The new show brought up a universal truth for mothers, whether they are married or not.
The tension isn’t sudden or fleeting. It’s a steady pressure, a hum beneath the day-to-day that lives in the small things: the missing school book, the annual wellness visit I’m the only one tracking, the text from my ex asking, Does she need anything for camp?, when we both got the same email. With the same list. Two weeks earlier.
In co-parenting after divorce, nothing is simply forgotten. Every oversight becomes a breadcrumb leading back to the same source, the same expected keeper of all knowledge: the mother. Even when custody is truly split, the responsibility isn’t. A 2022 UK study of separated parents concludes that “the mental load remains gendered even among those practicing a relatively ‘modern’ family form of shared care post-separation.” In other words, the family may have changed shape, but the hierarchy remains intact.
Of course it’s not only separated families who live inside this imbalance. Even in heterosexual couples who are still together, mothers overwhelmingly carry this load: a 2023 Pew analysis found that 78% of mothers say they manage most of their children’s schedules and activities. Divorce doesn’t create the default parent—it only reveals her more plainly.
The same, apparently, goes for tragedy. Which is why when I watched Peacock’s limited series All Her Fault, I recognized the choreography before the plot showed itself. A mother, Marissa (played by Sarah Snook), arrives at a playdate, phone in hand, ready to pick up her child who isn’t there. The camera stays tight on her face as the crisis begins to ripple outward—to neighbors, to police, to the digital ether. A husband is present, but only in the basic, literal sense. The frame treats him the way family life often does: proximate yet peripheral.
The show, based on the novel by Andrea Mara, heightens the stakes—kidnapping, suspicion, public scrutiny—but the emotional geography is familiar. Fiction just makes visible what real families often obscure: when something goes wrong with a child, the question isn’t what happened. It’s how she let it.
The Tyranny of the Default
The instinct to look to the mother first isn’t a plot device; it’s a cultural reflex. Feminist scholar Jo Freeman called it the Tyranny of Structurelessness. The essay explains that when no roles are explicitly named or divided, they default to the person conditioned to absorb them. Families insist they’re egalitarian, but the invisible architecture tells a different story. We have modern names for it now: the mental load, the default parent, unpaid labor. But whatever the language, the expectation remains unchanged: the mother should know.
Sociologist Allison Daminger writes that cognitive labor involves four phases—anticipation, identification, decision-making, and monitoring—and that mothers perform the majority of these, even in dual-earner homes. It’s not just remembering the appointment; it’s researching which doctor to choose. Not just scheduling the therapy session; it’s noticing the behavior that suggests it’s needed. Not just telling a partner what to pack for camp; it’s storing a full inventory of what the child owns, likes, has outgrown, has misplaced, and might panic without.
Even when fathers “help,” the help is often reactive rather than anticipatory. In All Her Fault, there’s a moment when the overwhelmed husband says, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
[Holding space for a scream.]
It sounds cooperative, supportive even, right? But the statement, the “you should have just asked” dynamic, exposes the deeper dilemma: to delegate, the mother must already have done the cognitive work. She is both the project manager and the backup laborer. And the hierarchy doesn’t dissolve with divorce—it calcifies.
But what All Her Fault gets right—and what conversations about “mental load” often flatten—is that even when a mother wants to be the reliable one, the unspoken expectation that she must be is its own kind of erasure.
Even beyond the central mystery, the show sketches this hierarchy in miniature. There’s the stay-at-home mother who chastises parents with “just one child” for not volunteering more—proof that even mothers judge one another by their capacity to absorb labor. And there’s Dakota Fanning’s character, Jenny, who works full-time, but is still the one fielding texts about the missing water bottle, the preferred bedtime ritual, the meltdown only she can soothe. Her husband isn’t neglectful; he simply moves through the world assuming his time is protected by default. When he “watches” their son for a single evening, he says he needs to “recover.” He says, “I can’t—I have…” while she rearranges meetings and obligations to say, “I’ll make it happen.”
She isn’t asking to be replaced. She’s asking for the rhetoric of partnership to match the reality. The ache isn’t in doing the care; it’s in everyone meeting her with the inevitability that she’ll be the one to do it.
The Architecture Outlives the Arrangement
Here is the truth the show articulates: The mother isn’t simply central to the storyline. She is the axis around which the entire crisis turns. Culturally, she always is.
But what the narrative reveals—and what real life confirms—is that this reflex isn’t merely interpersonal. It’s institutional. Mother-as-fulcrum isn’t the result of personality; it’s the predictable outcome of a system built on unspoken hierarchies. Even when relationships end, those hierarchies don’t. They reorganize themselves.
