“Wouldn’t it be nice to have gotten paid for what we did as wives? Personal assistants get paid. Dog walkers get paid. Housekeepers get paid,” asks divorced mom Lauren of her two friends Sophie and Madeline, who are also divorced mothers in the new novel, The Wife App.

Let’s ponder this. What if the jobs of wife and mother came with a salary commensurate with job responsibilities? Jeff Bezos and Oprah would be asking me for a loan, as I, for one, would be a zillionaire.

I’ve been a wife for 35 years and a mom for 28. Hence, I cracked open the first adult novel by acclaimed young-adult author Carolyn Mackler as though it were a window letting in fresh air.

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Wife: The Business

Although the story is set in New York City, women anywhere and everywhere can relate to feeling tired of being taken for granted and cheer on the troika as they create a fast-growing startup to monetize a wife’s labor.

Explains Laura, “People—we call them Spouses—join the app and hand over their mental load, their to-do lists, their annoying chores. The wives, capital W, on the Wife App, manage everything that people expect actual wives to juggle for free while also balancing careers and kids. Bottom line: for a fee, we perform the services of a wife.”

The wives, capital W, on the Wife App, manage everything that people expect actual wives to juggle for free while also balancing careers and kids.

What are these “mental loads”? Anything that has to do with school: forms, drop-off/pick-up, cupcakes for the class party, and so on; healthcare appointments and, of course, forms; vacation and birthday party planning; pet care needs; camp paraphernalia, and indeed, forms; and everything holiday-related from decorating to fête arrangements to gift buying; and there’s always more forms.

In fact, when my son Luke, 28, and daughter Meg, 25, were in grade school, the joke among the moms—as our mental loads were about to give us a mental breakdown (probably induced by forms)—was, “I need a wife.”

Creating the app is more than just a way for the protagonists to go into business for themselves. It changes the lives of Lauren, Sophie, and Madeline on a personal level in ways they never dreamed of when they were sitting around watching miserably as their ex-husbands ran around with the former babysitter, remarried with a new family, or moved to London, respectively.

What I Earned as a Wife

Although I couldn’t relate to their collective marital status, I could understand the satisfaction and career/life-altering experience of becoming an entrepreneur.

When Luke was born, I quit my full-time advertising copywriter job to become a stay-at-home mother and freelance writer. After more than a decade of working on whatever accounts my agencies happened to have landed, I was finally in a position to serve the type of clients whose products I actually had an affinity for, many of them in the entertainment industry. There’s nothing like the experience of a new business venture taking off. I actually lived it twice when in the early aughts I moved away from advertising and began my second act as an (eventually successful) essayist writing for newspapers, magazines, and websites.

Your payoff and bonus rolled into one is that you’ve raised solid citizens.

I realize that not every mom’s situation can allow them to let loose their inner entrepreneur, but I’m positive every mom can relate to putting in an 18-hour day without pay. Being a wife/mother is like being an intern, except at the end of the term there’s no 360-eval that informs you your hard work has paid off and now you’re promoted to a salaried position.

Your payoff and bonus rolled into one is that you’ve raised solid citizens.

The novel is still a reminder of how much mental load falls upon wives/mothers and how we need to take care of ourselves the same way we take care of everyone else. (I’ll spare you the airplane oxygen mask analogy.) Now is as good a time as any, given it’s summer, which is often less chaotic than during the school year, just in general—no matter if you have kids in school or not.

Carve out some time each day. Binge a TV show or read a good book, like The Wife App. Pay yourself with me time.

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Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of several novels, most recently The Last Single Woman in New York City (Heliotrope Books).