I Choose...To Play Fair (or at least try) with Eve Rodsky

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Garth.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Everyone, welcome to I Choose Me.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
This podcast is all about the choices we make and
where they lead us. Today, I wanted to get into
a really cool topic something I think my hubs needs
to join me for a babe.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Can you just join me for this conversation?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I'm here, Okay, good.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
It's something that all couples have to navigate. How do
you decide who's going to do what when it comes
to running a household? No one talks about this. Well,
today we're going to be joined by Eve Rodsky, who
wrote the New York Times bestselling book.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
All about this topic. It's called fair Play.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Just the title alone has me ready for this fun conversation.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Are you ready for it?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Baby? Yeah? I think so.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Please welcome Ev Rodsky to the podcast. Hi, Hi Eve,
thank you for being with us.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
I'm so happy to be here. Hi Daan, Hi Jenny.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
This is so fun.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I want to just let's just start with this. How
did you come to write a book called fair Play?
And it's not only a book, it's a it's a
documentary and now a card game.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Correct it's everything all in one. And I will say
a very simply Jenny and Dave. It's because my husband
set sent me a text that said, I'm surprised you
didn't get blueberries. Wait wait, wait, that's why. That's why
I did blueberries at home. So let's just want to
let's picture the scene.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
I had a breast pump and a diaper bag on
the passenger seat in my car. I was driving to
pick up my son from his Tawler transition program, which
lasts like three minutes in LA as we know, and
they cost our entire salaries because we don't have universal

(02:00):
childcare in the United States. I had just been gotten
off the phone with my workplace, who told me that
they had given away all my direct reports. I'm a
lawyer and I was working in number finance while I
was on maternity leave, and that if I wanted to
breastfeed when I came back, that it would have to
be in a supply closet and I'd have to bring

(02:21):
a battery pack because they didn't have an outlet because
we had an open floor plan at the time.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
What year was that, Oh, this.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
Is twenty eleven. This is twenty eleven, and so this
is what's all. And then of course there's the gifts
for the newborn baby to return in the backseat of
the car you're busy late, And then on top of it,
I get this text. And so as you know, for
those who live in La like, we don't really take

(02:48):
it lightly to pull over because you know there's a
lot of traffic getting across town, especially if you're going
east around three o'clock, and so nightmare. So for me
to pull over and be late to pick up my
son Zach and to cry in my car about being
the fulfiller of my husband's smoothie needs, you know that

(03:11):
something was going wrong. And what I want to just
say is that I think my life changed that day
because as a private citizen, as a lawyer, as somebody
who is known, what I'm to take pride in is
my research. I was really really alarmed later on that

(03:33):
women's shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes
to run a home and family, regardless of whether or
not they make more money, and actually even gets worse
for women as they make more money in the family.
I think what I if I had known that, my
life would have been a lot better. So Ever, since
that Blueberries breakdown, my trajectory in my life has been

(03:54):
so different because I feel like a personal vellet candmitted
to warning couples that as fair as you think, life
is going to be. As one woman said to me,
what fair play taught her with the movement taught her,
which we'll talk about the documentary of the book The
Cards would it taught her and her partner was that

(04:16):
she actually didn't have a magical vagina that whispered in
her in her ear what her husband's mother wanted for Christmas.
And so that's really the goal. The goal is to
realize that this is work. It's a lot of work,
it's a practice. And if we all just got rid
of that assumptions and we moved to more structured decision

(04:37):
making tools, then couples and relationships they just get better.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
I think I've had a blueberry breakdown of my own,
but it looked different, just the similarities, and I perhaps
might have a magical vagina, honey, So don't let her
convince you, right right, right, No.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
No, we don't have to.

Speaker 5 (04:57):
I'd like to know your blueberry, blueberry, it's a good one.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Well, no, I think.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
My blueberry was a little more simple than yours. It
was just you know, when you you drop all the
blueberries either in the grocery store and they fly everywhere
or in the kitchen. Yeah, that's a blueberry breakdown for me.
But yours is much more profound because you're right, there's
just not enough information out there about, you know, what

(05:23):
happens after you say I do and then you know,
there are books about becoming a parent, raising a baby,
raising teens, all of that, but there's no information out
there about how to navigate the day in the day out,
the nitty gritty, that not so fun conversation with your
partner that we have to have in order to make
everybody feel appreciated.

