Episode 237 (Transcript): The Invisible Labor of Women | A Conversation with Christine Pagano
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Anne Law for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
CP: I learned to equate motherhood with martyrdom. There was no room to be an individual outside of it, outside of motherhood. And I, motherhood isn’t, it’s not an identity, it’s a relationship. Same thing with being a wife. And if my only divine potential depends on the presence of someone else in my life and I have to self-sacrifice for that to happen- we land in that resignation sooo quickly and it’s painful.
SH: Hello. I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And I’m Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last she Said It. We are Women of Faith discussing complicated things and the title of today’s episode is The Invisible Labor of Women- A Conversation with Christine Pagano. Hi Christine.
CP: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
CW:: Welcome. Glad to have you.
SH: We’re so happy to have you.
CP: Thank you. It has been a wonderful journey to be here through all of the episodes- I’m currently caught up, which is amazing for myself.
SH: Wow.
CP: Yeah. Very excited to be here.
SH: Wow. We can’t pay you enough.
CW: We owe Christina, a cupcake.
SH: Uhhuh. At least a cupcake. Maybe something even better Cynthia. We need to review our gift list and start…
CP: I’m here for cupcakes. I’m here for it.
CW:: A non-existent gift list
SH: Perfect. Oh, Christine, I don’t know hardly anything about you. I know that we have met briefly in passing, but you know, it’s pretty unusual that we have a guest on that I mean- I just really don’t know at all.
So for me, and also for all of our listeners, could you just give us a quick bio, whatever you want people to know about you, and also something that could give context to this conversation. Like why are you the one here having this conversation with us today?
CP: Well, let me start kind of at the very beginning.
I grew up in Mill Creek Holiday, Utah, which is a suburb of Salt Lake. My parents lived in the same house from the age since I was two years. Kind of my claim to fame is I have three of my paternal- three of just my grandparents came, their ancestry came through across the plains, and we did not lose one single ancestor.
Everyone made it, which is almost unheard of.
SH: Wow.
CP: So we’re hearty, stocky, survivor type people. It is in the blood, the Mormonism goes back to Nauvoo and it flows. So the term Mormon is very much an identity. It’s very much how I see the world, how it shows up in just every single daily life is Mormonism.
So that’s kind of the framework of which I approach life, which is really important to our conversation today. So again, going back to the beginning, born and raised, I am the fifth of six children. Growing up from a young age, I did not naturally gravitate towards children the way that I noticed my peers did. And I was kind of like forced to do babysitting because that was really the only job that’s available to, you know, like a 12 to 14-year-old girl. But I didn’t like it and I would do anything I could to get out of it and that we’ll find out why that’s kind of relevant to today’s conversation.
Where I grew up I knew only one working mother- and she was a mom. She was a mom and a nurse. She delivered babies during the night. Which again, we’ll kind of talk about how that’s kind of like one of the okay jobs for women to have is- a caretaking nurse. So only one working mom that I knew of all of my friends’, primary church and community- there was no separation. I went to school with all of my primary best friends. I went to birthday parties with all of ‘em. We played on all of the same sports teams, so it was like church 24-7. And then as a teenager I started to notice that there was a little bit of a difference in the way that I viewed motherhood and the way that my peers did.
And I wanted to be a pilot at the age of 14. I loved the Air Force-
SH: Oh wow.
CP: and I wanted to fly planes. And I remember sitting in a lesson in Miamaids and the lesson was on basically like the essential role of motherhood and how, you know, we needed to look forward to that and prepare for it. And there, there lies our divinity.
I raised my hand and I said, well, I am, I’m not sure that I even want to be a mother, and if I am a mother, I wanna be a working mother. [00:05:00] And my sweet, young woman’s leader, she cried. She began to cry and weep- telling me how saddened that made her, and kind of just the loss that she felt for me in this, you know, this decision.
And it really put me in the spot of, okay, it’s pretty clear that I am the problem…
SH: Right.
CP: I’m the only one of my young women’s group who said something like that. So I, from a very early age, kind of was aware of motherhood, was thee option. It was what I wanted, what I needed to become, to be divine and to fulfill that potential.
But I was keenly aware that it was going to come at a cost of my individuality. And what I aspire to outside of that.
SH: So this was when you were in Miamaids, which would be like, what, 14 and 15? So technically you’re not even dating yet.
CP: Correct.
SH: I mean, I just gotta point this out.
CW: That just says it all Susan.
SH: We’re already crying. Our leaders are already crying over our loss of divine potential. And we’re not even dating yet.
CP: Not even dating. And this is, you know, around the same time that the we’re having mutual activities where we’re like planning our weddings.
CW: Right.
CP: And we’re cutting our dresses out of magazines, but we’re coloring on sleeves to make them modest. Like I had a time capsule of what my wedding was going to look like in a Pinterest board. Like this is where my youth group is at 14, and I’m like on the other side, like, I wanna put on combat boots and go to war.
So just a very stark difference of how I was experiencing life.
CW: I have a question about that though, Christine. If you were around 14 when you made your young women’s leader cry, I’m guessing like after that happened, did you feel less free to express your desires? Or no- that’s something that you have always, that has been your superpower and you still, and you kept doing it even after that.
CP: Yeah. So my superpower, I actually inherited from my mom, and it’s this ability to disregard stupid rules.
SH: I like it.
CW: Insert applause.
CP: It’s one of my favorite things about my mom is if it is a stupid rule, she will just ignore it and walk right past whatever stupid rule that is. And so I kind of inherited that ability from, you know, a young age of if it was stupid I had enough self-awareness and self-confidence to kind of blow it off.
CW: beautiful.
CP: Yeah- what other people thought or what that rule meant.
