This Is The Story
Everything is copy, including the mental load...
In May, I gave a guest lecture at the Creative Writing course which my friend teaches at Copenhagen University. Loosely speaking, it was a dummy’s version of How I Published An Actual Book, which is mostly what people on creative writing courses are interested in learning. I told them that this lecture, the one I was giving at that moment, was the only lecture I had ever attended in creative writing. I then proceeded to share a series of photographs and quotes which somewhat captured the last six or so years of book writing life and generally made me look unhinged. I have no idea if I was what they were expecting, but they were a lovely bunch and seemed to be taking notes.
After I’d quietly crushed their spirits by telling them there’s no such thing as an original idea (and wishing now I’d had this perfect Audre Lorde quote to hand: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”), I reminded them of the Nora Ephron line (technically her mother’s) that “everything is copy”. This has become a bit of a running joke between my friends and I who frequently see our conversations replayed and restyled in one of my essays a week or so after we’ve shared a bottle of wine. It’s not a hatchet job, to be clear — I’m not libelling people for offering up their vulnerabilities — but we cover such fertile ground that I am frequently inspired to run to my keyboard as the ideas move through my heart to my head and my fingers.
Sometimes I feel I could write a hundred books taken from events in a single week of my life. Not because anything significant happened, I hasten to add. More the opposite, that so much of daily life, the constant demands of caregiving and working and homemaking, make me think long and hard about what’s underneath it all.
At Casa McCrory, we’ve just concluded three weeks of staycation with the kids, such is the time-honoured Danish summer holiday season. Some years we go to another part of Denmark or the UK, and some years we just white-knuckle it in our own home and hope for the best. It is customary for me to have a minor menty b on the second Monday of this three week stretch in July, when the prospect of another two weeks of constant parenting and so very little alone time looms large.
It’s roughly at this time that I give profound thanks to the teachers and nursery workers who take care of my children during the rest of the year, and reflect on the systems, relationships, and roles which underpin our experience of raising two kids at home. I wrote, recently, that men get to build houses whilst women make homes, which bears out in the unequal division of the cognitive load of homemaking. But women are so often architects too, just of a different nature, given how frequently we build the systems and frameworks that maintain a household through any given 24 hours.
These systems do not take a break when the holidays come. For many women, the holidays signal a significant uplift in practical and cognitive labour, including and especially if those women are mothers and also need to work at the same time.
Not all, no, but certainly many men are beneficiaries of living in family households where a woman has designed and implemented every household and childcare system, from the way that meals are made and shared, to how children are dressed, cleaned, soothed and entertained, and the way bills, errands, activities and mess is handled. The mothers I know are running multiple timelines in their head on any given day which have short, medium and long-term deadlines; some timelines run forwards in minutes, hours, days and weeks, and some count backwards from bedtime, dinner time, nap time. The mothers I know are constantly calibrating the needs of the people in the house against these running clocks, anticipating a series of micro and macro consequences that shift each minute as the reality of getting multiple people fed, dressed and packed for a day out of the home sets in.
The mothers I know also hold a vast and constantly updated inventory of domestic and individual items in their minds, with mental tabs on locations, dependencies, sizes, expiration dates and accessibility, from raincoats to beach gear to packed lunches to membership cards to snack cheeses to suncream and on and on and on. Each day they drop these items into mental buckets, so they can make rapid decisions about what to do based on the changing weather, new information, or the sudden shift in someone’s mood. Each day may begin with a rough outline, meals and naps are penciled in, but everything can turn on a dime and these mothers will do everything they can to make sure, come the end of the day, that everyone is safe and asleep in their own bed, with a full tummy and a sound heart.
It is a kind of life support. And whilst no one would say outright that this particular system of life support is a deciding factor between life or death, as it may be in an Intensive Care Unit, the mother’s nervous system can no longer tell the difference.
Many of the mothers I know keep all these life support systems running so that holiday memories can be made. In addition to triaging the majority of household decisions and priorities, they become Chief Holiday Time Management Officer, Social Secretary, and Chief Holiday Meal Maker. These roles sound alluringly executive, like they come with social recognition and industry awards, but in truth they function like the pot washer in a Michelin starred restaurant. Essential but unacknowledged, quietly scrubbing the grease off plates whilst everyone else is having a wild time out front. Every mother I know has joked that ‘Managing a Family — Holiday Airbnb Edition’ is just washing more pots with a different view. Layer in work, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a breakdown.
Does this sound familiar? Even with a committed, loving and hands-on male partner and co-parent under the same roof (hello James!), even in sunny egalitarian Scandinavia, there is still a gulf in experiences between most mothers and fathers when it comes to the mental domestic load. I’m not just speculating, either; the research backs it up.
As my husband and I sorted through which photos to print out for a Summer 2026 album, we both remarked on what a lovely time our kids must have had, based on the evidence in front of us. But it made me think about what our children — still so young, at just six and two — will remember of these holidays. Mostly this year’s summer break was a collection of small things: eating croissants at the beach before 8am, ice creams most days, trips to the Zoo and the Experimentarium, hotdogs in the garden. I hope they’ll remember these small joys, the kind that can be easily held in the body, as sure as a heartbeat. But I worry that my contribution won’t always be understood, because you can’t photograph the mental gymnastics of planning a new nap location when you’re out of the house, or the certainty that everything we need for a full day out is packed in the rucksack. No one says ‘remember how Mum meal planned and then ordered our weekly groceries online’ with misty eyes, or understands that the fun and relaxed afternoon with friends in the garden only happened because Mum coordinated with a bunch of other Mums for several hours over text and did an additional food shop.
I worry that my children will remember me being tired and crabby, snapping at the end of a long day because I was at my limit. I worry they’ll remember me saying no despite the fact I said yes far more often, because the no came at the end of a rapid evaluation of what it would cost us all, emotionally, financially, practically, even though they wanted it so very much. I worry that if I’d let the foundations slip, the house would have come tumbling down.
As any good architect will know, the structure of a place should become secondary to how you feel when you’re in it. The foundations and rafters, windows and doors will move to the background so that you, the householder, can get on with the simple act of living there, untroubled. It’s a gift, is it not? To create this for the people you love. It’s a burden, too.
But as I reminded those students, everything is copy. It’s not about getting in the photo, though that’s important too and we’re better at making sure it happens in our family after I made a stink about it. No, this is about being in the story. When I sit down to write about any number of small things that happen in my utterly mundane week, or the stories I trade with friends over wine that make it into my weekly essays here, I’m not just writing about my life — I’m writing myself into my life. I’m writing about the things so many mothers like me do (and many fathers too, yes, I know) which are not always seen or understood or appreciated. The things that keep life at home afloat — including and especially when the holidays roll around.
This but it’s 9 weeks. I call it same sh*t different place.
Oof this really resonated Katie! From a fellow Chief Holiday Time Management Officer, Social Secretary, and Chief Holiday Meal Maker over in Amsterdam, I felt everything you said here! Thank you for sharing xx