Holly Ahnen: Hey, I'm Holly, and this is The Invisible Load, a podcast for working moms carrying the mental and emotional labor no one sees, but everyone expects. Here we talk about motherhood, burnout, ambition, and the invisible work that never gets a PTO day. This is a space for honesty, validation, and figuring out how to stop feeling like you're failing when you're actually just overloaded. Thank you so much for being part of this conversation with me today. I know how full your life already is, and it means more than you know that you chose to be here. Remember, you're not broken, you're not behind, and you are not alone. I'll see you next time, right here on The Invisible Load. I want to start today with a word that I don't think gets treated with enough honesty on shows like this. Resentment. Not the dramatic explosive kind, not the kind that arrives as a scene. The quiet kind. The kind that builds so slowly you almost don't notice it's there until one day you're standing in a room you feel it. ⁓ and specific and completely real. If you're capable, tired, but still showing up, you're in the right place. And you realize it has been there for a long, long time. I know this feeling all too well. I know it in my body. I know the exact moment it arrives. I was editing episode 10 a couple weeks ago, sitting at my desk working, and I took a quick break and walked past the bedroom. My husband was lying on the bed on his phone, completely relaxed. Nothing done around the house. And I felt it. Instantly. That specific heat. And here's the thing, my rational brain kicked in almost immediately. He starts a new job this week. New colleagues, new clients, a whole new chapter. He deserves a day to rest before that. Nobody asked me to do the chores I did today. I chose to do them because I wanted them done. of those things were true at the same time. The resentment and the rationale that dissolved it. that used to take me much to get to. There was a time when the resentment didn't dissolve, when it accumulated quietly every ⁓ single day until it became something couldn't see past. This is The Invisible Load. I'm Holly. This is episode 11. And today, we are finally talking about resentment. What it actually is, where it actually comes from, and what to do with it when it shows up uninvited in the bedroom doorway on a Tuesday evening. Let me say something that I think most of us have never really been told directly. Resentment is not the problem. Resentment is a receipt. It is your nervous system handing you a printed record, specific, itemized, accurate, of everything that has cost you more than it should have. Every absorbed task, every unspoken need, every time you said yes when you needed to say no, every expectation that went unexpressed, every boundary that didn't get set in time. You know these line items. We have been looking at them together since episode one. The mental load that starts before your feet hit the floor. The tabs that never close. The help that created more work. The burnout that arrives slowly and then all at once. The experiment of letting go. The relationships that have shifted. The identity that got lost. The guilt of doing something right. The apology reflex. And the wall that went up. when the boundary conversation never happened. Every single episode of this show has had resentment hiding inside it somewhere. We couldn't name it until we'd laid all of the groundwork first. We had to feel the weight of the load before we could name what carrying it without acknowledgement actually produces and feels like. And what it produces is this. The total at the bottom of the page. That total is not ugly. That total is not petty. That total is not evidence that you are a bad partner, a bad mother, a bad person who just can't seem to let things go. It is honest accounting, and it has been sitting there waiting to be read. Here's the problem. Of all the emotions we've named on this show, The guilt, the exhaustion, the anxiety, the grief of losing ourselves. Resentment has the worst reputation because resentment sounds like anger. And anger for most of us was probably not allowed. Not in an explicit way. Like nobody sat you down and said, you may not be angry, but the message was clear. In the faces that shifted when you raised your voice, in the words, too much, too sensitive, too dramatic, that got attached to your emotional expressions. In the cultural script that said a good woman is patient, forgiving, warm, holds things together, not falls apart. Resentment violates all of that. Resentment keeps score. Resentment. is not forgiving. So we learned to translate it into something more acceptable. We called it tired. We called it stressed. We said, fine, actually, I'm fine. We told ourselves we were being dramatic. We said it wasn't that big a deal. And we swallowed it over and over and over. We absorbed it. smiled over the top and just kept going. But suppressed resentment doesn't disappear. It metabolizes. It becomes the wall from episode 10, the apology from episode nine, the guilt from episode eight, and the burnout we talked about in episode four. Every coping mechanism we've talked about on this show, every wall, every sorry, every reaching for more to carry, has swallowed resentment somewhere inside it. You were not broken for feeling it. You were just never taught that you were allowed to say so. A listener shared something with me recently that I have not been able to stop thinking about. And I'm going to share it here because I think many of you will recognize it. For several years, her family had someone who helped with the children, but probably more than a babysitter, because they helped with after-school care, they helped on the weekends, and they really were like part of