SH: Okay. So did you feel encouraged from your parents in your dreams or did you feel like they patted you on the head, but you know, really sided with your young women’s leaders?
CP: No. So that’s another wonderful thing about my parents is my, beyond the fact that I was determined to go to the Air Force Academy, where of course my parents were like, oh my gosh, like that, you know, that could mean war.
And again, this was like right during Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. So there was a lot of fear in there, but the dreams and aspirations they were behind.
SH: Beautiful.
CP: And I think it’s important to note here as well, that I grew up with a mother who, she became a mom at a young age within, you know, a year of marriage herself.
And she married at a young age. And she was open with that regret with her children. She was very honest with us about, you know, if she could do things differently, she would.
CW: Oh
CP: And so again, this is also something important to point out, is I witnessed this pattern in women acknowledging that they had regrets and they wanted to redo part of their young adulthood to develop themselves further.
And it always came with this caveat of, but I still love my children.
CW: Right.
CP: And I never noticed that in men- they had that freedom to just say, I didn’t, you know, maybe do the things I wanted to, or I did do the things I wanted to, but I still love my children.
It was like women had to make the room for loving their children and wishing that they had held off or that they had accommodated their dreams first
CW: As if you can’t do both- right?
CP: Right. As if we can’t do both. So my mom was pretty adamant that we graduate college before we get married. And so she was very on board with us getting an education, and kind of pursuing the dreams that we wanted to. So moving forward into my life, every single one of my older siblings went on a mission and then I decided to go on a mission, and that is actually where I met my husband.
So we both served in the same mission and [00:10:00] I turned 21 the week before President Monson changed the age. So I went strolling into my mission as a 21-year-old, and here came my darling little husband at 18.
SH: Wow.
CW: Okay.
CP: He seemed like such a little baby at the time, and it was fun. So that is where we met.
He came home from his mission and at that time I was letting go of the dreams of being a pilot- that dream had kind of fizzled out within high school, but it had been replaced with this dream of being a doctor. And I was working at Primary Children’s at the time we were dating, and as I was working with these female surgeons and just incredible doctors, my expectation of being able to balance motherhood as a mom and as a part-time physician became very clear that was unrealistic.
These doctors, these female doctors clarified to me, made it very clear that unfortunately that was not a reality with the way that, you know, the system works and that motherhood has to be kind of put on the back burner. At least for a couple years while you get established, you get through residency, you do everything.
So I let go of those dreams and I graduated with a degree in public health education and I wasn’t really sure what I was gonna do with that. My husband and I get married, and then I kind of fell into social work and that led me to get my master’s degree and eventually into mental health therapy.
CW: And is that what you do right now?
CP: Yes. So that’s what I do right now. And he, my husband is in HR and he works locally and we’re just, that’s where we are today, is we’re living the dream. We have three children under the age of five.
CW: Oh!
SH: Wow.
CP: We’re, yeah, I had three in four years, which I don’t even know how that math works, but somehow…
CW: I don’t either.
SH: How are you even awake right now? How are you even sitting up?
CP: All single babies and highly caffeinated. I think that’s the way that I would describe it.
CW: Wow.
SH: Just amazing.
CP: Yeah.
CW: And that’s exactly why we wanted to have you here today, Christine, because you are a therapist and we had a Zoom call- I think several months ago, and we kind of touched on this topic that we labeled this episode, the Invisible Labor of Women.
And you just started saying all these amazing things, and Susan and I were like, that’s an episode. We want to talk about this. And so we always love it when we can have mental health professionals on the show, especially for an LDS audience. We always are interested in like how we can equalize labor in our families.
I mean, it’d be great if we could in our churches, you know, but at least in our homes, that’s hopefully a possibility. So we’re grateful to have you on to talk about the invisible labor of women and all the things that fall under that.
CP: Thank you. So let me give you kind of a brief explanation of how I ended up in kind of this sphere of invisible labor and domestic labor.
My husband and I, when we decided we wanted to have children. We talked pretty extensively about what we wanted a partnership as parents to look like, and then we were completely devastated when we quickly acted into our prescribed gender roles.
So there what we kind of realized is that there’s no roadmap for how to do partnership in patriarchy, at least within our little Mormon frame of reference.
SH: Right.
CP: My, my husband is incredible with kids. He is by far the more nurturing partner of us. But we had these kids, we had this, our first child, and I remember one night I had been up, you know, three or four times with the baby. My husband slept through it all. And in the morning he looked at me and he said, oh, that was, I’m so glad the baby slept through the night- I really needed that. And I am not kidding you, I imagined a car running over him.
SH: Wow.
CP: Backing up and going right back over him in just like four seconds. I was like, ugghhh…
SH: Who’s driving that car, Christine?
CP: Oh, you know who was in that front seat.
So I quickly became very familiar with rage, this motherhood rage.
And what we know about rage in motherhood is that it is a sign of postpartum depression and anxiety. Now, luckily for me, I wasn’t experiencing any of the other postpartum depressive or anxious symptoms, but I needed to get to what the bottom of what this rage was.
Because I was just spiraling all of the time, and I couldn’t figure out why having to grab the diaper bag and the child and go out the door when my husband would just [00:15:00] slide in the car would just enrage me. And I discovered The Exponent Facebook group. And I, wrote on the Facebook page a post about my husband’s useless nipples because I was a nursing mom.
And I just was like, why did God even put ‘em there? Honestly? Like they’re useless. What question was that for?
CW: Great question.
CP: Yeah. And I was shocked when I received over 300 comments from other LDS women empathizing with me and I thought, okay, there’s something here. I’m not the first one to experience this rage towards my very darling, present, well-meaning husband. What is it that’s causing this rage?
And that’s how I became introduced to this method called Fair Play. And essentially what Fair Play is it is a system at home that delineates domestic labor between partners. It brings the invisible work to light so that it could be shared equitably under the belief that all time is created equally.
