Motherhood and the Mental Load with Christy Shannon

Why does it feel like moms are expected to remember everything, manage everyone, and still somehow make it all look effortless?

In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Kristin Revere sits down with Christy Shannon, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Ollie AI, to explore the invisible mental load of motherhood and how technology can help lighten it. From managing family schedules and meal planning to keeping track of appointments and the never-ending to-do list, mothers often carry an overwhelming cognitive burden that goes unnoticed.

Christy shares her own motherhood journey, the inspiration behind creating Ollie AI, and how artificial intelligence can become a practical tool for reducing stress rather than adding to it. Together, Kristin and Christy discuss the realities of modern parenting, the importance of asking for help, and why simplifying everyday tasks can create more space for connection and joy.

Whether you're expecting your first baby, navigating the toddler years, or juggling a busy household, this conversation offers practical insights and encouragement for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the mental load of parenting.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What the "mental load" of motherhood really means
• Why invisible labor impacts maternal well-being
• How AI tools can support busy families
• Tips for reducing decision fatigue and overwhelm
• Ways partners can better share the mental load
• How technology can create more time for what matters most

If you've ever felt like you're carrying the weight of your family's endless to-do list, this episode is for you.

This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. Use the code GOLDCOAST to receive a discount of up to 20 percent off.

Subscribe to our newsletter, check out Kristin Revere’s birth and baby book, and see more about our doula services & online courses below:

https://linktr.ee/goldcoastdoulas

Transcript

Episode #348 | July 14, 2026

Why does it feel like moms are expected to remember everything, manage everyone, and still somehow make it all look effortless?

In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Kristin Revere sits down with Christy Shannon, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Ollie AI, to explore the invisible mental load of motherhood and how technology can help lighten it.  From managing family schedules and meal planning to keeping track of appointments and the never-ending to-do list, mothers often carry an overwhelming cognitive burden that goes unnoticed.

Christy shares her own motherhood journey, the inspiration behind creating Ollie AI, and how artificial intelligence can become a practical tool for reducing stress rather than adding to it.  Together, Kristin and Christy discuss the realities of modern parenting, the importance of asking for help, and why simplifying everyday tasks can create more space for connection and joy.

Whether you're expecting your first baby, navigating the toddler years, or juggling a busy household, this conversation offers practical insights and encouragement for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the mental load of parenting.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What the "mental load" of motherhood really means
• Why invisible labor impacts maternal well-being
• How AI tools can support busy families
• Tips for reducing decision fatigue and overwhelm
• Ways partners can better share the mental load
• How technology can create more time for what matters most

If you've ever felt like you're carrying the weight of your family's endless to-do list, this episode is for you.

This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth.  Use the code GOLDCOAST to receive a discount of up to 20 percent off.

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Christy Shannon today.  She is Ollie AI’s cofounder and CMO.  Christy Shannon is the kind of marketer who can build a CAC to LTV model and pack four lunch boxes before 7am, usually in the same morning.  For two decades, she has been helping brands grow by figuring out what people actually care about and turning it into stories, strategies, and campaigns that scale. 

These days, Christy is applying that same lens to the most demanding audience she’s ever worked for: her own family.  Before Ollie, Christy led marketing at Primer, where she helped top DTC brands like Hims and Madison Reed grow through high performance creative and paid social.  She’s rebranded global platforms like Fandom, built in-house creative studios from scratch, and driven acquisition at scale, all while staying relentlessly focused on making brands feel human.  As cofounder and CMO of Ollie, she’s building the AI personal assistant she wished she had through ever season of motherhood.  The one that handles the calendar, Tetris, the school forms, the weight – is it pajama day?  The dinner decisions!  Appointment reminders!  And the thousand other invisible tasks that hold a family together.  Ollie’s mission is simple: take the mental load off parents so they can spend more of their time actually being present for the people they love. 

Christy lives in southern California with her husband and four kids, who double as Ollie’s most demanding QA team.  She’s never met a spreadsheet she didn't want to color code, believes dinner should never be the hardest part of the actual day, and is building Ollie so families everywhere can spend less time managing life and more time actually living it.  Welcome, Christy! 

Hi!  Thank you so much!  It’s so nice to be here! 

I always say moms get things done, and you built a platform to solve problems that you saw in your own family.  I’m sure talking to other moms and colleagues and working with high-end brands that you had, you really solved a lot of problems.  And I’ve only touched the surface of what Ollie can do, but I’m using the calendar function in my own personal life, and it helps me stay on track in my business. 

