Psychiatrist and author, Saumya Dave, was two months postpartum when a fellow mom told her, “You know, I have this fantasy of just being hospitalized so I can be taken care of. I’m so tired. I’m so burnt out. And I wish I could just get mildly injured so that I would have to stay in bed and just watch Law & Order SVU on repeat.”
It turns out that this hospitalization fantasy isn’t entirely uncommon among mothers. The sentiments are repeatedly shared in private conversations, group text threads and across social media — not because moms are hoping to be grievously injured or unwell, but because meaningful support and rest has become so inaccessible to them, that the only way they can even imagine getting it is through an emergency.
A 2022 analysis of American Time Use data confirms that between the ages of 35 and 44 women have 23% less free time than men their age. Over the course of a year, this leisure gap adds up to nearly two months of added vacation days for men, who also enjoy the benefits of parenthood and the majority of professional power and rewards.
All the while, women are left increasingly depleted — of time, money, energy and wellbeing — while being repeatedly reminded that they “can’t have it all.” Instead of alarm, this totally unsustainable reality is met with casual dismissal, or worse, calls for women to just be grateful or even more self-sacrificial. It’s no wonder an actual emergency can feel like the only way out.
In recent years, as conversations about the unsustainability of household inequality and modern motherhood (in a country where childcare costs more than a college education) have become more widespread, there has also been growing pushback against the women who dare to call it out: It’s just that women’s standards are too high. Their parenting is too intensive. Their expectations are too great.
As a toddler mom also exhausted by the demands of parenting (even with the privilege of being able to afford daycare), I find myself repeatedly wondering how I could make parenting less intense. But every time, I come up empty handed. My exhaustion isn’t the result of insisting my two year old learn age appropriate math concepts or Mandarin or whatever other imagined excesses pundits may be suggesting, it’s driven by the fact that you cannot just opt out of watching or feeding or responding to a toddler because it is literally life-threatening to do so. We live in a culture more willing to dismiss mothers’ desperate pleas for help (while gaslighting them with claims that their exhaustion and guilt is a problem of their own making), than to give mothers the support they actually need in managing this essential labor.
And the ubiquity of the hospitalization fantasy tells us that mothers know this. They know that asking, pleading and begging doesn’t change anything. And they know that ‘letting go’ isn’t actually viable when you can’t count on anyone else to step up when you do.
For more on all of this, tune into my full conversation with psychiatrist and author of The Guilt Pill, Saumya Dave, or read through some of the highlights of our conversation below (edited for clarity):
Saumya: A few months before I gave birth for the first time, multiple friends of mine told me, “You’re going to feel guilt. It’s inevitable.” And I remember telling them, “You’re preparing me for it. So are there things I can do? I don’t know, journaling, reading, just doing any kind of exercises.” And they said, “No, it’s just going to come. It’s going to happen.”
So then a couple of months later when I was two months postpartum, I was talking to a friend of mine who had a one-year-old at the time, and she said, “You know, I have this fantasy of just being hospitalized so I can be taken care of. I’m so tired. I’m so burnt out. And I wish I could just get mildly injured so that I would have to stay in bed and just watch Law & Order SVU on repeat.”
And I said to her, “Why don’t you just do that for yourself?” And she said, “I would feel way too guilty.” And literally the next day, another friend told me the same thing. She said, “I wish I could go away. I wish I could be in a bed. I wish nobody needed me. Of course, I can’t do that, but that’s where my brain goes for the fantasy.”
And so in my day job, I’m a psychiatrist and I began wondering: What would it be like if I could write a prescription for women to be able to turn off their guilt for four to six hours at a time with the help of a pill? And what would they do? Who would they say no to? What ideas that have been weighing them down would they let go of? And so that really created the start of the journey for the book.
I actually read 30 nonfiction books as research, because in psychiatry residency, one thing that there’s just not enough time and space to go into are the different emotions that come up in life transitions — postpartum being one of them. But of course, all of us go through transitions of some kind. And those transitions can bring up a lot of things about ourselves — about our future, about our regrets, a lot of different things.
And so what I found in my research about guilt is that it’s not all bad. We actually feel things for a reason. And they can also just exist. And sometimes guilt can be a reminder of what we really value, what our internal core values are. But sometimes guilt can be emotional muscle memory. It might be messaging that we’ve internalized, either from the patriarchy or from the way we were parented or from societal expectations.
And so what I really hoped for throughout the book was for Maya (the main character) to go on this journey with her guilt to understand it and to look at it with curiosity and compassion and to see that not all guilt just means she’s doing something wrong and something has to change. It can actually represent many, many different things.
Stefanie: I think Maya says it in the book: Don’t we feel guilt for a reason? What is that reason?
Saumya: So I think it depends on the situation. Sometimes it is because we are acting out of alignment with our values. Or it really might be an emotional muscle memory. So if, for example, in Maya’s case, her mom has truly grown up herself believing that if you were not working all the time, if you were not tired, you were doing something wrong — rest comes with guilt. So it really depends on the situation. But I think getting curious about it, whether it’s through fiction or in our own lives, I think can be a very helpful exercise.
And for Maya, one thing I really wanted was for her to be very online as a new mom, because I think so many of us are online. Whether we’re parents or not, we’re getting information through our screens about how life should look and what we should and should not be doing, how we should be spending our time. What does healthy look like? What does accomplished look like? And I think those images can also create guilt as well.