Speaker 5 (05:45):
To run essentially the business of the family, Yeah, because
it's a structure and it has to have, you know,
a schedule, it has to have like you know, I.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
Think when we first jobs, Yeah, I think when we
first met, you didn't really have any concept of like
running a household or running being a partner in running
a family. Because he came in to our our lives.
I had already had three kids, I was divorced, we
had four dogs at the time.

Speaker 5 (06:18):
I was this seven year old, eleven year old and
a sixteen year old.

Speaker 4 (06:23):
Yeah wow wow yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
There and there was a lot and there was also.

Speaker 5 (06:30):
Not a lot of structure where no one had labels
of what was their duty around the house.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, that goes like to the family extension, the family unit.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
And that's me, that's my bad.

Speaker 5 (06:44):
I did come in and go, okay, well the girls
are supposed to do this. I'll do this, you'll do this,
and then we'll do that.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
What Yeah, wait it didn't work out that way.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
No, no, well well you know what, I'll tell you
what I didn't work out. It didn't work out that
way because no one's ever ever talks, never has talked
about the home as an organization. And so I will
tell you Dave and Jenny that even my aunt Marion's
Magen group, I feel for Dave, even my aunt Marion's

(07:19):
Magen group, I realized as I was writing fair Play
had more clearly defined expectations in the home, like you
didn't bring snack twice to that group and you were out.
But literally I remember interviewing a systems engineer, a man
who literally wrote systems for a living, and he said
to me that in his home they make the same
decision every night. They decide who's taking the dog out

(07:41):
right when it's about to take a piss on the rug.
And this is a man who creates systems. What a
system is is, as Dave was trying to do, figure
out in advance, who's responsible for what, so that in
the moment your emotion can stay pretty low and your
cognition can stay high. Because when there is no system,

(08:02):
what happens for everybody is we have this three toxic words, right,
we're going to figure it out. But figure it out
just means that we're going to either go back to assumption,
or are the dog's going to be pissing on the
rug or the twoth fairy doesn't come that night because
we all thought we were going to do it. And
that is what I was coming into when I wrote
fair Play, that this can't be good if at Marian's

(08:25):
masa group runs more smoothly than people's homes. And it
actually allowed me to get more grace for Seth because
this poor man, right to this day he says, how
do you get more fairness in a heterosist gender couple.
He's like, well, you just have to have your wife
write a book about you that portrays you in a
really bad, terrible light. But really, what the empathy I

(08:48):
was able to get for Seth over time was that
that magical vagina. Those assumptions that we're talking about. If
you think it's just going to figure we're going to
figure it out, all we have is really what we
saw in our childhood. All we have is what society
tells us. Right, we don't get to make those active
decisions for ourselves, so then we just become the default.
And often that's a race to the bottom. So it's

(09:11):
not something that was gonna work for me anymore, right.

Speaker 5 (09:15):
I Mean we come from you know, similar like households
where you know, everybody had like some sort of structure
and chores and all that stuff and hard working and
everybody pitched in.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
But it's kind of gone off the rails.

Speaker 5 (09:31):
I mean, it does go It just goes off the
rails naturally, but I mean it's, yeah, it goes off.
We literally just had a couple of days ago we
had this conversation. There's you know, about what certain chores
and what people do and this and that and sometimes

(09:53):
you know, my my chores to unload the dishwasher, I
do it because I'm the first one up in the morning.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
So I'm like, I do it. And sometimes I just
don't want to do it.

Speaker 5 (10:04):
Yeah, and I'll just leave and go to work and
I'll see I'll see if someone's done it. No one's
done it, so let's do it. Sometimes I throw tests
out there fun.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
But again, that that is that I would say that
that is what's great is like hashtag We're all normal
because we're all doing that that same thing. But I
think what's so hard about that is that often we're
communicating in our heads and so we're expecting that somebody
knows what, you know, what what we should and shouldn't

(10:37):
be doing. And but but the problem I also think,
especially if you're bringing kids to the table with this,
is that what I'm trying to convince people and this
I'll just take one step back. So after the blueberries breakdown,
one thing I realized as a researcher, I put my
researcher hat on. It turns out that what we're talking
about actually has a name. It's had a name for

(10:58):
many decades. Right. It's called the second shift, emotional labor.
It's called invisible work. It's often done by women. But
what this work is, it's the work of the household.
But the problem is because people hadn't been treating the
home as an organization. We just associated with motherhood. But
as Dave just said, what does dishes have to do