Oh, that’s awesome.  I love that; moms do get things done.  Moms are busy, as we all know.  We take on so much in our day to day.  We have things going on both inside our families and outside our families.  And we’re trying to juggle it all.  I’ve always throughout all stages of motherhood been looking for tools and solutions to help me to be more efficient, to be a better parent, to be a better employee or whatever the case may be.  And I really found a gap in tools that could help me manage the mental work that I do every day.  I sometimes think about it like a ticker tape that runs through my head of all the to-dos that are constantly in the back of my mind.  Don’t forget to sign this form; don’t forget to go pick up this birthday gift for an upcoming party; pay the gardener.  All of these random things that we have going on in our lives, and there’s not really a great system to help with that.  So that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with Ollie. 

I love it.  And I feel like both May and December are those very demanding months if you have school-age children.  You talk about the field trips and the forms and money that’s due and appointments that need to be made and sporting events.  I find that May is just so overwhelming for me.  Even just starting using the Ollie platform within the last month has helped me a lot. 

Oh, my gosh.  That’s great to hear!  Yes, Maycember is real.  There’s just so much going on, right?  And having a second brain, something else to kind of help you think through everything that you need to do can be really valuable. 

So we are talking about the mental load today and balancing life as a mom.  What are your tips for our listeners to balance it all, other than, of course, using AI? 

Yeah, so the mental load is real.  It’s not the doing; it’s the invisible work.  If you’re familiar with Eve Rodsky, she’s done a lot of phenomenal work around this topic and even has a deck of cards that I highly recommend called The Fair Play Deck where you can sit down with your partner and divide up all of these individual tasks – the remembering, the tracking, the noticing, the anticipating – to see who in your home is taking on those things.  And you might find that one of you is doing a lot more of that.  And that stuff – the remembering, the tracking, the noticing – that’s the invisible load.  And every person has it.  With or without kids, everyone thinks about what am I going to eat and do I have a doctor’s appointment and do I need to fill the car with gas or charge it or whatever.  When you start to have kids, that starts to stack, and it’s not one plus one equals two.  It grows exponentially.  You start to have to think about – as soon as they’re born, you’re starting to track sleeping schedules and feeding schedules and you’re looking at developmental milestones and trying to remember, are they on track for this one thing, and did I write down their last bowel movement, and did I order enough diapers?  You know, all of those things start to add up very, very quickly, and that is the mental load. 

And I’m a big fan of the Fair Play Method, so I’m glad that you mentioned the card deck.  The book is great, and there are so many fantastic videos and facilitators around the country. 

There are, and I find it such a wonderful exercise for really understanding because I think so many of us go through – and I was this way for most of my life – just doing it.  Just thinking it, doing it, and not really realizing it.  You mentioned tips or tricks.  I think the very first step in understanding and helping with the mental load is making it visible and understanding what are these things that I’m doing all the time, sometimes even subconsciously, that take up my mental space.  Because if we don’t understand them, we don’t recognize them, then we can’t find solutions for them.  So identifying them is the first step.  Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play Deck is a great way of doing that.  Another tool for that can be simply writing things down as you think of them.  Like, oh, remember to refill the soap, or as I mentioned earlier, pay the gardener.  Those kinds of things that you have to do constantly – you just go through your day and don’t realize.  And if you start to visualize those, bring them forward, then you can realize, okay, these are all the things I need to do, and I need support for these things.  

If I can, I’ll share a little anecdote about myself.  I mentioned how I have four kids.  My oldest is four and a half years older than my twins.  I had twin girls.  And then about 15 months later, I had my fourth.  So I had three kids under the age of three.  Actually, the kids under the age of two for about six months.  And it was a really busy time as a mom, managing very young kids and going through the motions of parenthood and babies.  And I took some time off of work to stay home with them, and after about a year or so, I decided I wanted to sort of stair-step my way back into the work force.  So my twins were old enough to go into preschool.  I put them into preschool part time, and then I had a babysitter help out with my youngest, and I started to transition back to part-time work.  As I was doing this, I was starting to feel the weight of all of these things happening in my life: managing preschool and the babysitter and work and my older child in kindergarten at the time, and all the things that come along with that. 