Stefanie: You also mentioned like there’s this socially constructed element of it. And I think that’s what’s hard is to parse out: What part of this is serving me and really telling me something about my values and what part of this is really just being driven by a social expectation that isn’t serving me?
Saumya: Totally. And I think they can get so muddled sometimes, too. And oftentimes, so many of us are on autopilot. We’re just trying to get through the day. That’s what I also realized, is that so many people are overwhelmed and they’re really just trying to make it through the day, the week, the year, especially when they feel like they’re in survival mode. So to be able to take that pause and to slow down and to ask those questions can also feel like a process and something that maybe can be hard to do.
Stefanie: You were working on writing this novel while you were pregnant, yes?
Saumya: Yes, when I was postpartum the first time and then pregnant the second time, so it was all sorts of fun. And thinking about all of the different things about life that impact parenting, all the way down to which — I mentioned this in the book, when Maya’s going through New York City with her big stroller, she notices how many doors she has to open while pushing it — so even infrastructure. And I think just going through that in real time made me really want to explore fiction.
And then, of course, the other element of things being online. I think we’re getting more parenting online than we ever have. And to see how that has impacted so many people around me in their parenting journeys has just been very, very interesting.
When I was pregnant the first time, before I knew I was going to write about motherhood, I was in my third trimester and I was watching the Today Show and they had a founder come on, a very known founder. And the founder was the first pregnant founder to be on the cover of a business magazine. And I remembered being so in awe because we were around the same places in our pregnancy. So seeing this person who created a company and then posing on a magazine, I just was in awe and everybody was in awe. Everybody was celebrating.
Six months later, in summer of 2020, all of these takedowns began being published and all of these other stories came out. And so I started doing more research into founders and just what it takes to build something from nothing, how hard it is. And I started learning about how little money women get when they’re the founders versus men — even when the idea is brilliant, even when they are beyond capable of carrying it through, how they’re doubted, everything from how they are often judged on past performance while men get based on future potential.
So when I began just learning about all of these different dynamics that come in, and the intersection of that with ambition and potential and who gets given opportunities, who doesn’t, I thought, I have to create a founder. I have to create someone who who kind of has a vision and she knows she has to follow it, but the system is not set up to support her.
And she, instead of looking at the system and holding it accountable, she’s been taught to blame herself over and over again. She’s a millennial. A high functioning millennial. And so she thinks, let me try harder, let me work harder, let me try to convince people. And that’s also part of what informs her journey — as a parent and definitely at work.
Stefanie: Since your book came out, the online space (and the expectations) have only become more and more fertile and amplified. What do you make of the way some of these dynamics you’re writing about are showing up in the culture now?
Saumya: There really is a lack of social support. We are wired to try to find it, especially when we’re stressed and when we feel isolated and we feel overwhelmed. And I think a lot of people then look to the thing they’re carrying with them, their phone, the thing that’s accessible if they’re up in the middle of the night and they can’t go back to bed. So they’re there. And I’ve even seen different communities saying, “Oh, you don’t have the village. We can be your village.” And I think that really attracts people. And I get it. Because I think if we’re too overwhelmed to have social supports that are in person, that are already there for us, it can feel very overwhelming to go out and try to build that for ourselves.
But I think the greater the lack of social support is, the more spaces online feel appealing. And I understand. But there’s also research that shows that when we substitute online interactions for in-person ones, we are less fulfilled. We are less happy. And so that substitution has been happening for very understandable reasons, but people are actually putting online interactions over in-person ones. And then we see people feeling less connected and more lonely.
Being online can give us access to people we may not have had that access too, so it’s not all bad. It’s more that when it comes in the way of the other things that have been proven to make us feel better and to help us feel more connected.
And then there’s those aspirational images that can make us feel less. To take in this many curated pictures in a day, we just weren’t meant to.
For more from Saumya Dave you can follow her on Instagram here and grab her book, “The Guilt Pill.”
And if you enjoyed our conversation here, you’ll love chapter 10 of my new book The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up — and Then Pushes Them Down, titled “Who Gets To “Have It All”?: The Real Work-Life Balance Lie,” that digs deep into the data behind the free-time gender gap and the other shocking myths and misconceptions behind work-life balance.
With less than one month until launch, here are some other ways you can support:
Preorder your copy of The Ambition Penalty wherever you get your books (note: audiobook and ebooks are also available for preorder, and if you’re in the UK, you can order through my UK publishers here. I also think Google Books allows international purchases).
If you have a Goodreads account, add The Ambition Penalty to your “want to read” list (bonus points if you add hardcover and kindle editions)
If you use Libby, add The Ambition Penalty to your “notify me” list
Request The Ambition Penalty at your local library
If you use NetGalley, request The Ambition Penalty and leave a great review if you love it
If you host a conference, book club, employee resource group or any other community that would benefit from this discussion, reply to this email for more information on bulk order discounts and speaking engagements
Share, share, share (this newsletter, the book, my instagram) to keep this conversation going
Finally, if you’re in New York City SAVE THE DATE for May 21st. I’ll be hosting The Ambition Penalty book launch at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble at 7pm in conversation with fellow authors Emma Pattee, Kimberly Brown, Amanda Holden and more. Tickets are free but reservations are required and books will be available for purchase. RSVP here. Hope to see you there!
Available for iOS and Android
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.