There is little in this world more frustrating than feeling diminished. And if you’re a mom, then there’s a good chance you’ve probably been told at some point “You really need to relax.”
The handful of times I’ve heard this (mercifully it hasn’t happened a lot) it’s annoyed me to the point of madness and I could never quite articulate why. But in a recent TikTok from creator Paige — who posts about mental load, parenting, childcare, and marriage as @sheisapaigeturner — perfectly expressed what is so absolutely rage-inducing about this sentiment.
She begins by describing a situation many of us will be familiar with: that of the “default parent.” The one who manages the kids’ appointments, lunches, backpacks, organizing family trips, and just generally managing everyone’s schedules and supplies. For that person to be told to “relax” or “chill out”, she explains, “is so dismissive of all of the work and time and effort that goes into all of those things.
“When you’re the person who is responsible for planning and packing and executing many of the things in your home, and your partner is the one who’s just along for the ride, and they can’t seem to recognize why you may have stress, that is so frustrating because you can feel so unseen. You can feel like the labor that you’re doing, the invisible labor, the mental load, all of that is just being completely ignored. And what they don’t realize … is that if you stop stressing, if you just chill out, if you relax, if you’re not worrying about it, everything might fall to pieces. You also probably understand the consequences of things falling to pieces. … You realize the consequences of not doing that work beforehand. So you understand that ‘stressing’ and ‘not chilling’ before something actually has value because what you were doing is you were saving yourself time later.”
“It’s incredibly dismissive,” she continues, “For your partner to come to you and just tell you to chill out because everything always works out’ when they’re not the person responsible for making sure things work out.”
So, OK, this might leave the other partner with a dilemma: they see their partner is stressed, and they don’t want them to be. How do they move forward in this? It’s actually really simple: ask yourself why you aren’t involved in whatever is stressing her out in the first place, and what can you do to take some of those stressors off of her plate. If you can’t or won’t do that at the very least you can do (like, the absolute very least) is to let her go about this task her way, because she clearly knows best.
The comments were full of folks (almost all women, it seems) who saw themselves in this hypothetical story.
“Tell him, ok I’m going to relax and you take care of Thanksgiving or the birthday or the next thing that comes up,” one commenter muses. “Watch the disaster.”
“[My partner] always tells me I need to get hobbies….while he’s going to the gym for two hours 4 days a week, gaming, working full time and we have two kids and a house that always needs cleaning,” another notes in glum frustration.
And a third put it absolutely perfectly by recalling,
“My husband once said ‘you know me, I’m go with the flow.’ I stared at him and said ‘I am the flow.’”
So, truly folks — and, let’s be honest: we’re talking about men here #NotAllMen, but deep down you know who you are — the next time you feel the urge to tell your partner to chill out, take a moment to consider that, perhaps, she could if she had a bit more help.