Patriarchy, on the other hand, believes that men’s time is finite. There’s only 24 hours. While women’s time is infinite, it’s unlimited.
SH: Right.
CP: So when we put our domestic labor into that context, it makes a lot more sense as to why women are drowning in a to-do list and all of these things that need to be done and experience, you know, depression and anxiety at much higher rates than their partners do.
So there’s a couple terms in Fair Play that I wanna briefly just go over, if that’s okay.
So a couple of the terms that we will talk about throughout this conversation is the she-fault parent. Naturally, kind of like a playoff of a default parent is the she fault parent. Okay. And essentially what we have discovered is that, I’ll say this with this term, is straight couples don’t plan for, anticipate or negotiate what emotional, mental, physical, domestic labor will look like before they jump into parent hood.
So this is actually something where we really can learn from queer couples and queer families that pre-negotiate and have a little bit more of an idea of how to handle this division of labor within their relationships.
CW: Makes sense.
CP: The she-fault parent is exactly that. The moms are carrying the load of motherhood, domestic labor, invisible labor, emotional labor, relational labor at much higher rates than their male partners.
The invisible work is the behind the scenes stuff that keeps a house running daily. So the example I like to give of this is there’s always toilet paper in the house. Who’s responsible usually,
SH: How does it happen?
CP: Right. Always toilet paper. The kids always have shoes in the next size, there’s clothes washed, right?
SH: Right.
CP: Like, I like to wake up in the morning and think, oh, how nice is it that- how nice would it be to just like wake up to clean clothes every day? That’s amazing. Like, so that’s the invisible labor that happens behind to keep the house running.
The mental labor or mental load refers to the never ending to-do list of running a house or of a family for some reason, this is the example that I can’t even get over in my own life is I’m very passionate about sunscreen and my kids have sunscreen on daily. Now it takes a lot of mental labor to know which sunscreen is gonna be the best for their skin to reapply it after 90 minutes to set the timer for 90 minutes.
So the mental load just refers to all of the things that happen in a head. The never ending to do list.
CW: That’s a fantastic example because it’s a daily example. My example, but I like yours better. My example I would always say to my husband is something about do you realize like the children always happen to be completely up to date on their immunizations?
CP: Exactly.
CW: You know, but yours is even better ‘cause yours is a daily, absolute daily thing where they need to have their skin taken care of. So bravo.
CP: Yeah
SH: I have one daughter that I’ve talked quite a bit about this with. It’s very much an issue in her own life and in her own marriage actually.
It’s something that they’re trying to solve. She has a very high powered career, so does he. And they have two children. So she was trying to explain to him about the mental load- the invisible work the other day. And she was telling me that, she said maybe you could just take on the grocery shopping.
And he said, I don’t know what we need. How would I know that? And she said, well now wait, think about it. How do you think I know that? And he said, well, would you expect me to like open the fridge and the cupboards and then just [00:20:00] like try and determine what we need based on what’s in there? I mean, he like really couldn’t even get his head around what are the steps that someone goes through to be able to keep a house supplied with food, right?
And I can really see both sides of that. I can see why he had never been called upon to do that mental exercise, maybe in his life, right? Because food probably- you know, appeared in his house his whole life. And so it had never occurred to him to go through those steps in his head.
And needless to say, in that particular conversation, it didn’t really go that well for him.
CP: Yes, I can imagine. And that, thank you, first of all for sharing that because it brings into the conversation this really important detail of, I wanna put this as gently as possible, because it can feel so offensive to men, but kind of this like infantilization of men…
CW: Yes.
CP: Where they’re like, but how, just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.
SH: Right. Right.
CP: And the women are saying, no, I, I don’t want to do that- that’s like the least sexy thing in a marriage is to be your mother. I don’t want to do that to, to you and put us in this relationship where I’m telling you what to do and have all the steps laid out for you, or writing you a to-do list.
That’s not my role. I want a collaborative partner, so thank you Susan for bringing that up. I wanna point out that exhaustion that your daughter, the fact that she can probably do that grocery list in her head while driving a kid to school while that kid is like, mom, I’m gonna tell you about this and mom, I got bullied on the playground and mom, my shoes are hurting, and mom and the other child is like screaming- that exhaustion and that just those moments of overstimulation. There’s some correlation to that with women being diagnosed in their thirties with ADHD.
SH: Interesting.
CW: And so that meaning like that causes the ADHD?
CP: Yeah. There’s some studies that say that every 17 seconds a woman’s thought is interrupted. And so it the- just the inability to finish a thought. And then while you’re multitasking all of these things leads to ADHD, which is actually the ability to hyperfocus on many things at once.
SH: Okay.
CW: Oh,
CP: So women are, you know, presenting with these ADHD symptoms being medicated for it, rightfully so. But is this also a problem that we could solve within partnerships within the home?
SH: Right.
CP: If we can get that to-do list out of her head and have a partner show up and take his load or her load of it- can we solve this over exhaustion, this, these symptoms of mental illness that are presenting.
SH: But in that particular story, that’s the part of it where there was a disconnect between them because he kept saying, I’m happy to get the groceries, write down what we need. And she was trying to make him understand that if I have to track what we have and write down what we need, I’ve already done all the work.
CW: Right. Right. 90% of the work is the invisible.
SH: I don’t care about going to get the groceries. Right. The 90% of the work is what’s going on- you know, the programs I’m running behind the scenes. And so that’s what she was trying to help him understand and it was like he really didn’t even- didn’t even have a way to even enter that conversation- you know, in, in a meaningful way. Let’s just say the problem is not solved yet. I think sometimes it’s hard for men to understand how much really is going on in a woman’s head all the time.
