Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair. Today’s conversation is one of those episodes that felt like a gut-check from the very first minute.

Paige Connell came on the show to talk about the mental load of motherhood — not the concept, but the lived experience of it. The part nobody warns you about. The part that starts small and then, slowly, without you even noticing, turns into a snowball you can’t stop.

Paige went from zero kids to four kids in under three years. Foster care, then adoption, then two biological pregnancies back to back, one of them right into COVID. Her husband is a blue-collar first responder who was never remote for a single day. So Paige worked a startup job remotely while pregnant, then while nursing, then while parenting four kids under five, all during a global pandemic.

She came out the other side with a marriage that works, a system that runs, and something really worth hearing: the actual story of how they got there.

What Is the Mental Load, Really?

The mental load of motherhood isn’t the tasks themselves. It’s the invisible management layer on top of the tasks. It’s knowing the laundry needs to be switched before it mildews. It’s knowing which kid has a dentist appointment and which one needs new shoes in a size up. It’s the calendar, the anticipation, the follow-through, all of it running in the background of your brain while you’re also, you know, doing your actual work. It’s what Hannah Keeley calls the mom brain that never fully resets — the cycling that doesn’t stop just because you closed your laptop.

Paige describes it like a snowball.

“It starts small, but it rolls down the hill, and it picks up snow, and it picks up speed, and eventually you can’t stop it because it’s just so big. You’re like, how did this get away from me?”

That’s the part that sneaks up on you. It doesn’t happen overnight. You take on one thing, then another, and then one day you’re doing all of it and you’re not quite sure when that became your job.

A lot of moms in Paige’s situation had a partner who was, on paper, a great partner. Willing, present, genuinely trying. But willing isn’t the same as proactively seeing. And that gap is where resentment lives.

The Laundry Isn’t About the Laundry

Paige got a lot of pushback online for sharing that she doesn’t do her husband’s laundry. (Not never. If it’s in the dryer and he’s not home, she’ll fold it. But she’s not responsible for it.) People were genuinely upset.

What’s interesting is that the laundry was never the point. Paige’s mother-in-law told her years ago, almost offhandedly: just never do his laundry. You’ll learn to hate him.

At the time, Paige thought she was being bitter. Looking back, she understands exactly what the warning meant.

“She was trying to warn me that when you set expectations and take on work as part of your partnership without conversation, without mutual engagement and equity, you will resent your partner.”

Here’s how it actually happens. Mom goes on mat leave. She figures, I’m already home, I’ll just do all the laundry. Then mat leave ends and she’s still doing all the laundry. It becomes an assumption. It becomes her job. And then one day she’s sitting there — tired, touched-out, buried — thinking, how did I become the person who does all the laundry?

The resentment isn’t really about the laundry. It’s about the assumption that she would always catch every ball someone else dropped.

The Conversation You Aren’t Having

Here’s what Dana and Paige keep coming back to: none of this gets fixed without conversation. But communicating with your partner about what you actually need is hard when you’re in the thick of it, when you’re exhausted and touched out and managing four kids’ schedules in your head at all times.

Paige’s husband cooks dinner most nights. That also upset people online, by the way. Not because he’s doing too little, but because he’s doing something that culturally reads as “the woman’s job.” The double standard is sharp: if a woman cooks dinner every night, nobody bats an eye. If a man does it, something has gone wrong.

What they actually did was build their division of labor around what each person is good at and what each person hates. Paige is type A and organized. Her husband is neurodivergent and can’t manage bills without spiraling. So she handles the finances. He hates laundry; she doesn’t mind it. She hates answering “what’s for dinner” every single night; he genuinely likes to cook. So he cooks.

“We really try to base it off the realities of our lives, but also our strengths and our weaknesses. And on top of that, how do we still have time to be people outside of all of this?”

That last part is the goal. Not a perfectly divided spreadsheet of chores. A system that runs so smoothly you stop talking about it and get to just live your lives. Moms are actually wired for this kind of systems thinking — the problem isn’t the capacity, it’s who the system is built around.

Why Defensiveness Isn’t the Problem

One thing Paige said that really stayed with Dana: defensiveness is normal. The problem isn’t that your partner gets defensive when you bring up the mental load. The problem is what happens after the defensiveness.