Schools, pediatricians, daycare directors, camp staff, therapists—every institution reinforces the same gravitational pull. Even when both parents’ names are on the forms, the communication funnels to the mother. Even when fathers are loving and present, the mother becomes the living archive: of vaccinations, shoe sizes, moods, anxieties, food aversions, and where the water bottle is hiding this time.
The exhaustion of that asymmetry isn’t theoretical. My ex was beloved by our daughter for the tiny voices he gave each of her favorite horse figurines when she was four. I loved that for her, too. But I was also sad that when I had time with her, my attention was often split: half tending to her, half tending to everything that kept her life from falling apart—the permission slips, the scheduling, the logistics, the invisible filing cabinet in my brain. There was rarely time that was solely ours, and I’d go to bed beating myself up for choosing logistics over presence.
I know this isn’t a personal failure. It’s the invisible curriculum of motherhood that tells mothers that if they don’t hold everything, it will break. And if something breaks, it will be the child who is affected the most. Co-parenting has only confirmed the lesson: things do fall apart when I stop holding them. So I keep holding—not because I necessarily want to be the keeper of all things, but because the alternative means my daughter not getting what she needs.
Not long ago, I told a friend—also co-parenting a daughter—about my petty fantasy of letting something slip. “Maybe I won’t send the gloves,” I said. “Maybe I’ll forget the reminder and let him figure it out.”
She gave me a look that said she’d had the same thought a hundred times. But we both knew exactly how that experiment ends: not with our exes learning anything, but with our girls standing on the playground with freezing hands.
So we send the gloves and the hats. We send the reminders and swallow the resentment. Because there is nothing we won’t do for our daughters. It’s a grim equation: the child’s comfort on one side, our exhaustion on the other, and no version where the burden shifts.
This isn’t about competence. It’s about conditioning. The mother becomes the point of knowledge because the culture keeps handing her the map. And once you start noticing this pattern, you see it everywhere—in families with parents who are together, divorced families, families in crisis, and the fictional ones, too. The architecture outlives the arrangement.
Which is why the moment something goes wrong, the point of view doesn’t have to move. It’s already pointed at the person we expect to know everything. Not because she should have known, but because we assume she could have—and that distinction is the entire problem.
Equal Time, Unequal Burden
Our custody schedule is 50-50. But evenness, I’ve realized, isn’t equity—it’s math without context. I’m still the one who keeps the doctor’s phone number saved, who remembers the book report deadline, who gets the calls about forgotten gym clothes even on my “off” days. Equal time is not equal labor; it formalizes hours, not responsibility.
These are small, almost imperceptible details, the kind that make you feel ungrateful for noticing. But together, they form the invisible current of motherhood: the quiet, constant sense of being the default.
All Her Fault turns that economy into suspense. The mother’s memory becomes the case file; her competence, the evidence. Every flashback is an audit of her choices: Did she check the phone number? Didn’t she sense something was off? The tension isn’t just about what happened to the child; it’s about whether the mother deserves forgiveness for being human. As if her internal monologue isn’t already self-flagellating.
That question—“What kind of mother are you?”—has been the spine of nearly every cultural portrayal of motherhood. The “good mother” is intuitive, prescient. The “bad” one forgets. In real life, those distinctions don’t dissolve when a family breaks apart; they harden. Co-parenting exposes them like X-rays. The expectation of maternal omniscience survives every legal arrangement, every round of mediation, every promise of equality.
The Tyranny That Outlives the Family
Sometimes, when my daughter is with her dad, I catch myself checking the weather and wondering if she remembered her jacket. I tell myself it’s because I care. And that’s true. I don’t want to ever stop thinking about her and whether or not she is OK in this world—it’s why I chose to be her mom. But I know it’s also training, the learned vigilance that insists a mother’s attention must never fully turn away. It’s what Freeman might have called the tyranny’s final form: a hierarchy so deeply internalized that it can survive even after the structure collapses.
Families will continue to shift shape. Marriages will end. Lives will reorganize. But when something goes wrong—no matter the custody arrangement, the household structure, or the crisis at hand—our culture still turns to the same place first.
And she’s exhausted.
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by Caroline Shannon
Caroline Shannon’s writing has appeared in The Cut, Vice, Narratively, DAME, and others. Her forthcoming book, Mother-Eaten: Notes On My Postpartum Body and Identity, explores motherhood, care systems, and the narratives we impose on birthing bodies. She is never not wistful for the days when call waiting was a luxury and her time spent online depended on a flimsy AOL trial CD arriving in the mail. Connect with her @bycarolineshannon.