One day, I took my daughters to my preschool, and I had my youngest with me, and I took them into the preschool classroom, and the teacher looked at me, and she said, “Well, did you bring snack today?”  And I looked at her and I just was blank in the face.  I had no recollection that I was supposed to bring snack, and I was devastated.  I’m such a Type A person; I couldn't imagine that I had forgotten something like that.  So I said to her, “No, no, don’t worry.  I’ve got a few extra minutes.  I’m going to run to the store, and I’ll be right back with snack.”  So I put my baby in the car, and we go down the street to the store, and I’m sort of frantically looking for the store, not paying attention, and I run a red light, and I get in a car accident.  And I’m fine; I broke my wrist.  My baby was fortunately totally fine.  And it could have been so much worse, but it was a wake-up call for me and forced me to slow down and realize that all of these little tiny things were stacking up to a point that was unmanageable.  And I couldn't take on all of this myself.  I needed support.  And so that was a moment for me to start to identify that I needed to offload some of this mental work and bring my husband in more to what I was doing and give him more visibility into what I was doing and bring my babysitter at the time, who turned into more of a nanny for us – give her more visibility into what I was doing to help me.  And it was really that I wasn’t sharing the work that was in my head.  And I wasn’t sharing all of the things that were weighing me down.  And so I needed to bring that to light so that I could have other people help me with it.  That was a really significant moment for me because I realized I can’t do it all, even though I wanted to.  I couldn't. 

And so I think as we think about the mental load and just bringing that forward, finding the visibility for it, and then finding people who can support you with that is the biggest thing you can do. 

I agree, and I feel like as moms and women, we tend to just take it on until we get to that point where there’s a big sign or we’re just so burned out and drained that we have to ask for help.  But everything stacks up and it gets to be too much. 

Yeah, absolutely.  And it can get to the point where it affects your mental health.  There’s a lot of data to support that.  In fact, the US Surgeon General issued a report last year talking about parental health and that 41% of parents say that most days, they’re so stressed they cannot function.  There’s a real need for modern parents today to get this kind of support and help and to identify these mental tasks that are weighing us down. 

Agreed.  So fill in our listeners and doula clients about your platform and how they can utilize it to help with the mental load, to handle their calendar, give reminders, and so on. 

Yeah.  So Ollie is an AI assistant.  It lives entirely in your text messages.  It was really important to us that we didn't add another thing to do to your list, so we built Ollie to be in your text messages.  It does not require an account or a log-in.  It’s simply texts.  And Ollie connects to the tools you’re already using – your email, your calendar – and it looks for important things, important information for you, and then surfaces that data to you in text message.  So for example, I have Ollie in a group chat with my husband and me, and I’ve told Ollie to look for all of our school emails and summarize those and let me know when I need to take action.  So it reads all of our school emails.  It tells me when something is important that we need to pay attention to then and sends both my husband and me a text message at the same time, so we’re both immediately on the same page.  I don’t now have that job of having to tell anyone, and as you know, if you’ve seen school emails, they’re like paragraphs long, and often the most important thing is like four paragraphs in.  You’ve got to really read through it.  So that work is done.  In Calendars, it summarizes our calendars and sends us the daily briefing every single morning for both of us to see what’s on both of our calendars and help identify conflicts, which has been really helpful.  My kids are school age now and they’re playing sports after school and so we’re constantly having conversations of who’s doing pickup, who’s doing dropoff, where are we going.  And Ollie helps manage and coordinate that schedule for us now.  So that’s been a big help. 

It also helps keep track of to-dos and reminders for us.  Anything that’s sort of in my brain that I’m trying to remember to do, I can now offload it to Ollie.  And one of my favorite things to do when I’m in the car, because it’s in text message, I can say, “Hey, Siri, send Ollie a text message to…”  And then I’ll say whatever the to-do is, and Ollie will remember it and create a reminder for me or a calendar event.  It can even draft and send emails for me.  So that is all taken care of. 

So I think of it as my second brain, and it’s a way for me to offload all of those mental tasks into an assistant that handles it and remembers it for me so I don’t have to be the one to do it. 

Exactly.  And then your husband is getting those same emails!  I have a family calendar that I share with my husband that tracks all of the appointments and sporting events and dropoffs, but he doesn’t check it the way I do.  This would be fantastic for him to utilize, as well.  

Yeah, I find just having that shared visibility is really helpful.  And then he connects his work calendar and I connect mine, so it brings all three of those calendars together in one place.  I never had that shared insight before, so that’s been really helpful for us, too. 

You mentioned your babysitter and nanny and how you involved her in your calendar, as well?  I’d love for you to touch more on that. 

