I learned early that maturity was currency.
By ninth grade, I had a role among my friends. The mature one. The advice-giver. The steady friend. Adults praised it. Friends relied on it. I could read a room quickly and adjust myself accordingly. The praise felt regulating.
If I was helpful, emotionally intelligent, stabilizing, then I had value. And if I had value, I was less likely to be left.
I didn’t consciously decide to become useful. I simply noticed that usefulness was rewarded.
That conditioning does not stay in adolescence. It follows women into adulthood. And for many, it crystallizes in motherhood.
Overfunctioning: personal anecdote 1
When my ex would shut down during conflict, something in me would mobilize. I didn’t just want resolution, I felt responsible for producing it. I would draft long messages clarifying my tone. I would apologize for things I wasn’t sure were wrong. I would analyze his silence, searching for the exact sentence that had ruptured us. If there was distance between us, I assumed I had failed to manage it.
As a reminder from part 1 of this series, in Bowen Family Systems Theory, overfunctioning–underfunctioning reciprocity refers to a patterned relational response in which one partner consistently takes on greater responsibility for managing emotions and decisions while the other becomes relatively less responsible, often in response to anxiety within the relationship (Kerr & Bowen, 1988).
My overfunctioning wasn’t only about losing him. It was about losing my purpose.
Disconnection felt like evidence that I had not performed my role well enough. Not attuned enough, not soft enough, not stabilizing enough. It also sat on top of something gendered: women are so often praised for being accommodating, emotionally tuned-in, and “mature,” while men are more easily excused from tending to the emotional tone of a relationship.
I could NOT tolerate being the cause of disconnection.
So I overcompensated.
Tying it back to Motherhood
Now scale that instinct into motherhood. If you already believe that harmony survives because you maintain it, parenting can feel like an infinite expansion of that responsibility. The child’s mood. The partner’s mood. The household’s rhythm. Everyone’s regulation begins to feel like it runs through you.
Sociologist Susan Walzer, in one of the earliest empirical analyses of the “mental work” of mothering, found that mothers disproportionately carry the cognitive and emotional responsibility for children (i.e. thinking ahead, anticipating needs, monitoring development, remembering appointments, tracking emotional shifts) (Walzer, 1996). This labor is largely invisible and often unshared.
I saw this long before I had language for it. My mom always knew when the cereal was low, when a permission slip was due, when someone had a test and might be extra fragile. She was thinking about everyone’s inner weather and outer logistics at the same time, while the rest of us mostly just…lived inside the system she was running.
Allison Daminger later refined this concept as cognitive labor, identifying four components: anticipating needs, identifying options for meeting them, deciding what to do, and monitoring how it went (Daminger, 2019). In heterosexual households, women overwhelmingly perform this anticipatory mental work and much of the monitoring at the back end.
In this case motherhood is not just physical care. It is constant vigilance. If you are already wired to scan relational environments for instability, motherhood intensifies this instinct.
You become responsible not only for tasks, but for moods, milestones, emotional climates. The instinct to nurture expands into an urge to engineer outcomes. If care starts to feel indistinguishable from control (over yourself, others, your environment etc.) then chances are, you’re doing some level of overfunctioning.
For some of us, that starts with watching a mom who quietly takes on “just one more thing” — signing the forms, managing the calendar, smoothing over conflicts, cushioning everyone’s feelings — until her own needs slowly slide to the bottom of the list.
Roles carry weight
Research consistently shows that mothers experience higher levels of time pressure and stress than fathers, even when controlling for employment hours (Sayer, 2005; Offer, 2014). This suggests that the strain here isn’t just about how many hours you work; it’s about responsibility density. The sense that outcomes rest on you.
Christina Maslach’s work on burnout emphasizes that chronic emotional exhaustion emerges when responsibility is high, boundaries are unclear, and the role is morally charged (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).