CP: You’re exactly right. And I’ve worked with countless couples where I have heard this same situation of a husband who sees his wife overwhelmed and wanting to lighten that burden and showing up with this golden retriever energy that your son-in-law had of like, I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I’ll do it- just show me how. And you know, the same conversation of, it’s not my job to show you how you need to solve this problem yourself.
SH: Exactly.
CP: And the purpose of Fair Play is to be able to offload a task through planning and preparation execution into completion entirely. So what that might look like for your daughter and son-in-law is if he owns that task, he is in charge of planning the meals, looking through the cupboards, knowing what is and isn’t there, executing the recipes, getting all the ingredients for them, planning for it, executing it, putting it on the table and seeing it through to whatever completion is decided upon the couple as being.
So if that’s the meall is prepped and that’s done, or if it’s the meal is prepped and dishes are put away in the dishwasher. That’s agreed upon between the two of ‘em.
SH: Wow.
CP: So it’s like beginning all the way through the end- so the other partner doesn’t even have to think about it. They just kind of get to show up to the show.
SH: Okay. But in what universe is that ever going to happen?
CP: It feels unbelievable, but once couples start [00:25:00] to use this method and really have the conversations behind them, it can start to happen to work and happen. Yeah. It can happen.
CW: Just the fact that you said a few minutes ago that this is a problem specific to heterosexual couples and that we can learn a lot from queer couples makes me think Okay, if they figured it out, like Susan was saying, you know, on what universe is this happening? Like it is happening. It’s just that I’m guessing queer couples come to a marriage with a clean slate because there are not the gendered stereotypes. So, it is doable for hetero couples. Right. I want it to be totally doable anyway.
CP: Yeah, exactly. Just the beginning of the conversations where they have to come together and say, what do we want our quality of life to look like? Does that mean one of us stays home? Do we both work? If we work, how do we manage childcare? Who’s responsible for the childcare financially?
Is it a both of us thing or is it a just a you thing? Like those conversations are happening. We see them happen much earlier in a relationship, even before engagement.
So love, love these conversations because it really brings up who it is doing this invisible work. But when we frame it within the system of patriarchy and we have to, I’m gonna get in trouble with this because my husband hates that I link it all back to corporate America because I have huge issues with corporations.
But corporate America is built on the invisible labor of stay at home mothers.
CW: A hundred percent.
CP: A hundred percent. So, right. And so there’s even these relation or these almost like characters that partners can show up in their relationship as, so for example, I am an accidental traditionalist where I like didn’t wanna be the stay at home mom- I had dreams of being a working mom, but then when it came time to actually being the caretaker at home I tripped and fell into stay at home motherhood because I didn’t even know how to find childcare. And when that childcare became more expensive than my income- I believe that was my responsibility and I shouldered that burden of choosing between- going to work essentially for free ‘cause it would’ve taken my entire paycheck. Or staying at home. So I accidentally kind of fell into even just one of these characters where I wanted something other than what I saw. I didn’t have the framework to do it.
CW: Sounds familiar,
CP: right? Yes. Sounds familiar. So another term that we can briefly talk about is the second shift. And this is the work that happens before and after parents do their own work outside of the home. So for dads, that’s, you know, before and after, a lot of dads- they don’t really even have a morning shift. It’s just get up, go to work. Right. A mom’s second shift starts throughout the night. Right. There is no separation of their shift being over. It’s 24-7, 365. Yep. So there’s the second shift, and then the emotional labor is maintaining relationships, managing the emotions of the household. And this is rarely, if ever recognized as labor.
So, with this framework of Fair Play, I, and essentially what it is Fair Play puts all of these just domestic labor type activities onto playing cards. They have a little domestic activity on each playing card. And as a partnership, you sit down and talk about those playing cards and you divide them out between who’s currently holding the cards and how do we need to divide it more equitably.
So you have the physical reminders in front of you when you play.
CW: So my question is so you would have a card that would say like “laundry”? A card that said “groceries” or “cooking” a card that said “immunizations” or, you know, whatever for children and then-
CP: Yep. Exactly.
CW: And then that you would divide them up by who’s currently doing it- that’s what we’re talking about right now.
CP: Yep. Yep. So the fair play method is essentially bringing that invisible labor or just the domestic labor to light on a playing card decide or seeing who currently holds it, and then redistributing that with the belief that all time is created equally.
The reason why that is important, because for a lot of times I have couples who come in and, you know, they have the dad who goes to work every day and he’s like, well, I only have six hours at home and it plays into kind of this belief again that she has more time at home, therefore she should have [00:30:00] more domestic labor.
CW: Right. Right.
CP: Where he doesn’t see the running to and from activities and the making the grocery list and making the click list and making the meals and all of those other things. So it reassigns them to be more equitable based on, again, the belief that all time is equal.
CW: Right.
CP: The other important thing in Fair Play that I think we really struggle with in our Mormon congregations is this concept of unicorn time.
And what that means is that individuals have the right to be interesting, and they have the right to be individual and to have hobbies and passions that are outside of their home and outside of their relationship. What we know is when a new child enters a home, a mother increases her domestic load by 21 hours a week, whereas men and fathers report five additional hours of free time a week.
SH: Wait, what!?
CP: The math doesn’t math again. How does one partner report 21 hours of additional labor and a partner is five hours of free time, and that’s for each child. So if you’ve had quite a few children, then that number obviously stacks up quite a bit. So the unicorn time card-
basically says it’s a card that demands that each partner receive time to develop their own hobbies, their own interests, and just be allowed to spend a few hours however they want, without judgment, without criticism in whatever way feeds them.
CW: Good name for it.
CP: Right? I know. Yeah.
CW: It sounds like a fantasy land, but yes- unicorns fantasy.
