ColumnRAISING THEM RIGHT
The actress’s viral red carpet moment struck a chord with other mums who find themselves constantly having to organise everything.
Niamh O'Reilly
ON PAPER, IT would be safe to assume I don’t have much in common with Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway. I can’t carry a tune to save my life. I (sadly) haven’t hung out with Meryl Streep or Stanley Tucci and haven’t, as of yet, bagged an Academy Award.
Other than the fact that we’re both mums to two boys, there’s little else that’s comparable in our lives, except for when it comes to turning off ‘mum mode’ when we’re not actually parenting.
While she was out promoting her latest film, Verity, a couple of weeks ago, Hathaway went viral for inadvertently ‘activating mum mode’ on the red carpet. The Devil Wears Prada 2 star, who is currently expecting her third child, was seen organising her co-stars and the waiting paparazzi so that everything ran efficiently, rather than descending into chaos.
The clip quickly went viral, and when she appeared on The Jimmy Fallon Show a couple of days later, Hathaway was visibly morto, calling it “the stuff of nightmares.”
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon / YouTube
“It’s like mom mode by way of chorus line!” she cringed to the chat show host. “I was trying to be helpful,” she added. “There were so many of us and the photographers were getting upset, and the vibe was changing.”
She admitted that as soon as she’d slipped into ‘mum mode’ and started organising everyone, her first thought was, “Oh, no.”
“I was doing it because I was trying to get them their picture, but when I was done, I was like, ‘But there’s also video!”
“I apologise, everybody,” she laughed.
It was a hugely relatable moment, and while I’d love to sit here and tell you I felt seen by Anne Hathaway because we have similar personality traits or are just natural organisers who love to take charge, I think we all know that’s not true. The actress was simply illustrating a familiar feeling many mums can relate to. Namely, being seen as the designated adult or organiser-in-chief who carries a family’s mental load, whether we like it or not. And judging by her reaction, my guess is it’s the latter.
We’re all in ‘mum mode’
Ten years into this motherhood gig, those ‘mum mode’ patterns have become deeply rooted in my own behaviour. Like Hathaway, there have been countless times when I’ve found myself falling into ‘mum mode,’ when I wasn’t parenting or even with my children.
It’s things like the default urge to clean up after I visited a rage room and made a mess. Automatically helping to serve food at someone else’s party without being asked or cringing inside when someone grabs the teapot and chimes, “Shall I be mother?” It’s instinctively cleaning the table in a restaurant or café when I’m not there with my children because it’s a reflex from dining out with kids. It’s the times I embarrassingly asked a grown adult do they need the bathroom before we left the house or telling them to wear a coat. It’s responding when a baby cries or calls out for mum in public even when my kids aren’t there. It’s always checking the clock for pick-up and drop-off times even when I’m not required to be somewhere. It’s doing the mental load arithmetic for tomorrow and the day after in my head, when I should be out having some downtime for myself or with friends.
The funny part is that I don’t particularly like being the organised person in the family. I don’t like all the thinking ahead I have to do or the million reminders I must put in my phone to keep up with it all. It’s exhausting because you feel like you’re always on duty. We know that lots of mothers feel similarly because they still carry the bulk of the mental load in the household.
This never-off feeling is the lived experience for so many mothers who have been told they can have it all and do it all. Work like you don’t have children and then parent like you don’t have a career. It feeds the always-on narrative, and as Anne Hathaway shows, when it seeps into our lives beyond parenting, you realise we’re more or less conditioned to be permanently on call.
Research from the University of Bath found that not only do mums shoulder the lion’s share of this invisible ‘thinking work’ in households, but that this stays the same even if they earn more than their partner.
They call it ‘gendered cognitive stickiness.’ Others might call it ‘mum mode,’ but the point is that because of how society is set up and views mothers, these tasks tend to “stick to women and are rarely renegotiated.” No wonder Anne couldn’t help herself on the red carpet; like most of us, she’s been doing it for years probably without realising it.
Pushing our own boundaries
But the real kicker is that, like me, Anne Hathaway is probably not some organisational savant. In fact, like the rest of us, she may well resent the feeling of being always on duty and being lumbered with the organiser-in-chief role and can’t shake it off. The truth is, most mums are not somehow ‘just better’ at organising things, or natural multitaskers, or love being in charge of everything. No. It turns out that men are just as good at multitasking as women; it’s simply that women are expected to do more of it.
In a really telling study of 35 couples, by Alison Daminger at Harvard, it was found that men referred to their wives as a “project manager” or said they were “keeping track of more”.
The study concluded there were four stages of mental work related to household responsibilities: anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding among the options and monitoring the results. Her research found that mothers did more in all four stages, and while parents often made decisions together, mothers did more of the anticipation, planning and research, otherwise known as the mental load.
The reality is, it’s hard to escape the ‘mum mode’ role when everyone assumes you’re just better at this whole organising malarkey. Part of the problem is that the mental load is very hard to quantify.
While partners try to split the household chores and responsibilities evenly, much of ‘mum mode’ involves what is often called the invisible ‘thinking work.’ It’s the things that just get done (sometimes as if by magic), like keeping track of everything, thinking ahead, constantly scanning, anticipating issues and solving problems.
Like Anne Hathaway, many of us mums do so much of this by default in our daily lives, that it not only becomes an expectation, but an ingrained reflex we can’t help shutting off. Even when on the red carpet in front of the world’s press.
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance writer and journalist.