A few weeks before her son Oliver turned eight, Jessica Koosed Etting found herself trapped in a familiar and exhausting psychological loop. The planning for his birthday had quietly taken up permanent residence in her brain weeks in advance, transforming what should have been a joyful milestone into an exercise in high-stakes project management.
They weren’t aiming for anything particularly extravagant. The family plan was straightforward: extended family would come over for dinner and cake, adhering to the comforting traditions they had built around birthdays over the years. There would be breakfast in bed with balloons, presents, quality time with grandparents, and his favorite meal for dinner. At the end of the night, the family would go around the table, with each person saying three things they loved about him. These little rituals had organically become the heartbeat of their family’s birthday magic.
Yet, as Etting points out, those intimate traditions do not magically materialize out of thin air. In the weeks leading up to the big day, her mind was constantly running through a silent inventory: figuring out what Oliver wanted, planning the menu, doing the grocery shopping, wrapping gifts, sourcing decorations, coordinating wish lists with extended family, ordering the cake, making sure his brothers had something to give him, and remembering to buy the specific brand of cereal he wanted for his birthday morning. She was juggling every moving part of the celebration alongside her regular professional responsibilities, school schedules, nightly dinners, and the myriad other commitments that populate modern family life.
When the day finally arrived, the celebration largely went off as planned. Oliver was thrilled, his brothers were excited, and the extended family was gathered together. At one point during the evening, the boys were playing and laughing with their grandparents, and Etting felt a natural tug to go and sit with them, to simply be present in the warmth of the moment she had worked so hard to construct.
Instead, her internal cruise-director brain immediately took over. Her thoughts pivoted instantly to logistics: if she didn’t start clearing the dinner table right then, they would serve the cake too late, which would throw off the timeline and squeeze out the time needed for opening presents.
Compelled by the invisible ticking clock in her head, she got up. She set up the cake and dessert, tracked down the candles she had purchased weeks prior, rounded everyone up for the singing, and began snapping photographs. Once the celebration wound down, a new wave of labor began—clearing more dishes, gathering wrapping paper, cleaning the kitchen, and eventually wrangling three overtired children into bed.
Later that night, long after the house had fallen quiet, Etting sat down with her phone to look through the photographs she had captured of everyone smiling together. They were the exact kind of images that define modern parenthood—the visual proof of a happy childhood, the kind of pictures that make an observer think that this, unequivocally, is the good stuff.
However, looking at the screens, she realized a stark and sobering truth: she could not remember a single moment from the entire evening where she had truly enjoyed herself or felt genuinely present with her son. And, most distressingly, birthdays were not the only time she felt this hollow sense of detachment.
This realization brought into sharp focus the hidden emotional weight of what sociologists and psychologists refer to as invisible labor and the mental load of motherhood. Before having children, Etting had envisioned herself as the kind of mother who would effortlessly revel in creating fun, whimsical memories for her kids. It was only after stepping into daily parenthood that she fully grasped the sheer volume of cognitive and emotional effort required to manufacture those magical childhood milestones.
From elaborate tooth fairy rituals and meticulously planned holiday traditions to family vacations and casual weekend outings, every magical experience requires someone to look ahead, anticipate needs, coordinate schedules, and execute the plan behind the scenes. In the vast majority of households, that operational burden falls squarely on mothers.
To be clear, Etting emphasizes that she genuinely loves creating fun moments for her family. It is a creative outlet and an expression of care that she has no desire to abandon. But as she experienced time and time again, the act of managing the entire experience meant she was perpetually barred from participating in it. While physically standing on a beach with her children, her mind was already calculating who needed their sunscreen reapplied, what groceries needed to be ordered for the next day’s lunch, or which email needed to be sent back to a child’s sports coach.
Some of that mental friction is an unavoidable byproduct of raising children, but Etting realized that carrying the entire weight of it was entirely optional—and unsustainable.
Reaching a place of greater balance was not an overnight transformation. It took years of intentionally building better habits around how her family approaches planning, organizing, and sharing domestic responsibilities. Even now, she admits to occasionally slipping back into default cruise-director mode when stress spikes.
As the founder of Jam, an all-in-one calendar and organization app designed specifically to help reduce the mental load of modern family life, Etting has dedicated a significant portion of her professional and personal energy to analyzing how families manage invisible labor. Over the years, she has explored various strategies to alleviate the pressure, particularly during times meant for celebration and connection.
Yet, beyond the logistics of app-based calendars and shared chore lists, a more profound realization began to take root: some of the most enduring, special moments with children require absolutely no planning or orchestration whatsoever. They happen in the unscripted margins of life—during a slow Sunday morning when nobody has anywhere to be, in the quiet warmth of a few extra cuddles and tickles at bedtime, or in the shared indulgence of the final ice cream cone of summer before the rigid schedules of the school year resume.
Those unstructured, organic moments are exceptionally easy to miss when half of a parent’s brain is already living in tomorrow, racing ahead to anticipate the next hurdle or requirement.
Recognizing the relentless pull of the mental load has become an ongoing practice for Etting, one that requires consciously deciding to press pause. In a household with three children and demanding careers, there will always be a next task waiting around the corner. The responsibilities are real and constant. But growing awareness has shifted her perspective: she no longer wants to spend her children’s childhoods perpetually preparing for the next phase of it. Sometimes, a lazy Sunday morning is the right time to get a jump start on the upcoming week’s to-do list, but just as often, it is a time to do nothing at all.
When she looks back at the family photo albums in the future, she wants to see more than just the aesthetic evidence of the celebrations she engineered. She wants to remember what it actually felt like to be fully, unhurriedly there with her children.
