It is 7:14 on a Tuesday. The kids are at the table. There is a plate of pasta in front of each of them and a third plate going cold on the counter because the cat got out and one of them had to chase it.
She is opening the fridge for the parmesan and her phone, on the bench beside her, has lit up with three things. A reminder that Wren’s library books are due tomorrow. A Slack message about the Q3 planner that should have had a reply by four. A text from her mother-in-law saying “do you still want the chicken on Sunday or shall I do the lamb?”
The parmesan is behind the buttermilk.
She is going to find it, grate it, eat her pasta cold, reply to her mother-in-law before she forgets, and not reply to the Slack message until she is upstairs with the door closed because the children will hear “work” and ask. She will not, before she sleeps, remember the library books. She will remember them at 8:50 tomorrow morning, in the car, after she has dropped them at school, when it is too late.
This is what we are talking about when we talk about cognitive load. It is not the pasta. The pasta is half an hour. It is the parmesan, and the library books, and the chicken-or-lamb, and the Slack message, all running at once. It is the fact that nobody else in the house is tracking any of these things. They are all happening inside the head of one person.
A cleaner, a nanny, an au pair
A cleaner cleans. They arrive on a Wednesday, do the bathrooms and the floors and the kitchen, and they leave. The work is exactly what it says it is, and when it is done, it is done.
A nanny minds the children. They arrive at three, pick the children up, take them to swimming, make their tea, get them ready for bed. Their job is the children. They are not, fundamentally, watching the pantry.
An aupair lives in for a season. Part-family, part-help, often in their early twenties, doing English at TAFE on a Thursday morning. They might do the school run and a load of washing. The arrangement is warm and porous, and usually quite short.
None of these is the person who notices, on a Tuesday evening, that the dishwasher tablets are running low.
The role we keep being asked about, the role we exist to place, is something else. “Household manager” is the closest English word we have. Some of our families call it, half-joking, their family-office-of-one.
What a household manager does
A household manager does six things, broadly.
Runs the household calendar
Birthdays, school terms, GP appointments, the AC service on Friday, the in-laws coming for lunch on Sunday, Olive’s swimming carnival on Thursday with the new goggles in the bag. The manager knows what is coming and what needs preparing for.
Handles the small ordering
Groceries for the week. Dishwasher tablets. The kids’ multivitamins. More sunscreen because it is nearly October. The new school socks Wren has somehow already grown out of. The manager runs the small endless decisions you have explicitly handed over, and only those. The rest stay yours.
Coordinates the trades
Plumber, electrician, window cleaner, locksmith, gardener. The manager is the contact, the confirmer, the one who lets them in, the one who pays them and files the receipt in the shared folder.
Keeps the children’s diary
Not the children themselves; that is the nanny’s role, or a parent’s. But the permission slip due Monday, the library books due Wednesday, the soccer ground that has moved because of the rain, the dentist appointment that landed in the email three weeks ago. The manager notices these in time for you to act, or acts on them so you do not have to.
Coordinates the people already in your life
The cleaner, the nanny, the grandmother, the dog walker. The manager becomes the person each of them texts when something changes, the person who reminds the grandmother about the new alarm code, the person who knows on Tuesday afternoon that Wednesday’s nanny is running late.
Documents the household
What time the cleaner comes. Where the spare keys are. Which child has the egg allergy. What the wifi password is. When the car last had a service. A small, dull, accurate set of notes kept in the shared platform, so the household can still run on the days the manager is not in it.
What this is, in one sentence, is keeping the household together so that the people inside it can think about other things.
That is the part working mothers understand instantly. Almost no one else does.
A lot of working mothers have lived for years on a hybrid. A cleaner on a Wednesday. A nanny three afternoons a week. A grandmother who covers the school holidays. And on top of all of that, a coordination layer that lives nowhere except inside the head of one person. The cleaner needs to be told about the dog. The nanny needs to be reminded about the dentist. The grandmother needs the new alarm code. And on top of all of it, you are also running your actual career.
The hybrid works, in the sense that no one drops dead. It does not work, in the sense that you do.
When a household manager comes in, what shifts is not who does the cleaning. The cleaner usually stays. The nanny usually stays. The grandmother definitely stays. What shifts is who holds it all. The manager becomes the contact for everyone you already have in your life. The cleaner running late on a Tuesday. The nanny coordinating Wednesday afternoon. The grandmother who needs the new alarm code. The dishwasher tablets running low, ordered before anyone has thought to write it down.
You get your head back.
This is, in the end, why we say what we say on the front page. The list stops living in your head. The to-dos are no longer for you to do. The relationship — with your partner, your children, your work, yourself — stays yours.
A cleaner is a good thing to have. A nanny is a good thing to have. Neither, on its own, answers the question a working mother is most often actually asking. Which is: who is keeping all of this together, if not me, and can it not be me, just for one evening, please.
A household manager is the answer to that question. Not the cleaner. Not the nanny. The one who notices the dishwasher tablets are running low, before anyone has had to write it down. The one who keeps noticing, every Tuesday, so you can stop.