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SUMMARY
Suri shares a simple exercise that parents and caregivers can try, to lift their mood and feel validated, in moments when their work feels invisible and underappreciated.
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- Links, show notes & transcript: suristahel.com/38
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- 📷 Photo by CDC on Unsplash
- 🎧 Intro Music: “Stars” by Emily Stahel
- “Guitar, Acoustic, GMaj7 Chord.wav” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
SHOW NOTES
This episode was made using:
- Microphone – Audio-Technica ATR2100x*
- Mic arm set with pop filter – Renkforce or similar*
- Recording – Garage Band (free)
- Denoiser – Bertram Denoiser Classic (free or pay-what-you-want)
TRANSCRIPT – edited for clarity
Pro-bono coaching offer
Hi, moms and caregivers. If you’re listening to this in January 2025, I have some pro bono spaces available for a three-month coaching series with me on anything that you’re stuck on. So if you’re looking to change the status quo in your life, then check out my offer at suristahel.com/offerings.
Welcome to episode 38 of Doing Things On Purpose, the podcast that empowers women to take charge of their time, health, relationships and money by doing things on purpose. I’m your host, Suri Stahel, a self-love and self-empowerment coach for moms, caregivers and heart-centered rebels.
The struggle in owning our value, as parents and caregivers
This episode was just so hard to record.My perfectionism got the best of me, and I wanted to fit so many things in the first episode of the year, 2025. But in the end, after some rewrites, re-records, edits, all those things, I will keep it simple today and talk about the idea of making what’s invisible in our lives, the work that we do into something visible.
As I shared on Instagram, oftentimes as women, as moms, caregivers, we do a lot of giving. And sometimes we feel like we’re not doing enough.
Although we know at the end of the day, we are beat, we have to juggle so many things…
(By the way, if you are having to play different roles, like you have to be a certain persona at work, and then be a different persona at home, it takes so much energy to transition between those roles – and personally, for me as a mom, just having that slot where I’m doing my self care, that slot where you’re doing work for the home, that slot where you’re being with your family, and then all the mini jobs that you have to do – it’s like constantly taking you in and out of states of flow between those different tasks.)
So you lose a lot of energy in those in-between times as you recalibrate to serve in a different way.
So one of the things I’m passionate about, helping women or people who identify in caregiving roles in more traditionally female roles, you could be a man who is a primary caregiver in your family.
Sometimes when we hear the sentence that parenting is the most important job in the world, but then deep inside, we don’t feel justified to own that. And we don’t see society valuing it as they say they do. Social security doesn’t reward you for staying at home and caring for your family and creating a strong community and strong participants in the economy and society through your children and through your partner that you’re supporting from home.
And oftentimes we also feel that we want people to acknowledge all the things we do, but in our heads, these things are also quite woolly.
If my husband were to ask me, “What did you do today?” In his mind, or my assumption of his assumption, is that I spent the whole day just lazing around, slowly doing the dishes and sitting around, scrolling or whatever it is.
Which of course, part of it can be true sometimes. But if I didn’t take the time to reflect on the types of labor that I ‘did’ do during the day, I would be inclined to believe that I’m lazy and useless and not enough as well. And by the way, this is again, just a story that I could be telling myself and believing about myself.
So what I really hope to do in this episode is to help caregivers and moms to recognize all of the work that they do and all of the things that fill up the hours of your day, both expectedly and often unexpectedly.
Actually, just thinking back to the past week, when I’ve been judging myself for not recording and publishing my podcast episode as I intended to, I forgot that last week was the first week back to school after the holidays. I forgot that last week, both of our male cats got castrated.
And then, I was the one who was there to nurse them after my husband brought them back from the vet, and of course, had to go back to work and worrying about them for the next few days. And then, it was also the week of my birthday where we had people over. And of course, I was busy cleaning the house and making it look nice.
And then also this week, one of the cats peed on the sofa after being castrated, right? I mean, they’re healing well, but it happened. And just a few weeks ago, I think one of them peed on one of the pillows.
And who’s the one that has to wash these things, right? I mean, it’s always happening when it’s bedtime, the kids have to go to bed or they have to go to school. And I have to clean it up, handle it.
And that takes time away from other things I had planned to do. And I am sure this happens to a lot of caregivers, because we deal with living things that don’t always follow a set schedule. So, that’s the power of reflection, that we see the reality, instead of believing in the shortcut version of the story, right?
That we just didn’t manage to do as much as we wanted to in the time that we had set for ourselves. So, now let’s get to the exercise that I’m inviting all of us to do together, to get a clearer picture of all the things that’s going on in our lives.
An exercise to make your invisible work, visible
So, the idea of this little exercise actually came from a Facebook group called Bridging the Gap, which is a peer support group focused on challenging sexism and systemic inequalities within households, workplaces and society.
So, I was curious about this topic and joined the group, and have been participating and mostly observing to see what kinds of conversations are people having to try and process and solve this huge societal problem.