(11:20):
with motherhood? Right? What is taking out not the garbage
because that that is a male masculine task that people understand.
But what is teaching a kid how to ride a
bike and knowing that you have to do that. That's
one of the fair place cards I'm showing you. What
does that have to do with motherhood? What when you
have to decide whether your child's adnoids are being taken

(11:40):
out or not? Why does a doctor just call the mother?
Why does that have Why would that fall in the mother?
Maybe the partner, the father or the stepfather or the
partner has more information on adnoids. But that's what happens,
is that we make these assumptions and so and then
it sort of falls on our kids to look at
this as ah, I don't want to help with chores

(12:01):
of the housework, so I always like to say, let's
back it up. Maybe I didn't ask your producer whether
this would be okay, but I think it would be fun,
given what we're saying, to like play a little game
about why this is how kids should be looking at
this just because you just said that, would you be
willing to pay?

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Be totally willing?

Speaker 3 (12:19):
I mean, the only thing is that the kids have
a dad who I kind of do a lot of
the nitty gritty of the parenting. Also, I need to
come back and circle back on the adnoid thing. I
want to make sure I know what an adnoid is and.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Us, by the way, I second that.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
The other thing is, you know, Dave and I do
work in partnership on this home and as it runs
now with two adult children and one well I guess
three adult children. Now she's eighteen, so things are different
than they things are different when they were little, for sure.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Totally yeah, yeah changed.

Speaker 5 (12:56):
And the twenty two year old has went to college,
came back and is now working with Jenny, and you
know it's it's definitely changed as they've grow.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Let's play the game, though, Yeah, let's try it.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Well.

Speaker 4 (13:09):
I think you'll see what I mean about how to
start having these conversations, especially what I like about it,
even with your daughter as she starts to partner with someone, right,
we don't want to model. I was the person who
had to do it all, so that you have to
do it all like that's I saw that because I
had I didn't have a father really in the picture,
so I really didn't really know that there was a

(13:31):
day or someone who would even open the dishwasher to
see if there was an addition there.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
I mean, sometimes even if you do have that male
figure in the home, you're still the lady, the mom.
That's right, that woman, the magical vagina is still doing
that's right.

Speaker 4 (13:45):
So let's play. I think these are the conversations. So
we're looking at the fair play cards. So if you
step back. When I was starting to look at this
issue around invisible work the second shift, the only advice
I had and Dave was, if you're so overwhelmed, make
a list. If you're so overwhelmed, get help, And so
I ended up doing that. I made this huge spreadsheet

(14:07):
called the Shit I Do Spreadsheet that was ninety eight
tabs and about two thousand items of invisible work, and
it took me nine months. I did send it to Seth.
I didn't get the response that I was hoping for.
I sent it with no nine months in twenty twelve.
Over this is early Facebook, where I was sending it

(14:27):
out to women I didn't even know I was getting responses.
I got a response from a woman of the Jewish
Federation of Arizona, I remember, and she said, I got
your spreadsheet. I want to let you know that I'm
not staying in my marriage. So I was like, whoa,
this is maybe they do way too much shit. Yes, yes,
so I was like, oh, thanks for the information. But

(14:48):
so this this was sent to Seth I did. I
can't wait to discuss. I got the early version of
like a pixelated monkey emoji with him covering his eyes.
So learn very early on that you know, no context
is not so helpful in a partnership. See no evil
is sort of probably the easiest way not to engage.

(15:09):
But what I did know from my day job, because
I'm a lawyer, I work with the families that look
like HBO shows succession. You should feel bad for me.
But what I do for those families is I do
use governance and organizational tools, as we were saying earlier, Dave,
to bring structure and grace in humor and some generosity
to these really difficult succession decisions, So I thought, well,

(15:31):
what if I use those same tools and build something
for the home. So one of the first things I
do with my clients before they start getting into well
I'm doing this job or I'm going to take this over,
you just have to sort of bring it back to
the why. So that's what I wanted to do with
the exercise. I just want to grab all of these cards.
I'm just going to shuffle them, and I just want

(15:52):
to stop at one. I'm going to practice, and each
one of you will pick one, or we can just
do one for both, and then we can well, I
just want to show you how to have the why
conversations that you can bring your children into, because it's
going to show you spoiler alert that this is the
stuff we're talking about is so much more than chores
and housework and how to run your home. It's about

(16:12):
really the core of like our humanity and our values
so exactly. So let's just let's just I'll just tell you,
just tell me when to stop, and we'll just see
what you get. Oh, okay, we'll see what this one is.
This will be Jenny's and then we'll do one for
you day. Okay, Jenny you got gifts for family. So

(16:34):
what I want to know, and this is there's a
different card for gifts for VIPs, which is people outside
your home, but family gifts. What I want to know is, like,
what do you remember about any gift giving from your childhood?