the family. They helped around the household and just supported day-to-day life with the children. That included ⁓ laundry, helping with morning routine. keeping the kids' spaces tidy when they came over, For years, the nanny, she did this without any hesitation. She honestly did like almost 75 % of kids' laundry for years. ⁓ And what can I say? That does sound glorious, does it And then the nanny left. and almost overnight without a single conversation, without any transition plan. without this woman's partner seemingly registering that an entire category of weekly work had just kind of evaporated. and she found herself doing everything she had done before, plus everything the nanny had been doing. extra laundry, the dirty dishes sitting on the counter that didn't make it into the dishwasher, the extra help on a morning when someone was traveling or had an early meeting, the emotional attunement she provided for the kids at the end of the long day, and the mental load of knowing what they needed when they needed it, And now, ⁓ She was doing all of that on top of everything else. And her partner, well, he was on his phone, playing video games, taking a nap, sometimes even being helpful and playing with the kids. But in a way, he wasn't being the involved parent. He wasn't really touching the invisible work underneath at all. She said that during this period, in The months after the nanny left was the most resentful she had ever felt in her marriage And not coincidentally, it was also the period that brought her to her knees. The resentment and the breakdown were not separate events. They were the same event wearing a different face. Because here is what her partner didn't understand and what most partners do not understand if I'm being pretty open here. And not from cruelty, but from genuine invisibility. It's the work the nanny did, but wasn't really noticed. It was in nature, but having it happen daily, was almost like it was non-negotiable labor And ⁓ that stopped being outsourced, the actual tasks didn't disappear, Unfortunately, they just were transferred silently and automatically to the person who is the default parent and default household manager. And in most situations, that's us, women, the wives in the relationship, the default parents who hold it all together. And the resentment that that listener felt wasn't irrational and was honestly a catalyst for this episode and a deeper dive into resentment for myself. This change in her routine, it was the exact, precise response to carrying double without it being acknowledged. The weight of life had changed and the receipt was sitting right in front of her. And here's what I've come to understand about resentment in close relationships. And this is the part that took me quite a while to see clearly in my own marriage. We all carry internal metrics, invisible scorecards that we never write down, never share, and never agree on with our partners. But we are running it constantly in the background. How much has been done today and who did it? whether it was done to the standard that it required, whether the distribution was fair, and whether the other person is seeing what you see. And when we run that list and those metrics silently, and we don't ever hand them to our partners, we don't ever express them, we don't explain the rubric we've created, and instead we just watch and measure and feel the result of that measurement, which could be relief if the score feels balanced, if the contribution feels balanced, but it is also where the resentment builds. Now here's the part my career coach said to me that honestly stopped me completely. She asked, when you feel resentment watching your partner rest, do you believe deep down that they haven't done enough to deserve that rest? Do you compare them to your metrics? You know, the ones in your head? I didn't have an answer immediately, but I felt the truth of the question in my chest before I could form a thought about it. Yes, that was pretty much exactly what was happening. I was holding my husband to a standard of earned rest, a standard I had never shared with him that he had never agreed to. and feeling resentful when he didn't meet it was completely unfair. And then my coach said something I have been sitting with ever since. She said, Holly, you do not need to earn rest. None of us do. Rest is not a reward. It is a requirement. We cannot show up as the person we want to be, not for ourselves or for our families or for anyone else we serve in our life. if we never stop. Rest is not what you get when you've done enough. Rest is what makes it possible to do basically anything at all. I felt the truth of that statement immediately. And then I went home and it took me the better part of a week for it to actually land. to catch myself mid-metric and ask, wait, am I applying an earning standard to someone else that I would never want applied to me? And the answer, more often than I was comfortable with, was yes. In episode eight, we talked about the reward system that taught you as a child that busy equals worthy and rest equals suspect. that the version of you that was praised was the version that was producing. And I want to draw a direct line from that to this. When we were taught that we have to earn rest, we absorbed that invisible standard. And then quietly, automatically, without meaning to, we started applying it to the people closest to us. The resentment wasn't only about what they weren't doing, It was about a belief we'd never examined, that nobody deserves to rest until the work is done. And since the work is never really done, since the invisible load has no finish line, nobody ever fully deserves to rest, including myself. That belief is the thing underneath the receipt. And it's worth