Last Tuesday, around 9:15 p.m., Camille and I got into a fight about trash bags. Not whether someone had taken the trash out — that would have been straightforward. It was about the fact that I hadn’t noticed we were almost out of trash bags, hadn’t added them to the grocery list, and hadn’t registered that the reason there were trash bags in the house at all was because Camille had been tracking, buying, and restocking them for years. Without ever once mentioning it.
We stood in the kitchen, both of us too tired to raise our voices but too frustrated to let it go. Elise had been asleep for an hour. Julien had woken up twice already. And we were arguing about trash bags.
Except it wasn’t about trash bags. It was about everything the trash bags represented.
The Shift That No One Warns You About
When Elise was born four years ago, Camille and I had what I thought was a solid, equitable relationship. We split cooking. We both cleaned. We talked about our feelings like two people who’d read enough to know they should. And then a baby arrived, and within weeks, something started to fracture — not dramatically, not with door-slamming or silence, but with a slow accumulation of tension that neither of us could name.
Here’s what I’ve learned since: the reason couples fight more after becoming parents isn’t because the relationship deteriorates. It’s because parenthood generates an enormous volume of invisible work — the planning, anticipating, remembering, monitoring, deciding — and that work lands unevenly. It always did, maybe. But before kids, the imbalance was small enough to absorb. After kids, it becomes the entire architecture of daily life, and it can’t stay hidden anymore.
This isn’t just my experience. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has shown that relationship satisfaction declines for the majority of couples after the transition to parenthood — and that the decline is most pronounced when partners perceive an unfair division of labor. Not just physical labor. The cognitive kind. The kind that doesn’t look like anything from the outside.
What “Invisible Labor” Actually Means at 6 a.m.
I want to get specific here because I think the phrase “invisible labor” has become so common that people nod at it without feeling it.
Invisible labor is knowing that Julien’s well-child visit is next Thursday and that the insurance card is in the second drawer and that the pediatrician moved to a new office and that parking there is terrible so you need to leave ten minutes earlier. It’s knowing Elise’s preschool has a pajama day on Friday and that her favorite pajamas are in the dryer and that the dryer cycle ended forty minutes ago.
It’s carrying the full mental map of your household — not just executing tasks, but noticing that tasks exist in the first place.
For the first year of Elise’s life, Camille held almost all of this. Not because I refused to help, but because I genuinely did not see it. I changed diapers, I did bath time, I thought I was pulling my weight. And I was — on the tasks that were visible. The invisible infrastructure? That was all her.
Why Parenthood Makes the Invisible Visible
Before kids, the cognitive load of running a household is real but manageable. Two adults need groceries, clean clothes, a reasonably functional living space. The mental overhead is there, but the stakes are low. Nobody ends up in the ER because you forgot to buy more dish soap.
Kids change the math entirely. Suddenly the household has a small human — or two — who need to be fed specific things at specific times, whose sleep schedules dictate the shape of every evening, whose doctors and teachers and developmental needs require tracking, whose emotional regulation depends partly on yours. The cognitive load doesn’t just increase. It explodes.
And when it explodes, the pre-existing imbalance — the one that was always there but felt minor — becomes undeniable. A 2020 study in Sex Roles found that mothers consistently perform more cognitive household labor than fathers, and that this disparity is strongly associated with relationship conflict and reduced well-being. The researchers distinguished between physical tasks and the mental work of planning and organizing — and found it was the mental work gap that predicted the most friction.
Sound familiar?
The Fight Isn’t Really About the Thing
When Camille and I argue — about trash bags, about who scheduled the vet appointment for the dog, about why I didn’t know Elise’s library book was due — the surface-level issue is almost irrelevant. What’s underneath is a question: Do you see what I’m carrying?
That question is the heartbeat of most post-baby conflict. It’s not about love getting weaker. It’s about one partner reaching a threshold where the weight of unseen work becomes physically and emotionally impossible to keep absorbing in silence. The fights are the invisible labor becoming visible — often for the first time.
The Gottman Institute’s research on the transition to parenthood found that 67% of couples experience a significant drop in relationship satisfaction in the first three years after a baby’s birth. But — and this is the part that matters — the couples who didn’t experience that drop shared a specific trait: the non-birthing partner was deeply involved in the baby’s life and, critically, in the unseen logistics of running the household. Not just helping when asked. Knowing what needed to happen without being told.
What Changed for Us
I’m not going to pretend we solved this overnight. We didn’t. But I can tell you what started to shift things.
We Named the Invisible Work — Out Loud, on Paper
One Sunday morning, while Julien napped and Elise watched something on the tablet, Camille and I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down every recurring task involved in running our household and caring for two kids. Not just chores. Everything. Who tracks clothing sizes. Who notices when we’re low on diapers. Who remembers which parent is picking up from preschool on which day. Who knows the name of Elise’s teacher’s aide.
The list was staggering. And seeing Camille’s name next to about 70% of the cognitive tasks — while mine dominated the physical, visible ones — was the most clarifying moment of our partnership since Elise was born.
We Stopped Using “Just Tell Me What to Do”
I used to say this. I thought it was helpful. It isn’t. “Just tell me what to do” is itself a form of invisible labor — it makes your partner the manager and you the employee waiting for instructions. It offloads the noticing and planning while taking credit for the doing.
Instead, I started owning entire domains. Not “I’ll help with meals” — I own meal planning on Sunday mornings. I know what’s in the fridge. I know what Elise won’t eat this week. I make the list. I buy the groceries. The whole cycle, not just the visible end of it.
We Built a Weekly Check-In
Every Sunday night, after the kids are down, Camille and I spend fifteen minutes going through the week ahead. Who has what. What’s coming. Where we need backup. This isn’t a romantic ritual — some weeks it feels more like a logistics briefing. But it has done more for our relationship than any date night, because it distributes the anticipation, not just the execution.
Research in the Journal of Family Issues supports this: couples who engage in regular, structured communication about household responsibilities report higher satisfaction and lower conflict — particularly when those conversations address cognitive labor explicitly, not just task division.
We Accepted That Fairness Is a Moving Target
Some weeks, Camille carries more. When Julien was up every two hours for a stretch last month, I took over almost everything else so she could function. When I had a deadline recently, she covered bedtime solo for three nights. Fairness doesn’t mean a perfect 50/50 split on any given Tuesday. It means both people are aware of the full picture and are adjusting deliberately, not accidentally.
The Real Reason It Matters
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The fights we have aren’t signs of failure. They’re signals. They’re the relationship trying to tell us something is out of balance. And when I look at it that way — when I hear Camille’s frustration about trash bags and translate it to I need you to see what I see — I can respond differently. Not defensively. Not with a list of all the things I did do. But with genuine curiosity about what I’m still missing.
Our kids are watching this, too. Elise is four. She notices who packs her lunch. She notices who knows where her shoes are. She’s building a model of how partnership works based on what she sees in our kitchen every morning. That’s not pressure — it’s motivation.
I still forget things. Last week I didn’t realize we were out of Julien’s preferred yogurt until Camille mentioned it, an edge in her voice that I recognized immediately. But I caught it. I didn’t get defensive. I said, “I’ll add it to my list,” and I meant my list — the one I maintain now, on my phone, that I check before I go to the store.
It’s not a perfect system. Some nights we still collapse onto the couch, spent, and I can feel the tension sitting between us like a third person. But more often now, the tension dissolves because we’ve already talked about the thing before it became a fight. We’ve already divided the invisible work before it became impossible to ignore.
The trash bags are in the pantry. I bought them yesterday. Nobody had to ask.