Speaker 3 (16:45):
From my childhood, I remember my mom and dad giving
me gifts mostly. I don't really remember my siblings giving
me gifts, okay, off the top of my head. And
they were always at Christmas and Birthday just.

Speaker 4 (16:59):
That, okay, And what do you remember were you excited?
Were you more excited for your birthday or Christmas? Did
your family have big traditions around these yeah, or is
it more like, uh, we just throw a dollar under
the pillow for you know or something.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
No, it was Christmas definitely. That was the one to
look forward to all year.

Speaker 4 (17:16):
Okay, what did that look like? So tell me a
little bit about do you remember any gift that you
got in your childhood that you can remember that you're
excited about.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
I remember my mom would always wrap things really beautifully,
and so it was just you just would shake them
and try to figure out what was in them for
the week leading up to Christmas, and I remember this
is so silly I got a Michael Jackson record.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
I was stoked about.

Speaker 4 (17:43):
Oh my god, that would have been so good. Would
you remember if it was thriller or thriller? Oh yeah,
that would have been literally my favorite gift because we
Billy Jean. We used to like go to the roller rink.
So Michael Jackson record, and you did you get that
from your parents or say?

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, well that's what I don't really remember.

Speaker 5 (18:03):
It feels like a sister gift. No, think it doesn't
seem like a me would buy you.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Maybe I'm mistaken.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
She did buy me some piggy slippers, though, I remember that.

Speaker 4 (18:16):
Oh I love that, And I will say that maybe
that's just a really good mother who's like, like, right now,
I'm a good mother. I like woke my son up
with Playboy Cardis album dropped. So maybe she just that. Yeah,
maybe this was like the Playboy Cardi album drop of
the eighties. Okay, so that's well. And then how many

(18:37):
siblings did you have? How many other people were getting
gifts around that time?

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Three sisters in the house at that time?

Speaker 4 (18:43):
Oh wow? So okay, So in thirty seconds I learned
that Jenny had a robust family that her parents were together,
that Christmas was a tradition. So I'm starting to learn
stuff about you that you like, Michael Jackson. So that's
really fun. So love, Yes, let's do it with you.
Let's just keep going until we stop. Dave stop. Oh okay,

(19:11):
this one is hard questions, right, hard question, hard questions?
So anything off limits in your childhood? Like how did
you learn about the birds and the bees? Did you
have any difficult conversations with your parents? Do you remember
any anybody? Did you just sort of sail through have

(19:34):
to figure it out yourself? Like do you remember any
adult actually answering hard questions for you?

Speaker 5 (19:38):
I'm just curious, no, no.

Speaker 4 (19:42):
No, okay, elaborate.

Speaker 5 (19:44):
I'm trying to think of all the questions that I
would have had.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
You didn't ask your mom and dad like tough questions.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Well I.

Speaker 4 (19:57):
Didn't, La.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
I just later found out that my mom would embellish things.

Speaker 4 (20:04):
Give me an example, what do you mean?

Speaker 2 (20:08):
God?

Speaker 5 (20:09):
Okay, So I remember I was like twelve years old
and we were walking into a it was like a
kmart or Roses.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
It was Roses on the East Coast, and I heard.

Speaker 5 (20:23):
A different language and I was like, oh, like, what
is this or whatever, and I was like, Mom, what
language is that? And she's like, I don't know, but
it's illegal to speak a foreign language in America.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
And I instantly, like at a young age.

Speaker 5 (20:39):
I remember at twelve years old, was like, well, that's fault,
that's not true.

Speaker 4 (20:45):
You knew she was.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
I was like, she's crazy.

Speaker 4 (20:48):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (20:48):
So I kind of like, you know, had that example
at and then like the birds and bees talk. I
remember I asked my dad something, but my dad would
always be like, you know, let's talk about sports. He
would change the subject.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Well, how the how the Phillies? Yeah, the Eagles are
They're gonna be good this year.