Motherhood is morally charged by design, and is also equated with great responsibility for the whole family. It is framed as selflessness. As a sacrifice. As endless availability. So what happens if a mothers’ boundaries are unclear?
BOOM. According to Maslach’s work, that’s your nonstop flight to burnout island, no layovers, complimentary guilt in the seat-back pocket.
If you already equate goodness with over-responsibility, motherhood can feel like confirmation that you were always meant to hold everything.
When the weight lifts: personal anecdote 2
Believe me when I say overfunctioning isn’t reserved for mothers and romantic relationships. My best friend and I ended our friendship after months of imbalance. I told her, “You haven’t had my back in a while” — I was emotionally exhausted from maintaining our relationship single handedly.
She never responded. And what I always feared, actually happened. After 15 years of friendship, I failed to maintain the relationship, and it ended.
For years, I believed it was my job to keep that friendship alive. That belief aligns with research on socially prescribed perfectionism, where self-worth becomes contingent on meeting perceived relational expectations (Hewitt & Flett, 1991). When love feels conditional on performance, you perform.
Now I know that a relationship is a two way street, and it was never my job to keep the relationship alive.
When the friendship ended, I expected collapse.
Instead, I felt expansion.
I stepped back and recognized how much energy I had been pouring into maintenance. I reflected on all my relationships. I reflected on my fear around motherhood.
I realized I am afraid of becoming indispensable in a way that erases me.
Because overfunctioning doesn’t begin in the delivery room. It begins years earlier, when usefulness starts to secretly become the organizing principle of your identity.
Why Is the “I need to be useful” mentality harmful?
Research on contingent self-worth shows that when individuals base their value on approval or usefulness, their emotional stability becomes dependent on external validation (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001). Women are socially rewarded for care work in ways that reinforce this contingency.
You are praised for being selfless.
You are admired for doing it all.
You are thanked for holding everything together.
And when your emotional stability is reliant on external validation, slowly indispensability starts to feel like safety.
But systems theory reminds us that chronic overfunctioning invites underfunctioning by others (Bowen, 1978). The more you carry, the less others are required to. In families, that dynamic can quietly cement itself and cause immense burnout in mothers.
A simple example: one parent learns everyone’s schedules, keeps track of school emails, plans meals, buys birthday gifts, and senses when the kids are off. Over time, the other parent no longer needs to remember dates, notice supply levels, or tune into early warning signs in the kids’ behavior — not because they are incapable, but because the system has taught them that someone else will always catch it.
Overfunctioning, through the lens of womanhood and motherhood, looks like this:
You anticipate disappointment before it happens.
You give more than you receive.
You monitor everyone’s emotional state
You cannot let conflict sit.
You feel responsible for preventing relational rupture.
You panic when you step back.
It looks competent.
It is exhausting.
And if you don’t examine it before entering motherhood, you risk mistaking self-erasure for devotion.
Part 3 of this mini-series will move into the internal engine that sustains this pattern — guilt, over-responsibility, and the illusion of control.
For now, the point is clarity.
The woman who holds everything did not appear overnight.
She was praised into existence.
References
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.593
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007
Erickson, R. J. (2005). Why emotion work matters: Sex, gender, and the division of household labor. Journal of Marriage and Family, 67(2), 337–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-2445.2005.00120.x
Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456–470. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.3.456
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Burnout. In G. Fink (Ed.), Stress: Concepts, cognition, emotion, and behavior (pp. 351–357). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-800951-2.00044-3
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. Guilford Press.
Offer, S. (2014). Time with children and employed parents’ emotional well-being. Social Science Research, 47, 192–203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.05.003
Sayer, L. C. (2005). Gender, time, and inequality: Trends in women’s and men’s paid work, unpaid work, and free time. Social Forces, 84(1), 285–303. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2005.0126
Walzer, S. (1996). Thinking about the baby: Gender and transitions into parenthood. Gender & Society, 10(2), 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124396010002007
