Nowhere in that sea, though, did I find practical guidance on how to make this suck less. (And man, I desperately needed it to suck significantly less.) The collective response this pervasive mental grind down seemed to be 🤷🏻♀️.
Where were the resources to help manage all the thinking, remembering, and decision making I was now doing? Surely, there had to be a secret playbook that I didn’t know about, right?! 🫣
How could there not be? There was no more universal experience than the mental overwhelm that is American parenthood. (Yep, this side-eye is for you, Absurd Expectations for Parents.)
What I found instead was a sea of validation: articles that described how suffocating invisible labor had become, social media content that made me laugh so I wouldn’t cry, and even academic studies that told me the burn out I was barreling toward was a national trend.
Hey 👋 I’m Cassie.
After my first kid was born and I settled into (or disappeared into the abyss of) working parenthood, I felt like I was on an odyssey in The Mental Load Tundra.
And that’s how Yaya came to be.
In the constant us vs. invisible labor showdown, my Village and I needed a practical game. (Instagrammable fantasy hacks need not apply.) We needed a system to make sense of it all and strategies to manage it over the long haul. I set out to find it. When I didn’t find it, I decided to build it.
To all the parents out there: It’s not you; it is genuinely bananas out here. The school emails. The spirit weeks. The unending errands. It feels like too much because it is too much. This shit is just plain hard.
Yaya is an answer of practicality to modern parenthood, a not-so-secret playbook to finding some calm in the shitstorm. Let Yaya throw you a life preserver. Grab it, catch your breath, and we’ll pull you into some mellower waters. And yea, we’ll probably have a glass of wine for you too.
💪🏽,
CdP
Cassie del Pilar
Founder, Yaya
Mom to Alexander and Leo
Chief Chaos Tamer
Outsourcing large parts of our life were well behind our means. And smaller-scale outsourcing often meant telling someone what to do and how to do it, which was more work than actually doing it.
Partner-in-crime upgrade? That seemed like the wrong order of operations.
Not caring? I've got a heart (and parental guilt) that stubbornly cares about stuff … not all stuff but some stuff.
About Me
Hey 👋 I’m Cassie.
I’m a Chief Chaos Tamer. In other words,
I’m the mom of two young kids and a partner in a dual-income household.
While these nuggets were useful for them, they never quite struck a chord.
Outsource. Outsource. Outsource.
Have a great, supportive, engaged partner.
Embrace the fine art of not giving a f*ck
Never found that memo, but I did get these bits of wisdom from others who had been through the fire:
There is no more universal experience than the all-encompassing mental marathon that is American parenthood (yep, I'm giving side-eye to you, motherhood).
After my older son was first born, I remember looking around in desperation for the secret memo on mastering the art of nurturing a tiny human, juggling household chaos now amplified by said tiny human, all while avoiding a pink slip from the job that keeps the lights on in the aforementioned chaotic household.