The General Contractor for the Household

We often think about household work as a collection of individual chores like laundry, dishes, and school drop-offs. However, running the household includes more than just executing individual tasks. It involves planning, organizing, coordinating, and taking responsibility for completion. Execution is only one component and generally only happens after planning, organizing, and coordination have already been done.

For example, making dinner is an important household task, but you first have to remember to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost, know what groceries you need, and buy them before meal prep time. Another example is swimming lessons with your child. It’s not just about going into the pool. Someone has to find the lessons that are appropriate for the child, register for those lessons, coordinate swimming with the other child’s hockey practice, buy the right size swimsuit ahead of time, and pack everything into a bag before anyone even gets to the pool. The visible task is only the endpoint in a whole chain of decisions and dependencies. This is often what we talk about when we use the term “mental load.”

When I was pregnant with our third child, we decided to renovate our house to make space for the new baby. My husband took on the role of managing the home renovation. We had a general contractor and tradespeople (plumber, electrician, hardwood flooring installer, etc.). But my husband was still the one managing the project. He made the decisions, managed the budget, coordinated schedules, and pushed to make sure things were happening as we wanted them and on something that resembled a reasonable timeline.

For example, to build a new bathroom, he had to decide on the layout we wanted, figure out where the plumbing stack would go, and coordinate the tiler, electrician, and cabinet person. He had to choose the tiles and order them in advance. All this had to be done before the tiler even showed up. If the tiler arrived and we had no idea what tiles we wanted or where, and nothing had been ordered, the job would just stop. He spent his spare afternoons and evenings looking at bathroom photos, calling the contractor, architect, or engineer, and planning and ordering materials. If there was a problem with the building permit, he was the one filling out the forms. There was a lot of pressure to keep the renovation on schedule, as we didn’t want to keep paying rent for an apartment longer than necessary, not to mention there was a literal baby on the way. It was a lot of work and he was exhausted. He was not doing the plumbing or putting in hardwood floors, but all the work he did made it possible for the contractor and the tradespeople to do anything at all.

Now I would like to say that I wasn’t unhelpful. I genuinely wanted to help. I offered to help choose tiles and decide on the colour of the floors. I was around to let the shower-glass installers into the house when my husband was at work. I constantly asked, “How can I help?” If he asked me to do something, I would willingly and happily do it. But I would never describe my contribution as anything remotely equal to the amount of work my husband put into our renovation simply because I went to the lighting store and chose lights for the bathroom.

Being the person responsible for the household is like managing a renovation. You ensure the whole process works. Before you even get to the “tradespeople” doing the laundry or the dishes, there’s a mountain of preparation, organization, and coordination involved. A partner can genuinely try to be helpful and willingly do dishes, collect a UPS package, or buy a swimsuit without taking on responsibility for the planning and management work. “How can I help?” is not the same as taking on responsibility for figuring out, “What needs doing next? What needs to happen to unlock the next step?”

When a supportive, helpful partner says, “How can I help? Should I take the kids to skating lessons?”, they really do mean well. They are genuinely happy to take the kids to skating lessons, but that does not suddenly make them responsible for knowing that skating lessons start on October 3, registration opens September 15, Johnny wants to be in lessons with his best friend who is only available on Fridays, and he needs size 10 youth skates.

And unlike in a renovation, a household often doesn’t have a general contractor or tradespeople. Many times, one person is expected to be all of those things. Even in households where chores are shared relatively equally, I often find that women still take on most of the “general contracting” work. Men may increasingly cook, do dishes, or pick up the kids, but the planning, organizing, and coordination often remain the responsibility of women. And that role is hard, exhausting, never-ending, but important. There’s pressure to keep children happy and healthy, maintain family and community relationships, stick within a budget, and manage limited time and resources.

A renovation takes six months, maybe a year. Household work lasts at least a decade or more. In some ways, that makes it less visible because we don’t see the added work of managing a household the same way we see the added work of managing a renovation.

Managerial roles are recognized elsewhere. In businesses, there are dedicated managers who coordinate people, schedules, and resources. They often don’t do a lot of the front-line work. We recognize that this job is real work that requires time and effort, even when there are other people executing front-line tasks. Yet somehow, in the household space, this work is often undervalued, unappreciated, and sometimes not even seen.

That’s why the mental load in households is often called “invisible labour.” It is a large part of what makes mothers burn out. We cannot even begin to address this until we at least acknowledge that it exists. Only then can we begin to think about how to redistribute, outsource, or make this work more efficient at all.