My mother remembers everything — from her wedding anniversary to my father’s misplaced spectacles, my cousins' birthdays to everyone’s doctors' appointments. She remembers to call, to send gifts, to care. My aunt once forgot to give gifts to my uncle’s sisters; she was met with humiliation and disrespect. Her one act of forgetting became larger than all her years of remembering. It was then that I realised that in families, friendships and love, there are always those who do the remembering and those who live in the comfort of being remembered. And most often, it is women who remember.
Remembering is not just a personal habit; it is a form of labour, one that often goes unacknowledged, unpaid, and unspoken. The act of remembering sustains households and relationships; yet it is rarely recognised as work. The concept of emotional labour crafted by the sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, helps reveal how women are expected to maintain the emotional and the social balance of families. Due to their subordinate position, women have a particular relationship with emotion work. First, to the extent that women are dependent upon men for financial support, emotion can become a good that is exchanged in significant relationships.
Remembering small things like the place where the button of a shirt is kept or the dates when in-laws visited is part of what feminist writers call the mental load — the continuous, invisible planning and recalling that ensures that everything runs smoothly. This work is so naturalised that when women fail to perform it, they are seen as careless. But men’s forgetfulness is treated as harmless or human. Forgetting, thus, becomes a privilege, one that women are rarely allowed.
Who remembers and who forgets reflect deeper hierarchies of care and responsibility. The expectation that women will remember is rooted in patriarchal divisions of labour. In most households, women become the repositories of family histories. Men, on the other hand, live without the same obligation to remember. As the scholar, Silvia Federici, reminds us, the unpaid work of women sustains not only families but also entire systems. The act of remembering becomes part of that hidden labour that keeps the world intact.
When women forget, even momentarily, the social order gets rankled. Their forgetting is not seen as a small oversight; it becomes a failure in terms of the role they have been assigned — the role of keeper, organiser, and emotional anchor. There is a quiet defiance in forgetting. Yet such defiance often comes at the cost of disapproval, anger, humiliation, and even gender-based violence.
Feminist scholars like Bell Hooks and Sara Ahmed remind us that remembering is political; it ties people, histories, and responsibilities together. But for women, remembering also becomes a form of captivity. To forget, then, becomes a form of freedom. It involves reclaiming one’s time, one’s right to rest and exist beyond memory.
What would it look like if remembering became a collective act instead of a gendered burden? If care, reminders, and the invisible labour of holding everything together were shared equally, relationships would become spaces of partnership instead of performance.
These days, I try to remind my mother to take her medicines, to call her friends, to rest. Not because she forgets, but because I want her to experience the comfort she has always given others: the comfort of being remembered.
