Did Pixar just answer my question about the emotional labor of motherhood?
Yep, 'Inside Out 2' crushed me.
I should have known I was going to cry in the movie theater the other night.
My ten-year-old and I went to see Inside Out 2 (spoilers ahead if you want to avoid). Pixar has a way of firing up my tear ducts (ugh, the opening montage in UP!, anyone?!) so I should have been prepared for that reaction.
I bawled during the first Inside Out. The year that movie came out, my oldest daughter was at the age of all of the Riley memories that were starting to fade in the “memory dump”. Those sweet early childhood memories. The first steps. The silliness of imaginary friends. The cute little quirks. Watching that movie with that age alignment was a reminder that I had to hold onto the present because the future was the one on the screen – her growing up and growing out of this stage. So, hold on. Hold on tight. This will all fade. Cue the waterworks.
Fast forward to today and, here we are, rapidly approaching the age of Riley in that first movie (11). The transition between little kid and big kid. The tween years. The age where those sweet memories of little kid life are all but faded.
And, with excellent timing, Inside Out 2 comes out with the reminder that puberty is right around the corner1. Cool.
Since my daughter would probably not appreciate my open discussion of her body and brain2, I’ll turn the focus back on myself…
I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in college. It probably started in high school, now that I think about it, but we didn’t catch it until I had a full on panic attack during my junior year. I remember the setting. I remember the feeling. I remember almost getting hit by a car crossing the road because I didn’t even realize I was crossing a road. Or maybe I didn’t care. I rushed to the university health clinic because I thought I was having a heart attack. “Do juniors in college have heart attacks?” I remember thinking to myself. “Maybe it’s a congenital heart defect. My heart is busted. That is clearly the problem.”
My heart was fine.
Fast forward to last night, in the movie theater, watching a Disney/Pixar movie with my kid – a kid on the edge of her future of puberty and middle school and high school and college and life – and I lost it. Those big, fat tears that are one step away from an ugly cry.
Even if you haven’t seen the movie yet (last SPOILER ALERT!) you probably know that “Anxiety” comes in as a character. She’s adorable. She’s frantic. She’s trying to run Riley’s emotional life now that Riley is growing up and “needs to think about the future”.
And then, in the climactic scene, it happens. Anxiety loses control.
She’s trying to do her job so well that she loses control. She starts moving about the Emotions’ control console increasingly quickly and erratically. Everything around her starts spinning. Soon, she is frozen in place. Stuck to the levers that should control Riley’s emotions. She can’t move. She can’t function. She can no longer do her job “helping” Riley.
Riley is having a panic attack.
It is the best visual representation of a panic attack I have ever seen.
And I lost it.
I couldn’t help going there — Is my daughter on the edge of going through the exact experience I had?
This comes right back to parental stress load
The movie also does a good job with a brief acknowledgement of something that I was feeling at the moment – my own parental anxiety.
In quick glances, we get a look inside the parents’ brains, including a scene with mom’s Anxiety popping in on her Emotions at work. The other mom Emotions acknowledge mom’s Anxiety with a “haven’t seen you in a while” which I very much appreciated. New stage of life as a parent and an emotion that has been relatively dormant can just pop back into the picture.
This feeling also brought on an unexpected “ah ha” moment. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how to interpret emotional labor as a stressor in the context of mental load3 and within the stressor map, in general. I still need to explore this one a bit more so I won’t get into it too much here. One thing I want to dig into is how emotional labor may hit the fear centers at this anxiety level – anticipation of the future, projection of a ‘threat to survival’ for our children in the most modern sense from a future of financial security to future happiness.
Watching a Pixar mom’s Anxiety pop into a fictional interpretation of parenting through puberty and recognizing my own reaction – coming to terms with how my own daughter’s brain and emotional journey will shift over the next few years – I felt it. Emotional labor. Carrying the weight of worry about her future. A future I have very little control over.
Modern parents (especially mothers) try so hard to overcome that last statement. We try to control as much as possible. We get too involved in our kids' lives. For parents that have the means to do it, we try to exert control over our kids’ education; we push extracurriculars; we fuel the youth sports industrial complex; we do insane (and sometimes, illegal) things to get our kids into their college of choice; we opportunity hoard4. We constantly fall to the pressure of intensive parenting.
Lack of control is a key feature in how our brain perceives a stress. As much as we fight against it, we cannot control what is happening in our child’s brain. Not surprising, the number one source of parental worry (read: source of emotional labor) is their kids' mental health.
