You Can Thank Exhausted Mothers For Your Vacation Memories

When Courtney Hardie was growing up, vacation meant one thing: a week in her grandfather’s “remote fishing cabin” in Ontario, Canada. The cabin had no electricity or running water, so the family used an outhouse and bathed in the lake.

“While I have lovely memories of this, I always felt like I missed out on new experiences and new cultures,” Hardie told HuffPost.

As a parent now herself, Hardie works diligently to plan trips for her own kids that expose them to unfamiliar parts of the world. The family, who live in Cincinnati, recently spent two weeks traveling throughout Australia.

“I’ve tried to give my children the experiences that I yearned for, which has led to me obsessing over making sure our trips are ‘perfect,’” she said.

Like in many households, the work of planning these trips falls mostly to mom — Hardie, in this case — though she does take some of the blame for this imbalance.

“My husband is not a planner by nature,” she said. “To his credit, he asks what he can do to help, but oftentimes I feel like it would take longer to explain to him what needs to be done than simply doing it myself.”

While Hardie feels that her efforts are well worth it, and she’s able to be “in the moment” once they’re actually on vacation, the intensive preparations do take their toll.

“This hyper-planning has led to me always being very stressed out right before trips,” she admitted.

It’s this constant calculation of time and effort that leads many parents — primarily moms — to take on the bulk of the work organizing the family’s activities, wherever they take place. Once this inequality is established, delegation can become just one more task to check off the list, a burden in its own right.

We sometimes refer to this kind of labor as the mental load, defined as “the never-ending, behind-the-scenes mental gymnastics required for everything to get done” in a recent HuffPost article. If you’re the parent who schedules the dentist appointments and renews the contract on the rental violin, you’re likely also the one who will remember to pack the swim goggles, call the hotel to request a crib and conduct sufficient research to have an informed opinion on which sunscreen ingredients are kid-safe.

The mental load is generally carried by the “default parent.” As Mercedes Samudio, psychotherapist and author of “Shame-Proof…