Why the viral clip of 'multitasking mom' at a baseball game has enraged people online
A woman with a baby strapped to her chest, a diaper bag on her back, and her arms full of food at a Major League Baseball game has inadvertently become a metaphor for the disproportionate load mothers carry — in this case, literally.
Video of woman carrying baby, diaper bag, trays of food toward waiting man draws disbelief and scorn
Natalie Stechyson · CBC News
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A woman with a baby strapped to her chest, a diaper bag on her back, and her arms full of food at a Major League Baseball game has inadvertently become a metaphor for the disproportionate load mothers carry — in this case, literally.
The woman was singled out by two legendary broadcasters at Tuesday's game between the Giants and the Twins at Oracle Park in San Francisco as she sidestepped back toward her seat balancing three trays of food.
"Holy smokes, Mike! Look at this," Duane Kuiper says as the woman makes her way across the aisle.
"If there's ever a true definition of a multitasking mother, that is the deal right there," Mike Krukow responds in the broadcast.
The clip, which has since gone viral, shows the man in the seat next to the "multitasking mother" staring at his phone until the woman is nearly beside him, standing up to move a coat out of her seat, then digging into his food while the woman shrugs the diaper bag off her back, still holding the grinning baby and two full trays.
"Did I just hear that guy say, 'Did you forget something?'" Kuiper asks, as the two broadcasters joke that maybe he she didn't bring any ketchup.
The broadcast returned to her a few more times between pitches while Kuiper and Krukow expressed disbelief at the scene, exclaiming, "are you kidding me?" and "bless her heart" as the man popped some fried food in his mouth.
"Well, that’s mom of the year right there!" Krukow said.
"She’ll be the last one to eat, too," added Kuiper.
Neither the woman nor the man sitting beside her have been identified. CBC News has contacted the San Francisco Giants and NBC for comment, but has yet to hear back.
Visual of a familiar sentiment
Without hearing from the people involved, observers can't know the context of the situation — like whether the man is her partner, or whether or not help was offered.
But while some have argued you can't judge a situation based on a short clip, for many others, "multitasking mom" represents invisible labour, the mental load of motherhood, and weaponized incompetence.
"How do I divorce someone else’s husband?" one person asked in the comments of an ESPNW Instagram reel of the clip viewed 40 million times by Friday. The comment was "liked" nearly 115,000 times.
"Let us stop normalizing this," someone else commented.
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The clip is resonating because it gave a visual to a familiar sentiment — that women do more household labour and family management, explained Shana MacDonald, the O'Donovan Chair in communication at the University of Waterloo, who researches social and digital media.
"This showed that in a very direct but almost comical way," she told CBC News.
On a broader scale, the past year has seen a significant increase in conversations around motherhood, MacDonald added. Some parts of society are emphasizing motherhood as "womens' central calling," she noted, while in other spheres, we're hearing more concerns about burnout and lack of support.
That includes some of the recent conversations about Lindsay Clancy, the U.S. mom who was on trial for the deaths of her three children, MacDonald said.
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The clip from the Giants game offers people a chance to voice their frustrations, Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Studies in Population, told CBC News.
She cautioned people against rendering judgments without knowing any of the context, while adding that the clip has tapped into the anger about structural inequalities in our society.
In the U.S., for instance, reproductive rights are being rolled back, she noted, and so-called "trad wives" that glamourize domestic life are on the rise.
In Canada, while some studies have found that fathers are taking on more parenting than they have in the past, others have found mothers are still generally the managers of the household. Women also still consistently take on a larger share of unpaid household work, including chores and child care, according to a 2022 Statistics Canada report.
All that to say, a woman balancing trays of dinner and a baby while a man next to her eats seems to be triggering for a lot of people, Strohschein said.
"Women, when they see this — I think it's kind of like the last straw."
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Natalie Stechyson has been a writer and editor at CBC News since 2021. She covers stories on social trends, families, gender, human interest, as well as general news. She's worked as a journalist since 2009, with stints at the Globe and Mail and Postmedia News, among others. Before joining CBC News, she was the parents editor at HuffPost Canada, where she won a silver Canadian Online Publishing Award for her work on pregnancy loss. You can reach her at natalie.stechyson@cbc.ca.
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