Speaker 5 (21:08):
So, I mean I just kind of And I had
two older sisters. I probably I had some conversations with them.

Speaker 4 (21:16):
That's my favorite configuration from now on. If I had
to start over, I'd only marry a man that had
two older sisters.

Speaker 5 (21:24):
Yeah, I mean, and they they just I would ask
them a lot of advice with girls, so and they
would always set me straight with that, well, suit, what
do I do?

Speaker 2 (21:35):
And this girl, this girl doesn't like you.

Speaker 4 (21:45):
Are you close to your sisters?

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (21:47):
I would say, so, Well, I love that that you
had these other adult figures.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, my oldest yeah, yeah, my oldest sister. She was
I was like sixteen, Oh yeah, I was. She was
sixteen when I was born, sixteen seventeen. So she was
like kind of my mother because she knew how my
mother was.

Speaker 5 (22:09):
She always kind of protected me. And she got married
when she was like nineteen.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
So wow, Like I was always at her house.

Speaker 4 (22:17):
Yeah, and she didn't tell you that it was illegal
to speak.

Speaker 5 (22:23):
Yeah white the opposite, right, well, said just don't listen
to anything, chlo.

Speaker 4 (22:28):
Right, right. Well, it's actually funny. When I first met
my husband, Seth, he said something like that to me.
You know how women are, They just don't understand things.
I was like, what are you talking about? I'm like,
I understand a lot of things.

Speaker 5 (22:38):
But again, which is like from my father has told
me the same thing.

Speaker 4 (22:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Growing up, my dad.

Speaker 5 (22:46):
You know, he would be like, well, just don't say anything,
and then you just don't cause a hassle because it's just.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
She's not going to understand.

Speaker 5 (22:57):
Until then me growing up going like, well why would
I communicate something like that?

Speaker 2 (23:02):
They just don't understand.

Speaker 4 (23:04):
And then as your parents, right, yeah, how do you write?
So you were just about to say that, so breaking
those cycles?

Speaker 5 (23:10):
Yeah, because I see my parents' cycle and I don't
want that, even though that they're still together to this day.
I mean, it's it's just something that was you know,
my sisters and I we just kind of were like.

Speaker 4 (23:26):
No, you're communicating to the and sharing your communication to
the world as opposed to the opposite of what you
just said, which is that you were told not to
say anything. So what a difference. What a cycle breaking
move you're making just in the in the in the
doing of this right, And so I think it's yeah, good,
was it? Sorry? What were you're saying?

Speaker 5 (23:47):
No, I was going to say, like, I mean, I
approach her with a lot of different questions and things
like that that I don't think my father would ever
really speak to my mother about, you know, certain stuff
like that.

Speaker 4 (23:59):
I love these evolved, yes, But what I love is that,
you know, I'm not sure even if we were sitting
together at a dinner that I would feel as close
to both of you just by being able to ask
that type of question. Rating two cards, just pulling two
random cards. We didn't prectice in advance, we didn't I

(24:20):
gave I didn't even tell the producer that I was
going to bring the cards out, but I think the
spotan eighty is so beautiful. And I think even for
your own children, a people do like to hear your
stories as they get older. Maybe if they're twelve or thirteen,
my son would not want my stories right now except
for to use them against me. He uses all my
stories against me. But as they get older, Jenny, like

(24:41):
where your kids are now, you know this idea that
they can learn a lot about you, that this work
we're talking about isn't just unloading the dishwasher, which is
where we started. It's really our humanity. It's not just
chores and housework. Yes, it's an organization, but a healthy
organization has really important things besides just systems and who

(25:01):
does what. It has boundaries where you respect the other person,
you go to the other person, and it has communication,
which is what you're talking about. And if you don't
have all three of those things, then it really can't
be a healthy organization. And that's what I'm hoping the
next generation can learn for sure.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
And I think it also has the component of giving
a shit about Yes, the other people that you work with,
basically in the house.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
That's so yeah, very true.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
Absolutely, And I think about the opposite of giving a shit.
It's when, like you said, you have this silent expectation
in your head and then that thing doesn't get done.
You know, if I had picked a card, one of
the ones I was really triggering when I would pick
it and tell my story was about garbage, because giving
a shit to me is taking the garbage out. I

