and kids. I do think I got my point across, though, and I forsee a period of peacetime ahead. And at the very least, I now have my full labor union assembled if we ever need to organize. I’m keeping it in my back pocket.