Battling a ‘Bounce-Head’ Week

This week I’ve been overwhelmed by ‘bounce head’. My term for something every working mother will understand: the feeling of holding more to-dos and conflicting emotions in your head at any one time than it’s possible to get down on a list; that sees your focus bounce back and forth constantly, within seconds from the most mundane lifemin to the most important family, friend or working-life priorities.
Sometimes known as ‘the mother’s mental load’, here’s mine this week in no particular order but as they bounce around my bounce head:
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A CEO Linkedin strategy; de-flea-ing an unhappy cat; 2 x two-page-long packing lists for school residential trips; replacing a rotten window frame that has just fallen off its hinges; inviting 20 Health-tech leaders to an event in Amsterdam; messaging eight mums re. dates for a birthday sleepover; two more chapters of the book draft I’ve promised a publisher by end of June; booking a summer holiday; (damn it, and camp bookings between those dates); a 5-page business award nomination; puppy training for a dog that won’t stop rolling in sh1t; getting the final slides in for a main-stage talk at London Tech Week; replacing cricket whites that now flap around the calves; refunding unhappy guests in a tired, requiring-update Airbnb; 378 pages of board-paper reading (and more importantly, thinking); four waiting loads of washing; trying to find a pitch template I saved 2 years ago to share with an impressive social entrepreneur I’ve just met; buying four birthday party gifts; follow ups to four exciting meetings; a marketing strategy for the local town market; walk the new puppy; and all this around the existential emotional worries: an act of utter carelessness that has hurt a much-loved friend; that one child has received next to no 1:1 attention of late or that another’s academic confidence is in decline - oh, and a blog to write. And it’s only Tuesday. Aaaaaaaand breathe.
Bounce head is not actually about the sheer volume of the to-do-list but the head f*ck that comes from moving from one highly emotive or important issue to five other mundane, urgent actions in the space of a single minute. And I bet many mums could meet or raise me on that list in any given week. Our heads are a constant melee of emotion, guilt, frustration, irritation, deadline pressure and exhaustion - we’re Neo in the Matrix, dodging bullets that just won’t stop coming.
We’re left with an inability to prioritise the deep work that is really important until we’ve cleared some of the mental load of the urgent - with much of the latter triggered by immediacy - a call from the school nurse; a customer complaint or the sports kit left in the footwell of the car that is required prior to the away-coach leaving at 1pm.
This is the reason that I lose patience with the ‘productivity’ industry (primarily promoted by childless men). Yes, it would be lovely to eat the frog, time-box, read more self-help books or just do the three important things that day. To choose not to worry about the washing piles or the kitchen table covered in a detritus of scrunched-up uniform in bags, dropped flower heads and sticky stains - but for most mums, the urgent can’t wait for the important. The sh1t hits the fan when it choses and it’s impossible to push the little irritations into the back brain to enable deep focus elsewhere. Decks must be cleared.
And much of this is female. It plays out along gendered-lines in so many family homes around me and all over the internet with men stepping over the optimistic pile on the bottom step or able to focus perfectly well on their laptop amidst the scrunched up uniform and on top of the sticky stain. (Here’s (www.tiktok.com...) Sally from Home & Away crying as she has this phenomenon explained to her by a psychologist, quoting how much more biologically wired women are to this, than men). Those women blessed with partners, could, and should delegate more. We know this… and here’s one (www.tiktok.com...) doing so, refusing to do her grown ass man’s laundry or book his hospital appointments, but I personally think she misses the point. We’re not trying to be martyrs. Many of us need to have a finger on the pulse of all the minutiae of detail within the walls of the family sanctuary. Indeed, we are the pulse of the family home and calendar. Many of us want to be.
Feminism has risen all our expectations and flung open doors of opportunity - especially for the professional class - but it hasn’t fundamentally rewired us. Is this just the price we pay for wanting it all, or am I just personally an idiot for taking on too much, being unable to delegate and martyring myself in the process? All I can think is that maybe it’s no wonder increasing number...