CP: Yes. So the reason why I think, again, I’m coming to life with or into my career with this Mormon framework, and once I found this FairPlay method and I started working with LDS women and LDS couples, it became pretty evident early on that this Fair Play is needed, especially within our homes, because we’re modeled after a church and a church organization. That’s how we’ve been told our whole lives to model our home lives-
SH: Right.
CP: And in the church, there’s a vast difference in the emotional labor that LDS women are showing up with that LDS men are not. So I realized like, oh, not only do we have to Fair Play their homes and do this within their relationships, but we also need to do this within the way they approach their religion and the spiritual wellbeing of their individual lives, as well as their family, as well as then applying it to how they view their church.
And I think that’s kind of where the conversation might take us today.
So there’s a pattern that I really wanna point out from working with my clients- and this is going to be speaking mostly to women, and I recognize that there are men who this is not as much of a problem, if at all, and that there are stay at home dads who can empathize with this and feel vastly underrepresented.
I understand that. But tonight, for this, the purpose of this, I’m gonna be speaking mostly to the women. There’s this pattern of perceived unfairness. And when we feel that unfairness in our relationships from carrying so much of this weight, then it leads to exhaustion, which turns into resentment for our partners, for our church, for God, whomever it may be that is carrying that burden of resentment for us to then finally resignation. And that resignation is where I see a lot of women feeling really bitter about where they’ve ended up in life or shattered even about where they’ve ended up or those regrets began to outweigh some of the other life experiences that they’ve had is resignation.
I don’t want couples to get into resignation. I really want us to come in with when we’re feeling the exhaustion, and that’s where Fair Play can really help, isn’t there? So I have a question for both of you then. Have you seen this exhaustion, resentment, resignation pattern in your own lives or in the lives of all the countless women you’ve interacted with in the church?
CW: Oh, Christine. How much time do we have?
SH: I was just gonna say…
CW: I was about to ask, Susan, do you need to lie down yet? Because I…
SH: And I was about to say, we’ve reached the part where I need to lie down.
CW: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, that’s my answer. And to spare the innocent or not so innocent, maybe I won’t give [00:35:00] too many details, but I know for my yeah- resignation that rings deeply true to me.
SH: For me, too. Part of the work of my later fifties and into my early sixties has been coming to grips with the fact that, you know, I’ve had so many mental health challenges in my lifetime, but I’m having to accept that my choices actually have played into that.
That if I had chosen different things, some of my mental health problems maybe wouldn’t have existed at all. And I come from a, you know, generations, many generations of mental illness in my family. And so I was, so when some of these problems started the easiest way for me to think about it was, well, you know- this was in the wiring, right? And I accepted that explanation. I got that explanation from many medical professionals. And I still think that there’s a measure of truth there. But, and I think I talked about this in the book, I’ve come to the realization that I brought gasoline to that fire when I made the life choices that I did.
And so when you said the word resignation, I thought to myself, when I heard that word come outta your mouth, I thought, and that’s where it happened. That’s where it happened. Oh, I hit resignation and there we were.
CP: Yeah. That resignation is where I think it can be so problematic for LDS women- I learned to equate motherhood with martyrdom.
There was no room to be an individual outside of it, outside of motherhood. And I, motherhood isn’t- it’s not an identity, it’s a relationship- same thing with being a wife. And if my only divine potential depends on the presence of someone else in my life and I have to self-sacrifice for that to happen- we land in that resignation so quickly and it’s painful. It’s very painful. It hurts our marriages, it hurts our relationship with our children. It hurts our homes, it hurts our spirituality. It’s deeply wounding for us to become invisible as we become older women as we age into what should be full individualism in our twenties and our thirties- we age into relationships and into motherhood and being wives.
And there goes our ability to exist. So something that we do see in the data is that women experience higher dissatisfaction within their marriages. For obviously a lot of the reasons that we’ve talked about is they’re not as happy, but we’ve also taken away their economic ability to support themselves.
So there’s even the resignation of, I’m unhappy in my marriage and there’s nothing I can do about it.
CW: Right, right.
CP: So overall, it’s just this feeling of stuckness that we begin to fill.
Lemme just briefly summarize kind of what I’ve just talked about with women losing their individuality by what we can call the Flamingo effect . Flamingos in nature as they mother their children, they lose their pink and they become really beige and lose their coloring and that is what we call what happens to women, especially like young mothers as they’re in the height of raising their children- they lose their color. They lose that zest for life. The problem is I see that in women in the church beyond motherhood is they’ve, we’ve just lost a lot of our zest, a lot of our excitement for life because of the invisible labor that we are contributing to a church that refuses to even recognize us as equitable partners worthy of recognition and authority.
CW: I never knew that about flamingos. That’s so sad.
CP: And I know, doesn’t it just make you wanna give a flamingo a hug? I know. Women report completing three times as much unpaid domestic work as their male peers.
CW: Yes.
CP: There’s an economic risk of being a mother- the pay gap, we all are aware of the pay gap between men and women, but what we aren’t aware of is that there is a pay gap between mothers and non mothers.
Within females is if when you become a mother, you lose five to 10% of your economic potential. So there’s even that’s happening is employers are seeing you as less with possibility to financially contribute because you are doing the domestic labor at home. And I’m gonna use an example of a friend here where she is the full-time provider.
Her husband is the stay at home dad, [00:40:00] and she has him listed as the emergency contact on all of her children’s school forms activities. Call dad without a doubt, every single time there’s an emergency, she gets called.
It’s super aggravating. Even within our society.
SH: Yeah.
CP: We tax the emotional labor of women just because we view them as the caretakers, even if they’re the providers. We still associate them with the ones being the caretakers. Okay. So what I noticed with my LDS couples again, is that to accurately be able to assess the domestic labor in their marriages, I had to kind of assess what’s going on with their religious beliefs and what’s happening within the emotional labor of their spiritual lives.
