Last week, my partner and I performed a familiar ritual of modern co-parenting: I told him that I felt overburdened by mental labor, and we made a plan to adjust. The logistical work of managing our kids’ lives has recently ramped up steeply, and while we’d been sharing the hands-on work equally, a lot of the ramping up had fallen into the category of family managerial work that can get out of whack without anyone meaning to shirk or to let-shirk. The challenge, of course, is that managing and feeling responsible are often invisible. But there’s more to it than that: You could easily miss that you’re not doing a full half of the managing and feeling responsible because even without doing a full half, you are still doing a lot of managing and feeling responsible! There’s just so much to think about, keep track of, and hope to avoid fucking up. It’s a challenge for even two earnest people to tend to it all with enough time left over to just enjoy the adventure of living with and raising kids.
A timely moment, then, for me to stumble upon this article asking “Can A.I. Apps Be a Mom’s Second Brain?” (I think that should be a free link.) It opens like this:
‘One recent evening, Lisa Green’s 5-year-old son, Fitz, came home from school bummed. He couldn’t check out a book from the school library because he hadn’t yet returned his last book.
His mother, a 34-year-old medical resident in pediatrics, said the family…hadn’t realized that books were due on different days each week in accordance with a rotating printed schedule that Fitz had brought home from kindergarten.
As a solution, she located the schedule, took a picture and uploaded it to an artificial intelligence agent named Ollie. Now, Green gets a text message reminding her to pack Fitz’s library book before it is due.
“I was at the point where all the balls I’m starting to drop feel like the glass ones,” Green said, “and that was kind of a breaking point for me.”’