Can you seperate work and home life? Can we keep work at work? Maybe not entirely, but as Brooke Le Poer Trench points out, you can change your mindset, and maybe that’s all we need.

A few years ago I took a busy life juggling a few kids and hefty freelance projects and hit the nuclear button: I moved overseas and stepped into a full-time role. I built-out my village by recruiting as much household support as we could afford and I jumped. And for the most part, it was a huge success (for me). I loved the job. My fears around not being able to step up and deliver faded, and being back with peers stoked my ambition. “I could do that,” I found myself thinking, as I observed people above me. This was a new idea: I had not missed the boat. 

But there were sticking points: even with all the support I had taking care of our children and keeping on top of dust bunnies, my workload at home was huge. Most women will understand: laundry, groceries, school dairies, homework, organising, decluttering, medical appointments, school community. The list goes on… and it was one that I both resented and relished. Being in control at home made me feel like I was missing less… and still mumming as hard as I did when I was doing more school pick-ups and cooking more nuggets. 

I viewed myself as the architect of this set-up. In the early years of motherhood the arrangement of me keeping the teeny humans alive, while my husband paid for all the things teeny humans need, bedded down a workflow system that could be summed up as: he works outside the house and I work within it. He cleaned the kitchen every night, which made him “amazing.” As sociologist Arlie Hochschild out in her 1989 book The Second Shift: if a man does a bit more than that notional average man in his community, he’s viewed as exceptionally helpful. Still, I had decided on a life without really deciding.

Shaking up our balance after 10 years (we all have the right to change our minds at any point) and stepping onto the same track as my husband put this arrangement under the microscope. I was breaking under the strain of it all. Returning home from one full-time job to another was taking its toll. The stress was mounting. The cracks were showing. My workmates were getting sparkly, fun, enthusiastic me and my family were getting the dregs. I was irritable, snappy, cross and on-my-knees-tired. Still, I forged on, figuring it would get better. 

In her book Drop the Ball, American writer Tiffany Dufu calls my attitude “the home control disease” and it stems, in part, from the insidious sexism of women being raised to see an impeccable home as a sign of her worth. A well-managed home, I remember reading late one night, is still a gendered expectation, which is why it’s so very difficult for men to get home control disease – they just don’t attach it to their value.

The truth was, my husband wasn’t some entitled a-hole engineering a Mad Men set up so he could do nada. He was just really just getting out of my way. I remember one day coming home from the park to discover he had re-arranged the cupboards and kitchen bench. And I’m ashamed to say, I lost my sh*t. I can’t find anything! I liked the coffee machine in the corner! I had systems! And then this, cringe: I don’t come into your office and mess everything up! Essentially guaranteeing he never, ever, ever tried anything like that again. 

So what’s a girl to do? Blame herself, of course. Why am I okay at work and then stressed at home? I must be bringing too much of my work stress home with me (*starts getting to work earlier). I mustn’t be eating enough leafy green vegetables (*eats more kale). It must be my gut microbiome (*adds kimchi to dinner). That 3pm coffee is causing a crash at 6pm (*skips afternoon piccolo). I remember getting a blood test and wishing the doctor would find something really wrong with me. I sat down for the results, bracing myself. Every page the doctor flipped through in the report, he would scan the numbers, highlight something and then say the same thing: “normal.” I was crest fallen. “Do you want me to write you a note for stress leave?” he asked. “No thanks,” I said. “It’s only my second week.” 

I’d enviously watch my husband walk through the door after a stressful day. He’d have a huge smile on his face. Dump his bags, kick his shoes off, and start rolling around on the floor. ‘At least one of us is still fun,’ I would think (as I trekked another load of washing out to the laundry and filled out an excursion form for school). I did not know how to shift the funk. I did not know how to redistribute the work.  

The first glimmer of hope for me came when I heard Barry Michaels, author of a bestselling book called The Tools, talk about how he learned to cope with that transition between work and home. “I was always arriving home angry and irritable, and I started to worry that’s all my children will know,” he said. “So I decided to fake it. I would get to the front door and just plaster a smile on my face. Give everyone a warm hello. And a funny thing happened: when you pretend to be relaxed and happy, what I would often find is that I actually started to feel that way for real.” Fake it to make it. That sounded good. I started doing it. 

And I started looking a little harder at the part I was playing in the way my life looked. I needed to shake this weight off. And so I started to prioritise my mental load. Laundry can pile up, I thought, because I’d rather sit on the edge of the tub and talk to my 6-year-old while she plays with her toys in the bath. I sent grocery lists to my husband to grab on his way home, knowing that while he might not anticipate the (insert food item here) was about to run out, he would happily pick up whatever was needed. I tried harder to not care I was the only person in the house taking toilet paper inventory. I started taking better care of myself: I went for more walks and actively tried to take deeper breaths (this was a hack from Eckhart Tolle in his podcast with Oprah, who said he rated this over disappearing for an hour every morning to meditate). I started listening to audible books like Unfuck Yourself. And I began to see that this role of being boss-of-everything-at-home wasn’t giving me power, it was sapping it. The mental load of holding all the planning and lists was doing my head in. 

Finally, I took a break with my sister. And then another one with two friends. And then another. And I didn’t freeze meals or make plans or book sitters. I just went. And it was brilliant! Now anyone who is willing to ditch their families for some timeout… they are my new people. I’ve done this a few times now and you’ll never guess what: everyone and everything is great when I get home. Often better than when I left. I feel renewed… and I suspect they enjoy the break from me just as much as I do forgetting all-the-millions-of-things.