Because we, I’ll probably get in trouble, someone’s gonna get mad at me for saying this, but our marriage is, we’ve been told it’s between man, woman, and God. We are very codependent on the church as an institution, which is hugely problematic in itself. So in the LDS Temple narrative, Eve is the one who’s tasked with the emotional, spiritual, and existential consequences of eating up the fruit.
I remember the first time I’m sitting in the temple and you see Eve reckoning with what God has essentially instructed them to do. And you see, you know, you see her wrestling with do I or do I not? And then she makes a choice. She considers future children, humanity’s progress, the possibility of joy itself.
And then you see Adam go, but God, like the woman thou gavest met? And I just, in that moment, I just, everything in me, that inner knowing. That inner authority screamed. What is this? Why is this what we are modeling our marriages after? Kind of that phrase, what popped in mind was, she’s damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
SH:Right.
CW: Correct.
CP: Right. That’s kind of the double bind of which Eve shows up in this, in how we portray Adam and Eve. So she’s carrying the burden of envisioning not just her life, but the wellbeing of all creation. So there we see her emotional labor, right? We see that start to happen. So then we see her bearing the consequences of this foresight.
She accepts the pain, the struggle, the stigma, both in the scripture and in our tradition, in order for life to move forward. She is honored as Eve choosing wisely, and at the same time, Eve’s transgression. So she shows up in this double- this emotional double bind where a lot of us have faced these double binds.
I wanna ask if either of you can kind of point to a time or experiences where you’ve felt that double bind as a woman.
CW: Again, how much time do we have? Right. But also how had I never seen that before in the Adam and Eve story that even, and of course we realized the movie that we see in the temple is a dramatization of ancient scripture. But just the fact that is how the director of that movie chose to have Adam and Eve portray these commandments from God. Like how had I never seen that before, that Eve was carrying all the emotional labor of that. That’s a really good observation. I’m sure plenty of other people are like, duh, Cynthia.
But I don’t think I had really seen that before, that the way it’s even portrayed in the movie really aligns with our own LDS culture. But she’s in charge of all that.
CP: Right. It really sets up this pattern of Eve being responsible for…
CW: Yep.
CP: Essentially the wellbeing of humanity.
SH: Right. For the existence of humanity.
CP: Exactly. Exactly. Even though she was told not to do that. Even though- so it’s this pattern again of, and again, we see this like throughout all of Mormonism and it shows up in so many different ways. If I can elaborate, I was the caller who called in about providing meals with the compassionate service.
CW: Yes.
CP: Do you remember that?
CW: I do! And before you even tell the story, ‘cause I want you to, we have never received more feedback on a voicemail than that.
SH: That’s true.
CW: So go ahead and relay the voicemail for those who didn’t hear it and then make your amazing point.
CP: Okay. So I was a compassionate service leader for the ward, and with the background of social [00:45:00] work, I was like, okay, this is one that God got, right- like this was truly inspiration. I can organize the heck out getting people services. So I was really excited for this calling. And the first thing that happened was a woman had cancer and she had two sons like 16 and 19 years old and then her husband. The first request was that they have hot meals provided to them weekly. They wanted 10 hot meals a month. In my mind, I thought, great, let’s provide like Beehive Meals, which is like a crockpot service. They freeze the meal and deliver it to you. You just have to open it and put it in a crock pot.
And I was told, no, we want the women in the ward to be making homemade meals and delivering them themselves. So again, we also see that physical invisible labor of women. And then of course we have women telling the women that you’re not doing it right if you’re not home making it regardless of, you know, that’s a working mom or a mom with young children or an older woman who doesn’t have the resources to do that.
You have to do it this way for it to be considered well done. So I first got in trouble for that. Then the second thing I got in trouble for was I talked to the bishop, who is the president of the Priest quorum, and I asked him to talk with his youth counselors to provide a few of the meals for the priest-age son and the family.
CW: Love it.
CP: And I got in trouble for that because I was told that it is embarrassing for the men to be asked to provide meals that they don’t know how to make. And okay let’s reference this that I didn’t say you had to make the meal. I said provide a meal.
So yeah, go buy a $5 pizza and a Caesar salad kit. Like that’s a meal. There you go. So I was told that was embarrassing for the young men to be asked to do that. That wasn’t their responsibility as a quorum.
And then the third thing was, I always started with ministering brothers before I asked women.
That was my little act of micro feminism was- I’m gonna ask men in the war to provide ministering meals other than the women. And that one, again, I was contacted by wives who would say like, hey, my husband said that you need me to provide a meal. And I’d clarify and say no- I asked your husband to provide the meal. It can be whatever he wants, but it is his responsibility to provide a meal.
CW: Yes.
CP: So that calling lasted three months before I was released. That, because again, you see this assumption that women’s time is infinite, that they have all of the resources to do all of this labor behind the scenes to caretake for the members of the ward.
And again, this I think, is a pattern that goes back to Eve and how she was burdened with caretaking for humanity. And also for Adam, you kind of see, I know it’s a dramatization, but in my mind at the time, that was literal, that was exactly how it happened. You see Eve doing the emotional and relational labor of like kind of bringing Adam along.
Which I remember your very first episode of the church bag- and I think that episode like sums this up perfectly- who in the relationship is bringing the church bag to church? And who knows what snacks to put in that church bag so they don’t get on the kids’ clothes and they’re not loud or disruptive and they’re not gonna send them on a sugar crash.
And who set out the clothes and who’s providing sacrament activities that are quiet and meaningful for the kids so that someone’s getting something out of church? ‘Cause we know it’s not mom, right? That someone is getting something.