But, how much of that worry feeds right back into our own health as parents? And how concerned should we be about parents with the growing teen mental health crisis? More on this soon!
Which brings me to another reason why the maternal stressor map will need to extend throughout the entire reproductive life cycle. For many of us in cycling bodies, we will parent tweens and teens and young adults right as we are going through another period of physiological flux – perimenopause/menopause. Many of us will also start to take on stress from additional sources, especially the heavier weight of caregiving for the generation above us as parents or other family members age and need more care. This is the Panini Generation –
’s reality-setting interpretation of true sandwich generation pressure.But think about Joy
In the end, Joy physically yanks Anxiety out of Riley’s panic spiral. All of the emotions cradle Anxiety until the spiral subsides5. And it does subside. Riley takes a deep breath, feels the sunshine on her face, and lets Joy lead again. All is well.
Aaaaand… I’m crying again.
Can I trust that my daughter will find her Joy when she needs her the most? I need to trust that. She’s growing up and I’m not driving her emotions console. I guess I never was.
More importantly, how does allowing our joy to come through, as parents, counterbalance our own parental anxiety?
In many ways, joy might be the ultimate stress buffer. Parenting is hard, parenting is stressful, but parenting also brings in loads of opportunities for joy and laughter. We need to keep sight of that too (thank you for calling this out,
).
Case in point, on March 26th, 2020, when parenting (and life) was at peak stress, we still had this moment — a four-year-old’s interpretation of Single Ladies — to bring us joy:
If you can watch that without cracking a smile, even when it feels like the world is on fire, you’re not human.
When we got home from the movie, I tried to explain to my daughter why I was crying so hard for the last 20 minutes or so. I thought sharing my story in the context of rainbow-hued emotion personification might be an interesting way to kick off the “let's talk about mental health!” conversation that we were due to have (I’ve tried a couple of times… it’s tricky). Maybe this was my own way of finding control in a moment when I knew I had none.
In a very tween-y, Ennui way, she shrugged her shoulders and immediately moved the conversation to something else. I’ll try again another time. I do appreciate having this cultural touchstone to come back to when the timing is right.
And I appreciate this opportunity for self reflection. Even if it was incredibly hard to watch an animated version of my darkest days.
Pixar, dammit, you did it again.
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Of course, puberty isn’t really one alarm that goes off on one day at the age of 13 and we’re already getting glimpses of it. Research shows that, these days, the full scope of puberty starts younger and lasts longer than it did when we were children. I highly highly recommend this book for everything about puberty and what parents will face in the tween → teen → early adulthood years.
I want to explore the particular parenting isolation moment of tween/teen-dom in a later post.
I find that, in the early years, most parents find/found an outlet in discussing the hard days of baby, infant, toddler, preschooler by talking with other parents about all the issues you face in those times. We could talk about diaper blow outs, rough sleep, cluster feeding, and tantrums openly.
You can’t (shouldn’t?) do that with older kids. They are thinking humans, out in the world and you have to respect their privacy. You can't talk about their bodies, their moods, their health, as openly or as casually as you did when they were little. There is also a fear of judgement if you are facing behavioral or mental health issues. It goes so much deeper than this, of course, but alas, we’re already in the footnotes!
Point being — not being able to “share” like you could with little littles can be very isolating.
More on this soon! I've started some fascinating deep dives into mental load with Haley Swenson, especially as it relates to the fantastic research by Leah Ruppaner and team. In addition, my friend+collaborator, Jodi Pawluski JUST came out with this review looking at the relationship between maternal brain changes, the mental load of modern motherhood, and maternal mental health. More on that one soon too!
Check out Jessica Callorca's interview with
—
or, if its still available (?) their video interview about her research and her new book, Holding It All Together
Also a good view on how modern society has painted parents (mostly mothers) into the corner of being the primary carrier of this burden.
This was also an excellent visual interpretation of how to get out of a panic spiral. And, whew, it’s hard to watch if you’ve been in that scenario.
I was so excited to see it as a person who has anxiety their whole life, parent and psychologist. It was so great and a helpful tool for the future. And pixar movies always make me cry at some point.
I think working with Dr. Lisa Damour really helped them get the anxiety and teen emotion stuff right. I interviewed her about it here: https://www.teenhealthtoday.com/p/how-lisa-damour-helped-shape-inside