The Work Nobody Sees
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open”– Muriel Rukeyser
I've been watching teachers work for a long time.
And the thing that always gets me, the thing I genuinely don't think gets talked about enough, is what happens in the first five minutes of the morning. Before the lesson starts. Before the attendance is taken.
She's standing at the door. Coffee going cold in her hand. Watching dozens of children arrive.
From the outside she looks like she's just waiting.
She is absolutely not just waiting.
She's tracking who came in without eye contact, and what that probably means based on what she knows about that child's home. Who's talking too loudly in a way that reads as performance rather than actual ease. Who's sitting next to someone different today, which means something shifted over the weekend. Another child is wearing the same clothes as yesterday.
She's done all of that in the time it took her to say good morning to her TA.
Nobody asked her to. It won't show up in her lesson plan or her performance review or any observation that anyone ever does. It's just the work, running constantly underneath everything else, like an operating system you never see but that's holding the whole thing together.
There's actually a name for this.
A sociologist named Arlie Hochschild called it emotional labour.
Not just being caring, but the actual cognitive effort of managing other people's inner worlds. The tracking, the anticipating, the translating behaviour into need. It's real, effortful work. It just happens to be invisible.
And in teaching and parenting? It's disproportionately done by women.
Then she goes home.
Where, if she's also a parent, a different version of the same thing starts. The kitchen has its own emotional weather. Her own children have their own inner worlds. The partner who came in quieter than usual. The teenager who answered a question with a flatness that means something specific, something she knows, something she files away to return to when the moment is right.
The tracking doesn't stop.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she wonders why she's so tired.
Here's what I want to say, and I hope it lands the right way.
Everything I teach in Positive Discipline at its absolute core is about this kind of attunement. The connection before correction. Reading behaviour as communication. The relationship that has to exist before any strategy can work.
Women who teach and parent well are already doing the attunement that Positive Discipline formalises. They were doing it before anyone gave it a name.
What they haven't been given is recognition that it is work. Real work. Work that costs something. Work that deserves to be seen.
So this is me, on the first Tuesday of International Women's Month, just saying: I see it.
Next week we're going further. Because naming the work is the first step. The second is asking what it costs when nobody ever checks whether the ‘cup’ is getting refilled.
I'd genuinely love to know: what's one piece of invisible work you carry that nobody has ever named for you? Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.
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