CW: It’s such a perfect illustration, you know, who, what was the name of that episode? Men Don’t Carry a Big Church Bag- Is that it, Susan?
SH: Yeah, something like that.
CW: It was episode five. And you know what is funny is before we hit record, I actually went and looked at our downloads and, you know, our very first season, our downloads are, you know, a few thousand because we were just barely getting our name out there.
But that’s our highest one. Men Don’t Carry a Giant Church Bag. Is our most popular episode for probably the first year or so.
SH: Interesting.
CW: And I didn’t even realize that till today, Susan. And also this makes complete sense.
SH: Right.
CW: Because of everything you’re saying right now, Christine.
CP: Right? So after eating the fruit Eve explains her choice to Adam and persuades him. She’s effectively doing the emotional, relational work of bringing him along. Which again, just mirrors the emotional labor of LDS women. We do this in our families, in our congregations. We [00:50:00] anticipate the needs. We’re smoothing relationships, explaining difficult choices. We’re holding others’ feelings while still managing our own.
And this, I think, is especially painful for us, LDS women, especially maybe within this group of women, of your audience, is how often have we gone to church hurting? Yeah. We’ve gone to church holding the pain of our children, of our queer children, of, you know, our hurting children or our own questions.
We’ve gone to church in the face of polygamy of you know, painful experiences of pornography and marriages of whatever. But we’ve gone to church in this place of bringing our families along because we have been told that it is our divine role, our divine duty, and it’s the relational, emotional labor that we do as women- that essential, that is essential, but invisible to our, to the church. And we do it all with no authority.
I’m gonna share an experience right here. I think that was very eye-opening to me- we were staying at my sister’s house. We were watching a few of her kids while she was out of town, and we had our own children with us. And my five-year-old was having an asthma attack. And for hours I held her body against mine sitting up in a chair trying to get her to just relax enough to breathe through it.
And I finally, it was probably three or four in the morning, I finally just said to my husband, give her a blessing. And he looked at me and said, well, I’d have to go get someone and I don’t know anyone else here. And in that moment. That punch to the gut of- I have no authority to put my own hands on my child’s head in this moment.
This labor is not enough to be able to then bless my own child? What, how much more invisible does that get? So again, that inner knowing in me was like no, this is not okay. This doesn’t feel okay.
And again, my husband’s wonderful. And he said, you know what? God knows that we have faith. It’s gonna be okay. Let’s do this. And he gave her a blessing. And there have been times where I have stepped into that own authority and have said, God, I know you’ve got me. I’ve got faith. I’m gonna do this.
CW: Yeah.
CP: And given a mother’s blessing.
CW: Beautiful.
CP: You know, whether that’s participating in my own children’s name and blessing I participate by holding my child while my husband gives a blessing.
And then I actually give them a mother’s blessing. I write it down and I give it to them at a later date. But there’s just these instances of like when a mother or a woman is doing the invisible labor and if she had the actual authority to do something about it.
It’s the equivalent of your, Susan, your son-in-law, coming and saying, well, how do I do the grocery list? It’s been done. It’s been done. Just give her the authority to do it.
SH: Right. Good point.
CP: So there’s Eve as the teacher and the comforter, the relational emotional labor that we do as women.
And then that just, it echoes in the Proclamation to the Family. It echoes in the 1947, talk- To the Mothers of Zion. Like there, there’s all of these patterns.
SH: 1987.
CP: Did I say 1947?
SH: I wish it were 1947.
CW: It was from the 1940s, let’s be honest.
CP: Oh my gosh, yes. 1987- To the Mothers of Zion, where again, your job, your emotional duty, your invisible labor of getting your children to heaven, but we’re not gonna give you any of the actual tools to be able to do so on your own free will.
So that’s kind of where I noticed Fair Play can come into practice with the church and how we view the church within our own marriages. And actually why, like the church just needs a Fair Play overall.
CW: Christine, as we wrap up this conversation, can we take this idea of Fair Play in the home and also to all our listeners, we’re gonna link to any resources that Christine has about this.
So check our show notes for that. But can we talk about what Fair Play could look like in the church?
CP: Yes. Okay. I love that because with every problem, we need to talk about the solutions. So again, talking about the invisible, the emotional, the second shift, the mental load of women within the [00:55:00] church.
We need to recognize it, validate it, and name it as labor to then be able to address it moving forward. So the first is by treating the work that is done as real, demanding and essential- women will then receive the recognition and relief of it being called labor and being acknowledged as such. With that comes the value of our time as well.
So, hey, I’ve been asked to make a meal. I’m going to purchase a meal and drop it off. Great. We love that. It doesn’t have to be homemade. So then labor sharing more equitably is recentering men back into their homes and into roles of nurturing teaching and relational care. Something that I see popping up all of the time is that men’s priesthood duty always takes them outside of the home.
It always takes them outside of the home, which then increases the amount of work that a woman is doing in home to subsidize that. Not only that, but you also see the work that she’s doing in relation to her children to almost like cover for the husband. Like, we need to support dad in his priesthood duties. We need to behave while daddy’s up on the stand. You see women taking on those responsibilities as well.
Something that I will say often to my male clients who have a hard time with kind of this concept is the priesthood doesn’t mean as much outside of the home as it does in your home- it would mean more if you just picked up a broom.
As you can imagine, that’s when we then have to lean into some therapy techniques to unpack that statement. And why I can see a visceral recoil come across men. So again, recentering men back into their homes and into roles of nurturing teaching in relational care. This is an area where the church can make a lot of improvements by encouraging the priesthood to start at home with equitable domestic care and equitable labor within their homes.
CW: I love how you’re reframing this about priesthood- that’s really, that could, I could see how that could blow a lot of your clients’ minds. Pick up the broom.
