Meet the Mom Who Went on 'Strike' at Home and Says She'll Never Go Back
The mother of two says she's closer to who she wants to be.
— -- (Editor's note: This article was originally published on Babble.com. It has been reprinted here with permission. The Walt Disney Co. is the parent company of both ABC News and Babble.)
Kerry Egan has done what every wife and mother has fantasized about doing —- she went "on strike" from all of the household and most of the childcare duties.
And after turning the bulk of the heavy lifting over to her husband, she found out something rather unsurprising: life on the other side is so much better.
It all started when Egan, 43, an author and former hospice healthcare chaplain from Columbia, South Carolina, was running out of time to finish her book "On Living."
The book, based on her experience working with the dying as a chaplain and her own traumatic experience with postpartum psychosis, required some deep introspection and heavy thinking -- two things that were definitely not happening while she was juggling the demands of running a household and raising the couple’s two children.
"I tried to write it while the kids were at school, but wasn’t making much progress," Egan explains. "A lot of [the book] was some incredibly deep reflections, and I wasn’t able to get myself in the mental headspace to really think deeply about these topics."
More From Babble:
Parenting Means Stumbling Across a Finish Line That Never Seems to Count
Why I Refuse to Go Nuts Babyproofing My Home
When I Fail as a Mom, It Makes My Kids Stronger
So when she was offered the opportunity to attend a writing residency in Aspen, a chance to live for free for an entire month all the way across the country and concentrate fully on her work, she felt what any mother handed a get-out-of-jail-free card might feel: a mixture of elation and guilt.
"I had incredible guilt," Egan admitted. "I was kind of panicked. I made casseroles and froze them. My kids wear uniforms to school and I was so worried they wouldn't have clean clothes that I called ahead to the PTA and bought used uniforms. No joke, I bought 12 uniform shirts for each kid and 10 pairs of pants for my son."
Despite her fear, however, Egan says that her husband, Alex, 44, a professor at University of South Carolina Law School, was very supportive. When Egan’s mother offered to come down and help him, he turned her down. "He said, 'How hard can it be?'" Egan recalled with a knowing chuckle.
So she went. And that month, Egan said, was the most "liberating" of her entire life.
"I honestly never realized just how much psychic and mental and emotional space taking care of kids is," Egan explained. "I really had no idea how much I did ... until I left and had a month in which to not do those things. I realized it wasn’t so much the time or physical labor as the psychic energy to remember all these random things that had to be done."
When she returned home, Egan realized with both horror and relief that her family was just fine without her.
"A part of me was thrilled that they don’t really need me, that they did fine without me, but then I was also kind of hurt," Egan admitted. "Part of me was like, really? I’ve been like driving myself into the ground for the last 12 years for nothing?!"
She relates that during her time away, her husband simply ran the household in a way she never would. The trio eschewed eating dinner at the table, instead opting for lots of pizza and take-out on the couch while watching cartoons. They also kept a different standard of cleanliness in the house.
And all those homemade casseroles she had so lovingly prepared? Yup, they remained in the freezer where she had left them.
"Were they fine? Yes, they were," Egan said. (The kids, not the casseroles, just to be clear.)
Coming back for "re-entry," Egan still had the duties of revising and editing her book, so she made a bold and life-changing move: she decided to keep the new way of living.
"I just continued not to do the stuff I used to do," she said, as if it were really that simple. Except, as Egan discovered, it really is that simple.
"What I realized is that I really don’t need to be doing all that. The reason it was my responsibility was that I took it," she said.
So what exactly does life look like for Egan now? Well, she has taken back a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, "which is still enormous," she admitted. But she made the decision that if she was going to take on the “invisible work” her husband was going to do a heck of a lot more of the obvious work.
"I still haven’t picked up everything I dropped," Egan said. "There are some things that my husband just can’t seem to get —- scheduling and taking kids to various doctors and orthodontists appointments, buying the necessary school clothes and supplies, cleaning the fridge. So I do the things he can’t or won’t. But I just don’t do the rest."
"I come home and ask what’s for dinner? If he doesn’t know, we order pizza. I make sure the kids have clean uniforms, but that’s it for laundry. Either he does it or it doesn’t get done. I don’t food shop anymore. Out of food? More pizza! I am far, far happier."
And while all of this is well and good for Egan, who has never been happier as a mother, how has it affected her husband?
"My husband was pretty miserable, mainly because he had to carry the load for the first time in his entire life," Egan said of that first month. But without much official discussion or fanfare, their household has adjusted to him taking on more.
"But as my stress level has decreased, his has also increased. There’s no getting around that. There’s a reason it’s called worry work. It has been hard for him, I can’t deny it. It’s been an adjustment, [but] he’s never been anything other than supportive."
Egan is aware that the solution their family has struck won’t work for everyone. The couple, for example, hires other people to do the cleaning —- a full-time job in and of itself. But Egan insists that the change that has made the most difference is simply her attitude.
She also suspects that her drive to be a supermom was directly related to the traumatic postpartum experience she had gone through after her first birth. "For a long time I was trying to overcompensate," she said. "I was going to be this ubermom who did everything."
She realized, for the first time, that the only person expecting her to do all the things was her.
Taking a cue from her hospice patients, she gave herself permission to refuse to do two full-time jobs. "They knew keeping a home was a full-time job and that has been forgotten in our culture," said Egan. "We have this expectation that this work will just kind of happen now."
With that realization, there was just no going back to the way her life used to be.
"I realized I was happier not doing all that work, my kids were happier and I was able to get back to who am I and who I want to be."
Related Stories
ABC News Live