Whose Work Wins?

On default parents, invisible labor, and whose dreams get to matter.

I’m on day 11 of 45 days of solo parenting.

45 days of school and camp drop-offs, meals, baths, bedtime routines, middle-of-the-night wake ups, laundry piles, bottle cleaning, sick days, and all the other invisible tasks that keep a family running.

This isn’t the first time my husband has had a work trip, but over the past year he’s been on the road more and more. For example, he had to leave for four weeks just two weeks after our second daughter was born. That was rough, but this is probably the longest stretch yet, and with two kids it feels like a lot.

So I’m on day 11 and when I’m not losing my mind, I find myself thinking about that burning question.

Whose work wins?

It sounds like a personal question, but it’s really a societal one. Every day, in millions of households, somebody’s work gets prioritized and somebody’s gets moved. And like so many women, it happened to me without anyone ever sitting down to discuss it.

Before children, I spent years building things, some successful, some not. And after my first child was born. I started building something new, but unlike my other businesses, this one wasn’t paying me yet.

And somewhere around that time my husband’s career took off with more opportunities. No one said his work mattered more, we just started acting like it did. When he has a work trip, I stay home. When he has a meeting, I adjust. When childcare falls through, I become the backup plan. When the baby gets sick, I rearrange my day.

And I get it. His work comes with a paycheck. Mine comes with potential.

But what’s wild is even in dual-income households, even when both parents are bringing home a salary, women are still more likely to be the default parent who has to adjust.

And it’s not just for the big moments. It’s everything in between.

Which sounds harmless until you realize anticipation is time.

It’s mental energy.

It’s remembering camp registration opens Tuesday at 9 a.m. It’s knowing who needs a dentist appointment, whether we have enough diapers, if the formula maker is full, and whether we’re fully stocked on snacks.

It’s work.

It just doesn’t look like work.

A study from the University of Bath found that mothers carry roughly 71% of a household’s mental load. Researchers call it cognitive labor.

Most mothers just call it Tuesday.

And when one person is responsible for carrying more of that invisible responsibility, they aren’t just giving up time. They’re giving up focus. They’re giving up uninterrupted stretches of thought. They’re giving up the space where ideas become businesses, books, promotions, projects, and dreams.

A 2024 Pew Research survey found that 65% of fathers believe they share childcare equally. Only 29% of their partners agreed. That gap isn’t a communication problem. It’s two people living in completely different realities inside the same house.

And it starts before you even open your front door. A field experiment sending emails to over 80,000 US school principals found that even when both parents’ contact information was provided with no signal about availability, mothers were called first 60% of the time. The school didn’t ask who was more available. It was just assumed.

And if you needed any more proof that the default gets assigned before you even walk in the room, when was the last time you saw a changing table in a men’s bathroom?

I remember lying awake with the baby, exhausted from another night of broken sleep, thinking, who needs more sleep right now? The person with meetings that pay? Or the person responsible for keeping a tiny human alive all day?

I want to be clear, this isn’t about resenting my husband. It’s not even really about him. It’s the invisible math that somehow always adds up the same way.

Reading the studies I felt seen, but also slightly uncomfortable, because honestly, part of the problem is me.

I want to be with my kids. My family was always the dream, but so was everything that came before them, and I’m still not done building. And maybe that’s the conversation we’re not having honestly enough.

We spend a lot of time debating whether mothers should work or stay home, but we don’t talk enough about how to make the two coexist without penalty. And underneath that debate is an assumption so embedded most of us don’t even notice it anymore.

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not sure one exists.

And sometimes I wonder if this is just the season I’m currently in. If everything picks back up once both girls are in school? Or does the default just follow?

What I do know is that ever since I started writing about this, I keep finding the same woman. She built things before this. She’s still trying to build, somewhere in the margins. She’s asking the same question I am.

Maybe the goal isn’t figuring out whose work wins.

Maybe it’s recognizing that both people’s ambitions deserve to be treated as real before they become profitable.

Because by the time a dream starts generating income, it’s usually already survived years of invisible work. And if we’re only willing to protect ambitions once they start paying, we’ll keep asking mothers to prove their dreams are valuable before they’re allowed to pursue them.

And if enough of us are sitting with the same unanswered question, maybe that’s not a dead end.

Maybe that’s where we start.

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I just missed my husband’s call because I was putting my baby down for her nap that she still fights aggressively, and I haven’t had the chance to come up for air since 6am and he texted “just calling, hope you’re doing something fun.”

And with that, I’m throwing my phone out the window.