Adjusting Visibility into the Mental Load

Before I go off on a rant about this, I'd like to offer the reader this:

1. Update your resume as you go. Have a "living" resume whereupon you update it with all the notes post project wrap up. Let it be the place that you can champion yourself, feel free to write down every little detail. You should have a professional resume that is separate and more cleaned up -- but in this living document, you can track items so you don't forget it.

2. Normalize writing about your volunteer opportunities. It can absolutely live in your "living resume" and not your professional resume; but don't forget about the work that you might accomplish as a volunteer. That stuff matters.

Onto my rant. Many may be familiar with the mental load (if you aren't, I highly recommend the book too). It's all the work you do, the things you manage that just sorta happen around you, that you may not notice. The calendaring of the household, the photojournalism you undertake, the cleaning, the management of a team, project management as you assure that the household are meeting deadlines and reaching goals, and so on. But it's not termed like that, now is it? Managing a team at work comes with some recognition whereas doing it at home is... Well, it just is.

Now being a Stay At Home Parent doesn't mean that you can convert those skills so readily onto a resume. Maybe you can as I'm not saying that you can't, in fact, I advocate for getting them onto a resume and not forgetting the amount of skill and labor that being a SAHP takes. Plus there's also the additional skills and roles that are taken on, like volunteerism. Get those skills onto a document because at some point, you're likely to forget all the things you did -- just like when you've completed a major project 5 years ago and struggle to recapture all the work you put into it.

Change the lens of what it means to be a SAHP; adjust the visibility.

I've been helping a friend work on her LinkedIn profile after years of being a SAHM. In our conversations, she's mentioned that she's just a SAHM. Except she's a huge cornerstone of the community; she's lead several projects, executed events, coordinated efforts across different teams, recruited, fundraised, etc. All under the guise of "just being a volunteer." One of the things I reminded her that as she moves on from being a volunteer, those skills are what she needs for her next phase.

So I write this to others, just as a reminder, "just being a volunteer" can vary greatly from just being one in name only -- to being the person that gets things done. And even if you're somewhere in between, think of it as a job and highlight the things you did and/or are doing. Because it may not matter in the moment that you're doing it... But it might mean something to you later on. Write it down.