You Have Mostly Everything Handled. Except the Part Where You're Doing It All Alone.
On dentist appointments, charcuterie boards, and why you cannot be a martyr dying on a hill no one even knew was a hill.
A video featuring The Skorys family shows a mom losing it because no one remembered to thaw the chicken. After handling all the cooking, cleaning, and planning, her family’s only suggestion is to order Chipotle.
She finally snaps: “I’m done doing everything for everyone while you just exist here.”
If you’ve seen it, you know. If you haven’t, look up The Skorys on YouTube Shorts (obviously after you read this post, because otherwise you will get stuck in the YouTube short zone and this article will be ever so much better than that). The short in question is 90 seconds of every mom’s breaking point. This is exactly where this story starts—but not because the breaking point is the destination. Rather, it’s because most of us have been there, and nobody talks about what comes after.
Now, let’s move from that breaking point to what follows. Do you just occasionally keep exploding in anger? Do you accept that your entire family and your spouse are huge jerks that don’t care how hard it is to do what you do day in and day out?
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About five months ago, I handed off something I had been carrying for years. Not with a speech. Not with a printed color-coded calendar. I just told my husband that scheduling the kids’ dentist appointments — and actually taking them. Everything involving the dentist was now his job.
Simple, right? Except we were living overseas at the time, which meant every dental appointment came with a full administrative side quest: pay out of pocket, collect the receipt, scan it, upload it to the reimbursement portal, and then — because nothing abroad is ever clean — probably re-send 23 times to the correct place when the first submission vanished into bureaucratic void where only Brad can see it and it is not Brad’s job to get the reimbursement to you so he does nothing. I hate Brad.
But I digress: I explained the whole system. He understood it. He made the appointment.
And then a last-minute work meeting came up, and I took the kids.
And then we evacuated from the Middle East before the reimbursement receipt never got submitted.
So, mixed results on round one.
ROUND TWO
Fast forward to this week, back stateside. New dentist, new forms, fresh start. I found the dentist, filled out all the new-patient paperwork online, and handed it back to him: you’re taking them and dealing with anything else that is needed.
He took them. And then he called me from the waiting room to ask whether the kids had had X-rays at their last appointment or had actually seen a dentist, because the kids said yes, and he didn’t know if that was true.
I stood in my kitchen, holding my phone, feeling the familiar pull—the one that whispers in these moments, “I should have just gone myself.” “I would have known all this.” “Why do I even bother with getting help, because it is faster if I just do it.”
But instead, I just answered the questions (potentially with an exasperated sigh and a non-verbal eyeroll felt across the universe). He handled the rest. He did great.
And here is what I know to be true after years of being the person who kept everything in her head and years of slowly, painfully learning to let things go:
You cannot be a martyr, dying on a hill no one even knew existed.
If you carry everything, track everything, manage everything — and you never hand anything off and let someone else figure out the learning curve. But if this is your choice you cannot also be angry that they don’t know how to help. You didn’t give them the chance to figure it out. You kept going until you burned out, and then, from the pit of despair, note that it is everyone else’s fault that you are at the bottom and too burnt out to climb out.
That is not a system. That is a trap you built for yourself. I know because I have done it a time or two. And the exit is uncomfortable for everyone, including you, because to get out, you have to start handing things over and accept that you also, in part, got yourself there.
The Drawer Doesn’t Have to Look Like You Did It
I make my kids fold and put away their own laundry. Their drawers do not look great. We are not running a Gap Kids display situation in this house. But I have painted what done looks like for them — clothes folded, put away so they can actually find things without destroying the whole drawer the next morning (Thank you Marie Kondo) — and when it’s just shoved in there, I ask them to do it again. I don’t do it for them. I don’t silently refold everything at 10pm and feel both virtuous (I am the ONLY one who can do this right) and resentful (I’m done doing everything for everyone while you just exist here).
Because here is the thing I say to my kids all the time, and I mean it every single time: I am not raising children. I am raising adults.
And raising adults is genuinely harder than just doing everything yourself. I am so much faster than they are at every single thing that is adulting. I whine about 27 million times less. It is deeply, sometimes spiritually painful to stand there and watch them do something slowly and imperfectly when I could have finished it in forty-five seconds.
But the point is that they are being set up to function as humans when they leave this house—so they aren’t baffled by laundry or expecting someone else to manage dental insurance.