Yes.  Ollie can work in a one-on-one conversation in text message, or you can incorporate other people in your family into a conversation.  So this is really helpful if you have other caregivers in your home.  So if you have a postpartum doula working with you at home, if you have a nanny, you can have them in the chat with you.  They can have visibility and shared calendar, just like you would.  If you’re tracking sleep schedules, you can do that with Ollie, and Ollie can create reports and summaries right in text messages, and your doula can be right in the conversation with you.  It can help with other to-do’s and reminders, doctor’s appointments, tracking any of that kind of information.  It can all be done in there.  Ollie can help manage that process for you, and it can do it in that same group chat with a doula, a nanny, any other caregiver in your home. 

I love that so much!  And then doulas who are sharing call for a client or working as a group with a family in the postnatal phase – I imagine that we could use that function to keep track of clients and stay on top of tasks and update on how sleep went and feedings and so on? 

Yes, exactly.  Ollie is really great at tracking and summarizing information and doing it in a way that’s easy for you to sort of process and then move on from.  You don’t have to keep thinking about it.  You can get the information you need, and then you can sort of compartmentalize it and move on. 

And you don’t need to log in to an app and deal with technology issues that might arise, if it’s all in messages versus a unique app. 

Yeah, exactly.  There’s no new system you need to learn.  It’s all in the tools you use every single day where you’re probably texting – if you’re like me, probably too many times a day. 

For sure!   So what’s next for Olie?  I know AI changes rapidly.  What do you have planned in the future? 

We are continuing to improve Ollie in the way that it learns about you and your family and is more proactive.  So Ollie is today already proactive.  It will understand and learn from the context of your information that you share with it and ask questions of you to help you stay on top of things.  We’re going to be doing more and more of that.  So if Ollie knows that you’re going to be attending a first birthday next week, it can surface relevant birthday gift ideas for you.  We’re doing more work around meals and grocery shopping.  We already today have integrations with Instacart and Walmart, and we’re going to be doing more to make the process of finding recipes, understanding your pantry, and then connecting to these stores to place orders – we’re going to be doing more to make that easier and more seamless for you. 

I love it so much!  So any other tips for our listeners, Christy? 

My biggest tip is, if you’re not already trying AI, whether it’s Ollie or something else, I would encourage you to just go and play with AI a little bit.  It’s a very powerful tool, and it can really help with your day to day.  So I would encourage you, whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT, or of course we’d love for you to use Ollie – give it a try.  Play with it and see how AI can help you.  My favorite way to use it is to ask it to be your thinking partner.  Give it an idea that you’re thinking about, and ask it questions about how to think about it differently.  You might be surprised at what kind of answers you get. 

I haven’t tried that yet!  I will have to do so!  So how can our listeners and our doula clients and doulas on our team begin signing up with Ollie?  What costs are associated and so on? 

You can find Ollie at Ollie.ai, and you can simply start texting right from that page.  There’s a button there that just says “Text Ollie” and it will open up text messages, and you can just start chatting with Ollie.  It’s as easy as that.  It’s free to start, and it’s a message-based system, so you get free messages to start and get a feel if Ollie is the right fit for you and if it’s going to help you.  And if it and you want to use it more, then the everyday plan is $25 a month.  And that gives you access to Ollie to really take on all of that day to day coordination.  But it is free to try, and no account or credit card or login is needed. 

And then that $25 per month, is that per user?  So if a nanny and multiple doulas and the father would be involved, would it be a different fee for each, or one monthly fee for the family unit? 

That’s a great question.  So that pricing is based on who initiates the conversation, so if you are paying the $25 a month, that would include your conversation and any group chats that you initiated.  So if you initiated group chats with your doula and your nanny and your partner, that would all be included in your everyday plan.  If your partner decided to go out and have one on one conversations with Ollie separately, they’ll start on the free plan and will have the ability to engage with Ollie for free until they want to upgrade to that more involved plan. 

Okay, that makes sense.  So you mentioned the website, Ollie.ai.  And then you’re also on social media?  Where can our listeners find you on social? 

They can find Ollie on Instagram: @heyollieai.  And then you can find me personally on LinkedIn.  I’m Christy Shannon on LinkedIn, and I’d love to hear from you.  Please reach out and connect with me and send me a DM.  It would be fun to connect and hear from anyone! 

Thank you so much, Christy, and we will have to have you on in the future as you expand Ollie! 

Thank you!  Thank you so much for having me!  This has been really fun. 

IMPORTANT LINKS

Ollie AI 

Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming A Mother course

Buy our book, Supported