Nobody Told Me I’d Be Too Busy Making the Memories to Enjoy Them

A few weeks before her son Oliver turned eight, Jessica Koosed Etting found herself facing a familiar, quiet burden that begins long before any guests arrive or candles are lit. Planning a child’s birthday celebration had quietly taken up permanent residence in her brain, turning a joyful milestone into an intricate logistical challenge managed entirely behind the scenes.

The plans themselves were modest and rooted in beloved family traditions rather than extravagance. The agenda for Oliver’s eighth birthday included extended family coming over for dinner and cake, alongside rituals the family had built carefully over the years. There would be breakfast in bed complete with balloons, the opening of presents, dedicated time with grandparents, and a dinner featuring his absolute favorite meal. To cap off the night, the family would gather around the table to share three things they loved most about him. These intimate traditions formed the true essence of what Etting and her family considered birthday magic.

Yet, as any parent—and particularly any mother—knows all too well, those moments of magic do not simply manifest out of thin air.

In the weeks leading up to the big day, Etting’s mind was constantly running through a marathon checklist: figuring out what Oliver wanted, planning the menu, grocery shopping, wrapping gifts, sourcing festive decorations, coordinating wish lists with extended family members, ordering the cake, ensuring his brothers had their own gifts ready to give him, and making sure she remembered to buy the specific brand of cereal he wanted for his birthday morning. She was juggling every single one of these logistical details alongside her professional work, school commitments, regular evening dinners, and the endless stream of tasks required to keep a multi-child household running.

When the big day finally arrived, the celebration went off largely as planned. Oliver was thrilled, his brothers shared in the excitement, and the extended family was fully present. At one point during the evening, as the boys laughed and played with their grandparents, Etting felt a natural pull to go sit down with them and soak in the joy of the room.

Instead, her internal cruise-director brain immediately took over. She calculated that if she did not get up to clear the dinner dishes right at that exact moment, the cake would be served too late, throwing off the carefully timed schedule that still needed to accommodate opening presents before bedtime.

So, she got up from the table. She set out the cake and dessert plates, tracked down the candles she had purchased weeks prior, rounded everyone up for the traditional singing, and made sure to snap the required photographs. Then came the inevitable second wave of labor: clearing more dishes, cleaning up scattered wrapping paper, and eventually trying to wrangle three over-tired children into their beds for the night.

Later that evening, once the house had finally gone quiet, Etting sat down on the couch and scrolled through the photos on her phone, looking at the smiling faces captured throughout the evening. They were precisely the kind of images that make an observer think to themselves that this was the good stuff of childhood.

Yet, a profound realization hit her: she could not actually remember a single moment from the entire evening where she had genuinely relaxed, enjoyed herself, or felt truly present with her son. And, most distressingly, birthdays were far from the only time she experienced this hollow disconnect.

The Mental Load of Making Memories

Etting had always envisioned herself as the type of mother who would thoroughly relish the process of crafting fun, imaginative memories for her children. However, until she experienced parenthood firsthand, she had no comprehension of the sheer volume of invisible labor required to manufacture those quintessential moments of childhood magic.

Tooth fairy visits, elaborate holiday traditions, meticulously packed family vacations, and carefully curated weekend outings all demand someone behind the scenes to map out the logistics, anticipate needs, and manage the timeline well in advance. In the vast majority of households, that designated planner is Mom.

To be clear, Etting emphasizes that she genuinely loves creating joyful moments for her family. She recognizes that this level of festive curation is not every parent’s priority, but it was an aspect of motherhood she personally wanted to embrace and maintain. Even so, she quickly realized that something fundamental needed to change.

While she was busy planning, managing, and executing the entire experience from an aerial view, she was entirely failing to participate in it as a human being. Instead of actually enjoying a tranquil afternoon sitting on the beach with her children, her mind was already racing ahead—calculating who needed their sunscreen reapplied, figuring out what groceries needed to be purchased for the following day’s meals, or mentally drafting an email response to one of her kids’ sports coaches.

While a certain baseline of organization is undeniably unavoidable in family life, Etting realized that the entirety of the mental burden did not have to rest squarely on her shoulders.

Learning to Be Present in the Moment

Reaching a healthier equilibrium was far from an overnight fix. Etting notes that it took years of intentional effort to build better habits surrounding how her family approaches planning and the division of household labor. To this day, she still finds herself occasionally slipping back into autopilot cruise-director mode when high-stress events pop up on the family calendar.

However, her professional background provided a unique lens through which to view the problem. As the founder of Jam, an all-in-one family calendar and organization application explicitly designed to reduce the crushing mental load of modern family life, she has spent countless hours analyzing how families can better distribute invisible labor. Over the years, she has discovered practical strategies to alleviate that weight, particularly when trying to navigate special, memory-making milestones without sacrificing her own ability to experience them.

Despite the necessity of planning, Etting’s perspective shifted profoundly over time as she began to recognize that some of the most deeply cherished moments with her children require zero planning whatsoever. They are found in the quiet margins of daily life: a slow Sunday morning where nobody has anywhere they need to be, an extra few minutes of bedtime cuddles and back-scratching, or sharing a final ice cream cone on a warm summer evening before the rigid structure of the school year takes over once again.

Yet, those unscripted, effortless moments are also the easiest to let slip through your fingers when even half of your cognitive energy is already living in tomorrow.

Today, Etting is far more attuned to the constant, magnetic pull of the mental load, and she has learned the importance of actively pressing the pause button when it threatens to steal her attention. She acknowledges that in a busy household with three children and a demanding career, there will always be a next task waiting around the corner—it is an inescapable reality of working motherhood.

Even so, she maintains a heightened awareness that she does not want to rush through her children’s formative years by constantly preparing for whatever phase comes next. Sometimes a quiet Sunday morning is genuinely a good time to get a head start on the upcoming week’s administrative tasks, but other times, it is a time to simply stand still.

When she looks back at the photographs capturing her family’s milestones, Etting no longer wants to see only the beautifully orchestrated scenes she managed to pull together for her children’s benefit. She wants to remember what it genuinely felt like to be right there in the room, sharing the experience with them, too.