MOMENT | How to share the mental load without fighting, with Eve Rodsky

0:03Hi, everyone, and welcome to this Motherkind moment. Thank you for being here. Thank you for pressing that play button. I appreciate you very much. Welcome to this moment. This is your place on a Monday for calm, connection, and maybe even a shift in perspective before the crazy week ahead. This week's clip is with the brilliant Eve Rodsky, who's the author of Fair Play. Eve created a system for families seeking balance, efficiency, and more peace in their lives. Who doesn't want that? She called the system Fair Play and it's a time and anxiety saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities.

0:47If you haven't listened to the full episode, then I really, really, really encourage you to do so. It's one of those game changing episodes that I got hundreds of emails from our community about. If you just search Mother Kind Eve Rodsky, wherever you're listening to this, it will come up. In this short clip, Eve talks about how to redress the balance of domestic duties in your home and why it is so fundamental for us to do that. And here is the episode and clip from Eve. You did something that actually a lot of women report to me are afraid to do. You sat down to have a conversation. So let's talk about communication for a second.

1:27Yes. I had a wonderful interview with someone who said to me that she did not want to have a conversation. Like you did tell me your husband's name again. Guy. With Guy. You know, her conversation with her guy over domestic labor, over childcare in the home, because she was just concerned her husband was going to listen. It was going to cause a fight. The same woman in our interview later on tells me that when her husband forgets to put the clothes in the dryer, when he forgets to take them out of the washer, she puts them on his pillow. She takes the wet clothes and puts them on his pillow. Same woman who told me she doesn't want to talk about domestic life.

2:10So what I'll say to you, and there's other women that I've interviewed, and there's funny articles online to confirm this, who say the same thing to me, but then they have public Instagram accounts called things like the shit my husband doesn't pick up. And they take a picture and publicly shame their spouse for every piece of garbage or piece of clothing that's left on the floor. So what I'm going to say is very important. You are already communicating. Every one of your listeners is already communicating, whether it's by public shaming, eye rolling, withholding emotions, walking away, issuing those drill sergeant-like requests like I did, or that the wife of my glue stick man did.

2:51We are already communicating. So what I'm asking women is to communicate in a shift, communication shift, not a communication start. So you already told us that you were able to sit down with Guy. But I wanted to pause to say that a lot of women aren't even at that step yet, where they feel like they can have a conversation about domestic life. So what I'm saying to them is, I promise you, you're already communicating. This is just a way to communicate in a way that's productive. And men love it. They are eating it up because it's a way to be unemotional. They use the word onboarding to a system.

3:29They know their role. I had one man say to me, if men don't believe in systems like you've set up, just have them watch football or have them watch a basketball game because coaches know about systems. You don't show up to a field and say, which position am I playing? You know your role. What I'm saying to women is men are receptive and I give you the tools and fair play to start the conversation. I even give you a little paperless post invite to hand over to your partner if you're stuck. So tell us then about the game. We've got these hundred cards. How do we play? Okay. So the hundred cards evolved from what was eventually unhelpful, which was a spreadsheet called the Should I Do.

4:19So the Should I Do spreadsheet was the most cathartic, amazing thing I could have ever done. And it went viral amongst groups of women across America, helping me source the shit I do spreadsheets. And that is where the cards have come from. What I realized about the shit I do is that lists alone don't work, but systems do. So when I started to gamify and use rules that I use in my day job, I'm a mediator, a lawyer, and an organizational management specialist. When I started to use the system language that I use with my clients, things started to change. So here's how it goes. There's a hundred cards in the system.

4:57Those cards are divided up based on what I call mustard. All you have to do is understand mustard to understand how the game works. So of the hundred cards, when you take a card, you just have to think about mustard. And when you think about mustard, think about the fact that your second child only likes mustard. They don't like ketchup and they like the yellow kind, not Dijon. Then you have to have a place to write down that they like that yellow mustard, some sort of list, grocery list, I don't know, email to yourself on your phone. That's step two. And then you actually go to get the mustard at the store.

5:39That's step three. So women are knowing all over the world that their second son likes mustard. That's what women hold. That's conception. Women are also planning for how to get that mustard. That's the planning part, the list, knowing when they're going to get to the store. Men come in on the execution side. And that's minimally helpful. That is a glue stick moment. When you can hand over to Guy or to all of our men the full mustard situation, where you're going to be thinking about it, to planning it, to executing it, It is transformative. And this is such an important point because you say in the book, this is mental load.

6:27If we are still thinking about the tasks that we need to quote unquote delegate, it is not playing fair. Real freedom, and I want to talk about unicorn time, do not let us forget about that, but real freedom is about not having to think about, as you say, the mustard. If I have to remind you, it is not helpful to me. It is not helpful to me. If I have to remind you, it is not helpful to me. A great study just came out of Harvard, which was perfect timing for fair play that showed that women, even highly educated women who are able to have conversations with their partners who have, obviously they're in the workplace, they'd have difficult conversations on a daily basis are still the ones holding the cognitive labor.

7:17That cognitive labor is the term, the scientific term. I call it CPE, conception, planning, and execution, or mustard, however you want to think about it. But it is imperative that when you hand over full ownership of something, you include the conception and planning.

7:43Thank you.