reading. Okay, so now we have this receipt in hand that I've been talking about. The list of items that have created the resentment total. And that resentment is real. It's valid. It's been building longer than you've probably admitted to yourself. So what are we gonna actually do with it? You're gonna read it before you react from it. Resentment that gets acted on without being understood becomes the wall we talked about last week. The cold silence, the pointed comment, the doing it yourself in a way that communicates everything you haven't said. before you react, or instead of reacting at all, get curious. What is this receipt actually for? What specific thing has been costing you that you haven't named out loud yet? Next, I want you to check your metrics. When the resentment arrives, ask yourself the question my career coach asked me. Do I believe this person hasn't done enough to deserve what they're doing right now by my internal standards? standards they never agreed to and probably don't even know exist. If the answer is yes, use that information. It's not about them. about the belief system you are running. Next, ⁓ the true thing, ⁓ the loaded thing. The loaded thing is the wall, the silence, the sigh, the eye roll, the doing it yourself to make a point. The true thing is harder. It sounds like... I've been carrying more than I've said and I need you to know what it costs me. It sounds like I think the distribution shifted and I don't think either of us fully registered it. It could also sound like I'm feeling really resentful right now and I don't want to be. And the only way I know how to move through this is to say so out loud. Those sentences are terrifying to say. They are the only ones that have any chance of changing something though. And finally, you need to extend the rest standard for yourself. This is the one most of us skip entirely. If rest doesn't require earning, if it is a requirement and not a reward, then that is true for me and you too. You also deserve to stop. Not when the load is done. Not when the list has all the check marks. Not when you've proven yourself enough. But now, ⁓ right now, ⁓ as you are, with the still in washing machine and the list getting longer, This is not laziness. This is the only version of you that is actually sustainable. Here's what I want you to take from today. The resentment you feel is not ugly. It is not petty. It is not evidence that you are too sensitive, too demanding, too much. It is a receipt, itemized, accurate, and completely earned. It is the total at the bottom of 10 episodes of Invisible Labor. absorbed without acknowledgement, carried without being named. And the fact that you feel it means your nervous system is doing exactly what it should. It is telling you that the distribution is off, that something has cost you more than it should, that something needs to be said out loud instead of swallowed again. Read that receipt. Check your metrics, say the true thing, and then this is the part I want you to actually do this week. Promise me you're gonna extend the rest standard in both directions. To the person you've been watching rest while you keep moving and to yourself because you cannot. or from a place that never gets refilled. You could not be present for the people you love if you were running on the accumulated debt of everything you never said you needed. You cannot be your best self, the version of you that can actually intentionally show up if rest is something that you believe you have to earn. You don't have to earn it. None of us do. That was the thing my career coach said that took a full week to land. And I want it to land for you too. Wherever you are, whatever you're carrying, however long the list is today. And you're allowed to stop. Not because you've done enough, but because you are enough. and people deserve rest. I say this to you with so much love as I am still struggling with this every single day. When I sit down on the couch to watch a movie with my boys and all I can think about is the dishes that need to be washed, the laundry that needs to be folded. I feel guilty still for sitting there. but my improvement is actually doing the sitting. For me, that was the first step. I'm still working on feeling guilty for not doing it, but I'm actually giving myself the opportunity to rest. I'm saying that can wait. It is not the end of the world if the house does not look unlived in. and it feels pretty darn good to put myself first, to allow myself to rest without earning it, according to my imaginary metrics and standards. Here's the thing about this work. You can get really, really good at reading that receipt. You can catch the resentment in the bedroom doorway and talk yourself through it in real time. You can know intellectually exactly what it costs you to continue to carry too much. But you'll still find yourself tempted to buy a ticket back. to Burnout Central. I have made some real progress. I know I have. But this week, I also volunteered. Unsolicited, nobody asked, I just raised my hand. Not for one, but for multiple committees at work. and not because someone needed me to though. because the overachiever in me saw an opening and walked straight through it before my rational brain even had a chance to say, wait, we talked about this. Is this the most efficient use of your time? And this is what we're going to talk about next week. Not because burnout was a topic I haven't covered. Episode four is still the most listened to episode of this show, which tells me everything about how many of us are living there. But burnout is not a destination you arrive at once and never return to it. It has this magnetic pull, a familiar gravity. And right now, I can feel it And if you can, I'll see you next week.