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It was 3 a.m. when my mother-in-law Rita, 53, got out of bed: not because she couldn’t sleep, but because someone had to make the food.
By the time the rest of us were blearily getting into the car at 5 a.m. for the post-Lebaran (Idul Fitri) family trip to the mountains, there was already a full spread packed and ready: telur dadar (omelet) with scallions, rice, vegetables and fruits. My father-in-law Amal, 55, had wanted an early start to beat the traffic, so Rita had built her morning around that, hours before the rest of us were even awake.
My own mother Elis, also 53, does the same thing every time we go on mudik (exodus), the annual tradition of returning to one’s hometown for Idul Fitri. The day before a trip, she’s already prepped meals, packed snacks and sorted travel supplies. She always says this is practical, since buying food at rest areas only adds to the cost.
But the real cost, the one no one talks about, is hers.
“Sometimes I get stressed, because I want everyone to be happy,” she told me once. “But making everyone happy makes me twice as tired.”
The family holiday, it turns out, isn’t a holiday for everyone.
Invisible checklist
Research has put numbers to what many women already know, from the physical and mental toll they endure. A study by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, commissioned by the American Psychological Association, found that women consistently report higher stress levels during holidays than men, largely because they shoulder more of the planning and execution, especially around food and logistics.
In Indonesia, the pattern is the same. Hariati Sinaga, a gender studies lecturer at the University of Indonesia, uses the term beban mental (mental load) to describe this: the thinking is “invisible” cognitive work of managing a trip so that everyone else can simply enjoy it.
“Because it’s a long journey, that means preparation: food, medicine, making sure the kids who get carsick are accounted for, planning where to stop. All of that detailed work tends to fall to women,” she says.
And it isn’t just planning and preparation. According to a 2021 study by Desloehal Djumrianti et al., “Asian Women’s Roles in Family Holiday: A Case Study of Indonesian Females”, women are usually the primary decision-makers for family trips, responsible for the planning, the managing, the coordination. They aren’t just packing the bags; they’re designing the entire experience.
Hariati traces this back to something older and more stubborn than any single dynamic in a family: gender stereotyping that has long assigned domestic work and caregiving to women, treating it as natural, even inevitable.
“The gender norms we have still assign reproductive and domestic labor to women. And it gets normalized, over and over,” she says.
“So when something goes wrong on a holiday, the assumption is that it’s a woman’s responsibility to fix it.”
This has consequences beyond exhaustion.
A 2023 paper by Natalia Reich-Stiebert et al., titled “Gendered Mental Labor: A Systematic Literature Review on the Cognitive Dimension of Unpaid Work Within the Household and Childcare”, has found that mental load has measurable effects on women’s mental well-being.
In my own family, this shows up in the simplest way: Both my mother and mother-in-law, once we finally arrive at our destination, always need to sleep longer than anyone else.
Uncounted labor
What makes it worse is that women’s work is rarely shared.
In my family, my mother handles everything. At most, my sister or I will help pack the food. My father and brother take care of the car and consider their contribution complete.
Men doing the driving and assuming their work is done, Hariati says, is one of the clearest examples of how unequal the distribution actually is. Navigation, fuel and car maintenance count, but meals, medicine, comfort, the mental architecture of the entire trip don’t.
“Women in families are often left to manage everything on their own. Even when men take on a task like the car or the route, what they carry is still nowhere near what women carry in terms of planning and responsibility for everyone’s comfort,” she says.
A YouGov survey in the United States found that the majority of men said they weren’t involved in holiday cooking or caregiving at all. Eighteen percent simply said there would be someone else to cook for them.
While the context might differ, the dynamic is familiar: care work, referring to unpaid labor that involves looking after the needs of people and the home, is still treated, almost universally, as something absorbed by women rather than shared between partners.
A ‘real’ holiday
None of this means the family holiday is a problem in itself. It means the current version of it is broken, at least for half the people in the car.
Hariati is clear that the most realistic fix isn’t a grand restructuring of family values overnight. It’s both simpler and harder than that: Share the work from the very beginning, and mean it.
“The easiest solution is dividing the responsibilities,” she says.
“But it’s not just about dividing tasks; it’s also about the expectations placed on women,” she continues.
“If the tasks have been shared, make sure everyone actually follows through. Don’t let the cognitive load quietly drift back to [women].”
That last part matters. Sharing a task isn’t the same as helping out. It means more than delegating and walking away.
It means owning the outcome, knowing what needs to happen and making sure it does; all without being reminded, managed or followed up.
There’s a version of the family holiday where everyone, including the women who planned it, gets to rest. It’s a version where someone else sets the alarm at 3 a.m.; where my mother-in-law doesn’t arrive at the guesthouse needing to recover from the vacation before it’s even begun.
We’re not there yet. But it starts with noticing and acknowledging that we’re not.