The same logic applies to your partner. Getting help from someone you haven’t really pushed for help from before is painful at first. There is a learning curve. There will be a phone call from a waiting room asking about X-rays. That is not failure. That is just the beginning of the process.
Paint What Done Looks Like
Brené Brown has this concept she uses in leadership called “Paint What Done Looks Like.” Don’t assume everyone shares the same mental picture of what finished means. Be specific. Be clear. Not in a condescending way — just in a this-is-what-I-need-the-end-result-to-be way.
It is time-consuming to do this for the first time. It will feel, at least once, like you are explaining something to another fully grown adult who should probably already know it. That feeling is valid, and you are allowed to have it quietly in your own head or acknowledge it with a friend, as I did with my friend Alice yesterday. Just don’t say it out loud to the person who is currently attempting to give you what you consider mediocre help.
But the alternative is keeping the whole operating manual inside your head—every appointment, every deadline, everything that needs to happen before the next thing—and wondering why no one else seems to notice the hill you’re climbing every day.
They don’t notice because you never showed them the hill.
You know the receipt needs to be re-uploaded, the lunchbox washed the night before, and that camp registration opens in January and fills up quickly—because you built the system and kept it to yourself.
Being a family means everyone pulls their weight in some way, shape, or form. That is true whether you work outside the home, inside the home, or some exhausting combination of both. It means communicating before it is Wednesday, and you really could have used two hours at a coffee shop to think — and instead you are white-knuckling it through the week because no one knew to offer.
Dad Dinner and The Charcuterie Board
In our house, for the past two weeks, there has been Dad’s dinner day, which means grilling and a very basic salad. There is also charcuterie days most weeks, which is really just throwing fruit, vegetables, crackers, cheese, and meat onto a large surface and letting the kids graze outside while I do not have to referee their arguments because I sit inside with my charcuterie and some wine.
Those nights exist because I need them. I cannot cook from scratch every night and also have energy for things that matter to me, like exercising or a walk with a friend. So some nights, someone else handles it in their own way, and I try to let that be enough, even if my husband thinks I have a judgmental face when his way of making salad is to open the grocery store container and put tongs inside.
Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.
Here is the thing to keep in mind. A different way to do a task doesn’t mean it is wrong (still working on this myself, as my husband will be the first to tell you).
The task is no longer yours, which was the whole point. Paint what done looks like and then walk away. They can figure out how they want to do the process for themselves. So if you, too, have a resting judgmental face, potentially leave the room or the house so that the task can be completely owned by that member of the family.
Your Kids Are Watching All of It
There is a longer game here, and it matters more than any single dentist appointment.
Your son is watching. If he grows up seeing his dad exist in the house — present, well-meaning, but functionally uninvolved in the logistics of keeping a family running — he is getting a very clear education. He is learning that the invisible work isn’t his job to notice. That it will just happen, the way the heat comes on, or the fridge stays full. Running a household is someone else’s problem. It is someone else’s domain.
Your daughter is watching too. She is learning what to expect from a partner. Whether equal means equal, or whether it means she spends the next twenty years running everything alone and calling it FINE. She is quietly seething with anger over what needs to be managed, but no one will help her because she never tells people she needs help.
Mom’s—we don’t teach this with a conversation about whether there are specific gender roles in our house. We teach it by letting our kids watch both parents doing the boring, invisible, logistical work of running a home together, imperfectly, with a phone call from a waiting room about X-rays and a charcuterie board on a Tuesday night.
The unseen work of a family should not fall on one person. Share it, show it, and let everyone take part. That ensures your kids learn that running a household is everyone’s responsibility, not just yours. The mom in that video didn’t want to snap over frozen chicken. She wanted a partner. She wanted her kids to grow up knowing that household management belongs to everyone.
That’s all any of us want. The hill is real. It belongs to everyone. Show them the hill.
The hardest part of all of this is getting it out of your head and onto paper. I made a free worksheet to help you do exactly that — a fillable “Paint What Done Looks Like” guide broken down by every area of your household. Meals, laundry, medical appointments, school and activities, seasonal projects. Each one has space to write exactly what done looks like, assign an owner, and set a frequency.
→ Grab the free worksheet here
If any part of this sounded like something you have talked to with your Alice, send it to them. The woman who has everything mostly handled except herself is everywhere — she just doesn’t always know how to make life look different.
If someone sent you this OR you’re new here — this is what I write about. The stuff capable women are carrying alone and what to actually do about it. No fluff, no toxic positivity, just real talk and actual tools.
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