Validating Motherhood

Essays & Blogs That Examine Mental Load, Emotional Work & Identity.
Resources, Tools & Systems Created To Reduce the Invisible Labor of Motherhood.

Curated By Author, Systems Engineer & Mom, Maera Vale; For Mothers, Caretakers, Partners, Household Managers & Primary Planners. 

Who is Maera Vale

CORE BELIEF

Experiencing mental load is not a failure of productivity.
It is a structural imbalance shaped by culture, gender
expectation, identity, and inherited responsibility.
Relief does not come from "trying harder," it comes
from clarity, structure and conscious redistribution.

The Mental Load Project exists at the intersection of
emotional intelligence and structural clarity, it exists
to help caregivers carry less without becoming
someone else.

Who is Maera Vale

Maera Vale Logo Author Founder The Mental Load Project
Maera Vale Logo Author Founder The Mental Load Project
Maera Vale Logo Author Founder The Mental Load Project

Maera Vale is a writer and systems-minded observer of modern motherhood, emotional labor, and the invisible architectures that hold families and women’s lives together.

Her work explores the psychological, relational, and cultural weight carried by women, particularly mothers, whose labor is rarely named, measured, or shared. With a voice that blends clarity, restraint, and emotional precision, Maera writes for women who are tired not because they lack strength, but because they have been strong for too long.

She is the founder of The Mental Load Project, a body of work dedicated to making the unseen visible, through language, structure, and shared understanding. Her writing rejects performative positivity and instead offers recognition, coherence, and truth as forms of relief.

Maera writes from lived experience, systems thinking, and deep attention to the inner lives of women navigating care, responsibility, transitional phases, creativity, and selfhood. She believes that naming reality is the first step toward changing it.

Maera Vale Author and Founder The Mental Load Project