A willing partner gets defensive and then keeps listening. A partner who isn’t there yet shuts down. You can’t force someone to stay at the table. But if they’re willing to sit with the discomfort of the conversation, that’s the foundation on which everything else gets built.

Paige also reframes the whole dynamic in a way that helps: it’s not you versus your partner. It’s you and your partner versus the overwhelming amount of work that has to get done.

“Instead of looking at your partner as the enemy — because I think that’s oftentimes what it feels like — it’s like, how do we do this together as a team so we both feel like it is fair?”

The dishwasher not getting emptied doesn’t mean he doesn’t see you. It might mean he was running late. The impact and the intention are two different things, and both of them matter. Saying “when you didn’t do this, here’s how it made me feel” is a different conversation than “you never help me.” One opens something. The other closes it.

The Third Option Nobody Talks About

Dana and Paige both spent time in the part of this conversation that doesn’t get talked about online: the middle ground. The internet loves a binary. Suck it up, or leave. That’s always been how it is, or divorce your husband.

Paige isn’t buying it.

“I truly believe there’s a third option where it’s like, do it different. It doesn’t have to be divorce or suck it up. It can be change the dynamics. Work together to change it.”

For Paige and her husband, the hard work took about a year and a half to two years of actual, difficult conversations. Resentment. Two steps back. Moments where she wasn’t the nicest wife. And then, slowly, through something on the other side that looks like a real partnership.

She’s been with her husband since she was 16. Two years of hard work feels like a blip against 20 years.

The thing that made it possible wasn’t a system or a framework. It was a partner who was willing to stay at the table. And it was Paige being willing to stop treating him as the enemy and start treating him as someone fighting the same pile of work she was.

Growing at Different Speeds

One of the things Dana brought up that hits close to home for a lot of moms building businesses: women often start a self-development journey and their partners don’t come with them. They read the books, they listen to the podcasts, they do the inner work — all while figuring out how to actually work when the kids are around. And then they look up and realize there’s a gap.

Paige puts it clearly: there’s less stigma for women around therapy and self-work. A lot of the men in her life respond to “you should try therapy” with “it’s just not for me.” Which is often a societal conditioning issue, not a character issue.

“I hear from women all the time: how unfair that I have to teach my husband how to be a capable adult. How unfair that I have to push him into therapy? Totally, completely unfair. Also — we get to choose if this is the hard work we want to do.”

You can choose not to do that work. You can choose to leave. You can choose to stay and pull someone along. All of those are real options. What Paige did was decide that the long-term payoff of doing the hard work together was worth it. Not because it was fair. Because it was what she wanted.

Dana’s version of this looked different — a divorce, a friendship that held, a co-parenting system that runs on quarterly meetings and shared values — but the core belief is the same. Doing the inner work on why you’re triggered, why certain conversations feel impossible, why resentment builds the way it does, that work pays off. The catalyst doesn’t have to be a crisis.

What Makes a Partnership Actually Work

Here’s what Paige and Dana land on together: the goal isn’t a perfect division of labor. The goal is a system that runs quietly enough in the background that you both get to be people.

People with hobbies. People with friendships. People who want to be in the car together, or want to come home from college, or want to spend their birthday with their family instead of their friends.

“I always tell people my goal as a mom is for my kids to want to ride in my car. I want them to want to be with me.”

That’s the whole game. Not a perfectly divided chore chart. A family that wants to be together because they built something worth coming back to.

And building that starts with one honest conversation about who is doing what and why. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Because the things that actually make you successful as a mom in business aren’t the strategies — they’re the foundations you build at home first.

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Your Next Step

If this conversation hit something for you, here’s where to go:

Find Paige Connell everywhere at @sheisapaigeturner on Instagram and TikTok, on YouTube, on Facebook, and on Substack at Lessons Learned. Her website is sheisapaigeturner.com

Come into the free BossMom Community. This is not just a place to hang out. This is where we actively help you figure out what you want, build the focus and clarity to go after it, and do business in a way that works with your family rather than against it. Free networking events, mindset workshops, daily mindset audios, real connection with other moms, all inside a dedicated app that lives completely off social media. There is genuinely no reason not to come check it out.

When you’re ready to level up, BossMom+ is where we build the actual plan. A marketing strategy built specifically for your business, plus the ongoing support and implementation help to make it real. Come when you’re ready.

I’ll see you next week.

xo, Dana