And we’re not going to go into that in today’s episode, but there was an idea from a woman in there who was sharing that she’s tired of doing all the work in the home, and how everybody else in her family didn’t seem to be aware of all the work that needs to be done. I mean, this is a really common problem, right?
So the intention of the exercise was to train the family members to notice more things. And so the game was that the mom would write down a list of things that she noticed in the day that needed to get done. And then at the end of the day, her kids and partner can guess all of the things that she had written in her list.
So the things that they noticed by themselves during the day. And so they would compare what the kids and the partner noticed against the main caregivers list. And I thought it was a brilliant idea to try and equalize the dissemination of responsibility for all members of the family in that way through simple heightened awareness.
But at the same time, I thought that there was a problem, which was that this exercise requires the buy-in of the children and the partner.
A simple exercise with colored paper
So, another way you can use this exercise is to, yes, take notice of all the things that you do. And what I have done is to write them down on preferably little squares of colored paper.
So, if you have colored paper lying around, just cut them up into tiny squares, enough for you to write down one task on them.
I’ve got one in pink, green, yellow and blue. And these different colors stand for different areas of life where you have to do stuff:
- For instance, in my case, the pink stands for chores and things I have to do or we have to do around the home.
- The yellow stands for things we do for the family or things we do with our free time together. So, that could be playing board games on Saturdays or watching movies or going to the museum or going on holidays, going swimming, trips to the zoo.
- And then the green stands for hobbies that each of us spend our time and money on and also things that are a part of our own personal self-care.
- And lastly, the blue stands for things we have to do for work. So, for your kids, it would be school, their homework. For your partner, it could be going to the office. If you are the main caregiver, you might have your part-time work. And for me as an entrepreneur, it could be podcasting, marketing, administration, seeing clients in session, sales calls and investing time in my own personal growth and learning.
But I think a lot of the invisible work that we do as women and caregivers falls in the pink or the chore section as well as the family section, which is for me, the yellow.
So I’ve taken the time to open up my pieces of pink paper just to see what’s in here. And here are some things that I’ve written down:
- Setting the table
- Cook meals
- Prepare snacks for the kids
- Sew clothes that have holes in them
- Shop for new clothes and shoes when the kids outgrow them
- Do the cat litter
- Throw the trash
- Do the groceries
- Meal planning
- Clean the toilet
- Sweep the balcony
- Water the plants
- Fold clothes
- Wash laundry
- Iron clothes
- Vacuum
- Recycle the cardboard
- Clear up toys
- Clear the living room
- Make the beds
- Go to the recycling center for aluminum glass and pet bottles.
- Be the calming energy who gives loving instructions and guidance. Basically, giving people instructions about what they can do to help or what’s the next thing to do when everybody’s in a rush or everybody’s angry and have lost their heads.
- Feed the cats
So that’s a lot of stuff. And then, you fold up all your little pieces of paper, and then you put them in a transparent jar, like a jam jar. So you can see that your life is likely fuller and richer than you thought at first.
Because we can think that, oh, nothing’s going on with my life. I have no direction, not doing anything right. I’m not progressing fast enough.
And once you write down all the things that you are doing or intentionally remembering to do, maybe not all the time, right? Maybe you are not able to travel as often as you like, or read to your kids as regularly as you would like. But these are still intentions that you try to maintain in your life.
And then, you think about all the hobbies that you do make time for. I think just looking at that jar, that full, possibly almost overflowing jar, is really powerful for yourself to acknowledge all of the things that you already do, all of those invisible things that aren’t written anywhere – nobody’s paying you for them – right beside all of the things that you do get paid for.
And so I really hope you’ll try out this exercise.
I think it’s much more interesting than journaling about all the things you do, because also, you know, my kids sometimes get interested in opening one of these pieces of papers and see, oh yeah, we do do this for our family. You know, oh yeah, I do have this activity as my hobby.
It’s a beautiful validation and reminder of all the things that fit in your life.
Gratitude comes through clearly witnessing your life as it is
And I suppose it makes you feel quite rich in a way. And then it becomes natural to feel gratitude for all the things that are going well, all the things that we have the privilege to nurture and grow, and all of the things that we get to enjoy in our life as it is. It takes effort.
It takes work.
Next Steps
That is where I will end this podcast today. The next steps, of course, is about what everybody’s busy doing, which is maybe goal setting and planning your year, planning your intentions, deciding what you’re focusing on this year, and all of those things will come.
They will come once you acknowledge where you are right now first. But I hope for now, this exercise of making what’s invisible in your life visible, and thus, acknowledgeable, and something you can be proud of has helped you. I hope you will try it out, and of course, comment or write to me at suri@suristahel.com.
And if you want to see how this exercise looks like, you can go to my Instagram account @suristahel, or go to this episode page at suristahel.com/38.
Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.
Please share it with a friend, or click like, subscribe, or leave a review on iTunes to help support this podcast. I wish you a beautiful rest of the week, and I’ll catch you again next time.