When I first came across Kelly Hubbell's viral story—the one where she left the family vacation and the internet lost its collective mind—I nearly stood up and applauded. Here was a woman quietly rebelling against the unpaid, unacknowledged, expected emotional labor of family life. That single decision to pack up and leave wasn't selfish; it was revolutionary. 12 days into a 17 day vacation Kelly and her husband decided that being away for so long from the systems that kept them happy healthy and whole were important enough to return home early. Grateful for the time they spent with their family, they were able to return to a carefully curated quality of life at home. In a culture that romanticizes women's exhaustion, she's doing the radical work of saying, "No, I will not die on the hill of clean beach towels and everyone else's sunscreen."

Part of the reason Kelly was able to take such a definitive and distinctive action was because she and her husband had already built systems that distributed the load—organizational, emotional, and operational. They worked with an on-site house manager to create a rhythm of household life that didn't depend solely on her bandwidth or willingness to "hold it all together." From that lived experience came a sharp insight: most families don't need more "help," they need structure, language, and transparency around the invisible work of running a home. Noticing a gaping hole in the marketplace for holistic, human-centered household management, Kelly founded Sage Haus in 2023. The platform brings dignity and design to domestic logistics, transforming the chaos of family coordination into a system of shared accountability. It's part therapy, part workflow, and wholly a revolution in how we think about emotional labor in the modern home.

In our conversation, Kelly and I talk about how emotional labor operates as the invisible architecture of every home—how it's both the glue and the grind. Sage Haus offers a framework to make that invisible work visible, delegable, and dare I say, shared. Kelly's approach bridges empathy and efficiency: she blends heart and logistics, showing families how to distribute domestic responsibility without guilt or resentment. It's emotional labor with a project plan—a vision for a household where care is collaborative, not compulsory.

Laboring Mothers, Then and Now: A Conversation with Dr. Ellen Ledoux

I get Google alerts for the topic of "emotional labor," and one day, a name popped up that stopped me in my tracks: Dr. Ellen Ledoux. A scholar of 18th-century literature and feminist theory, Dr. Ledoux's work powerfully unpacks how historical narratives continue to shape modern understandings of work, gender, and care.

Her book, Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century, explores the cultural origins of the myth that maternal care and paid labor are mutually exclusive. She reveals how Enlightenment-era ideals elevated the domestic role for white, privileged women while rendering poor, enslaved, and working-class mothers invisible—or unworthy. In other words, motherhood was never just a personal role—it was political, racialized, and deeply tied to labor structures.

When I asked Dr. Ledoux why we're still here—still talking about "work-life balance," still treating caregiving as if it were weightless—she pointed to our enduring belief in rugged individualism and our failure to interrogate the systems that demand superhuman effort. As she put it: we expect a woman on the tenure track to birth both a baby and a major scholarly work, as if both forms of labor don't demand everything.

Dr. Ledoux's scholarship is a gift to anyone grappling with the emotional labor of care, work, and identity.

Learn more about Dr. Ledoux and her work: https://ellen.ledoux.us/
Order Laboring Mothers: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5949/