CP: Right. You going and providing a blessing to some ministering brother isn’t gonna mean as much to your family’s spiritual wellbeing as lightening the load of your partner and showing your children what it looks like to take care and minister to their mother.
So, and then another point of improvement that can be done is again, giving formal authority to women and work that they’re already doing, allowing women to bless their children with authority so that in the moment they don’t have to be like, oh my gosh, my child’s bleeding from their head- let me call a ministering brother.
Calling and setting their own presidencies, setting apart their own presidencies. Deciding budgetary needs. Giving Women Temple recommends- things that don’t have to go through men, spiritually- that can lighten the load of what women are doing behind the scenes.
And you guys have talked about this quite a bit in episodes as well- shifting the narrative is encouraging women’s wisdom, courage and ability to lead. Imagine how different it would be. I’ll use this as an example. A few years ago, my husband- his boss passed him up for an executive leadership position.
And the reason why his boss did that is because we had just had our second child and my husband was in an MBA program. His boss said, you just have way too much on your plate. You don’t need to add this other thing at work on top of it. And my husband was, you know, kind of complaining to me about how unfair it was.
He knew he could handle it. It was unfair for his boss to do this. And that’s exactly what it feels like in my mind to be a member of this church as a woman.
CW: Yep.
CP: I am passed over. I am not even invited to executive leadership meetings because someone has decided for me that’s too much for my spiritual abilities, that my job is elsewhere.
And until we can shift that narrative to women having enough authority just within their own lives as women in the work that they are doing, and it is as equally important, valuable, and contributes as much, if not more, to the wellbeing of the church as an organization, then nothing’s gonna progress and we’re gonna continue to bleed women.
CW: Nailed it.
SH: She said it. Wow.
CP: It’s a painful truth, but I can’t [01:00:00] help but think women are hurting, not because of the difficult experiences that we’ve had in church- women are hurting because men refuse to allow us to step into our divine potential. And that’s a painful truth. When you love this church, you love this community. You love what we believe God can intend us to believe. But when there’s a man in the way who says no, that’s really painful.
CW: Wow. Well, Christine, thank you so much for being here today for talking about this very important subject. And any last words?
CP: I don’t think so. Do you guys have any other questions?
SH: Yeah. Where were you when I was 30? Well, or 25 actually. We could back that up- 21. But where were you?
CP: I know. Well, it’s, I always giggle because I tell my mom, she’s a closeted feminist. And she does not love that. But there-
SH: She doesn’t think of herself that way.
CP: No. She does not think about herself that way.
And I remember actually growing up thinking that the F word was feminism.
CW: Interesting.
CP: That was as equivalent and terrible was being a feminist. But when I look at what could happen within this church as an organization, as a community, if we would stop limiting women to relational roles and allow them to be individuals, then I think we can see the exaltation of us as a people.
CW: Oof. That’s the perfect line to end on.
SH: Beautiful.
CW: Thank you, Christine.
SH: Thank you.
CP: You’re welcome.
Voicemail 1: Hi, this is Micah and I was just listening to your recent episode, and I agree that the church needs to be more flexible with both tithing and women’s lives. That’s been a very important part of my faith journey and that of my husband. So after graduate school, he developed health issues that were very disruptive to his life and his career.
And I went back to school only to have a bishop lecture me about how the stress that me being in school was causing my husband was the reason he had his health issues. And it ended up being very important that I went back to school because that was our most stable job for a long time, was mine. We lived on a one part, one part-time income for a little while, and during that time it was a choice between paying the bills or paying tithing.
And while the church offers food, I didn’t wanna beg for food every month. It made more sense for my family to pay our bills instead of tithing, and that’s what worked for us and me working and going to school was also what worked for us in spite of what I was being told at church.
Voicemail 2: Hi, my name is Aaron, first time caller, and I know this is a women’s space, but men like the show too. I am a CPA in the financial topics discussed on your recent episode featuring Natalie Brown really struck a chord with me and to do my part in combating the affordability crisis and faith crisis- I’d like to share two resources that debunked the idea that a righteous tithe should be based on gross income.
First, the current handbook tithing is the donation of one 10th of one’s income to God’s church. Interest is understood to mean income. All members who have income should pay tithing. Second, the still in effect, but lesser known 1970 first presidency letter for your guidance in this matter, please be advised that we have uniformly replied that the simplest statement we know of is the statement of the Lord himself.
Namely that the members of the church should pay one 10th of their interest annually, which is understood to mean income. No one is justified in making any other statement than this. We feel that every member of the church is entitled to make his own decision as to what he thinks he owes the Lord and to make payment accordingly.
Nowhere in these resources or other current guidance is a method specified or even suggested, and this isn’t a loop hole, it’s a longstanding position that culturally we’ve drifted away from the method by which one measures income and subsequently their tithing is a personal matter. And any method a member feels right with God about is on the table.
Surplus, net, gross, they all have strength and weaknesses, and I would encourage all to let go of the cultural expectation and utilize the framework for individual discernment and adaptation that is available to us right now.
CW: Can I hold on for I need to, my air conditioner is not on and I’m dripping, so gimme 10 seconds.
It’s in the hallway.
SH: While she does that, I’ll fan myself because I’m also dying.
CP: Guys, this is way harder to read notes and talk at the same time.
SH: Oh, it’s hard. That’s why we sometimes sound like we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. When we’re on this.
CP: Hat’s off to both of you.
CW: Don’t forget, we have a [01:05:00] website- at last she said it.org.
That’s where you can find all of our content. You can contact our team, send us a voicemail, find transcripts, buy our book, subscribe to our substack, or make a tax deductible donation. Paid subscribers get extra stuff including access to our community chats, and also Zoom events with us. Remember, your support keeps the podcast ad free.
Thanks for listening.