(25:50):
grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and
Alphabet City. There were a lot of cockroaches and water bugs,
and I would help my brother. I was. My mother
was a single mother, I told you earlier, and she
worked nights, so my brother had autism and other problems.
So I would help him get to bed, get him water,
go into the kitchen. I had my routine. I close

(26:11):
my eyes, click on the lights. The cockroaches and water
bugs would scatter. Then I would go fill up the
water in the same because we didn't have water bottles
back then, and then take it to him in his room.
And what I remember about that was our garbage was
just like a takeout bag. I got a knob and
it would always like spill out over to our little
apartment common area, and so I think for me when

(26:35):
Seth would, as Dave was saying, when you wake up
and maybe those dishes are not unloaded or you're waiting
to see what someone else is doing for me. In
my mind, I hadn't told Seth this. He never knew
this about me. But I would just see when the
garbage would overflow or when that the bag the liner
wasn't put back into the garbage, and I would become

(26:56):
Set's garbage stalker. And I think it took me a
while time to understand that instead of just saying put
the liner back in, put the liner back.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
In before you even like communicate it.

Speaker 4 (27:05):
Right, like with it right. And so he was like,
you were literally a garbage stalker. And so I think
it took the why conversations around fair play where I'm
trying to say, invest in the practice like you do
with exercise. One of the most depressing surveys I ever did,
I did it on purpose, was I asked over a
thousand people what their most important practices. I did it

(27:28):
very vaguely, and I got some interesting answers, as you
can imagine, like all the way from exercise to like ayahuasca.
But not one of those thousand people said that communication
was their most important practice, and I did it on
purpose so I could have that stat because I think
it sounds important that nobody said communication. But I think

(27:49):
what we're what I've realized being a mediator for really
difficult families and also developing the fair play system of
discussing these hundred cards that go into running your home
and family, is that the key is really that communication
is a practice. And the more you can practice when
emotion is low and cognition is high, the more that
you get better at knowing how to communicate with Jenny,

(28:11):
the more I would get you get better at knowing
how to communicate with Dave. It's a practice, just like
the more you get better at progressive overload when you
lift weights.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
What's a good drill?

Speaker 4 (28:20):
Yes, you want to know the drill?

Speaker 5 (28:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (28:22):
I mean you know, I work at golf. I work
on the drill. It's like, what is a good drill
for that? That's a great point.

Speaker 4 (28:31):
Number one is I'll ask I'll do it as a
diverse newly what there's three steps. Again, we didn't make
the we didn't know we were going to get here.
But I think it's a fun way to to play Okay,
So I want to know, Jenny, if Dave had to say,
what your communication? So step one is knowing your own
communication vulnerability. It's very important because it allows you to

(28:52):
have humor in the moment once you know it. So
if Dave had to say about you, like reverselywed, what
your communication vulnerability is, what do you think he would say?
And I'm going to give you some options? Would he say?
What do you say avoidance? What do you say all
or nothing? Like you never do this, you always do that.

(29:13):
What do you say tone like this is a nail
on the chalkboard issue? What do you say ignoring where
you just want the issue to go away and not
bring it up. That's like another version of avoidance. Would
he say verbal assassin, which is when you say things
in a really nice tone, like Dave, you're the best,
but you know did you know you're like the worst

(29:35):
stepfathers father of all time? Like I didn't know that
it was going to happen? How'd you get this bad?
That happens a lot and to a lot of couples,
So what would what would he say about you?

Speaker 3 (29:45):
I think I would have to pick all of them
because I am ann not a great communicator.

Speaker 5 (29:56):
Okay, I would say that, I would say avoidance would.

Speaker 4 (29:59):
Be problem avoid Do you have an example?

Speaker 5 (30:05):
She'll say things, I didn't want to talk about that
because I didn't want to see your reaction, which is
making an assumption. But yes, have I done that in
the past, My am I reactionary?

Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yes, Like for instance, this ties back into household things.

Speaker 4 (30:22):
Yes, can you.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Help me fix the bathroom door handle?

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Mm hmmm, which I might go.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
Right, that's the sound, the sound, and then you.

Speaker 5 (30:36):
Go right now, and then she goes yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 (30:42):
Usually I say whenever you have time, whenever you can
get to.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
It, whenever you have time, or but it feels.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
Like right now, you feel like it's right now, but
I'm not. You're assuming that I want to done right.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yes, you're probably.

Speaker 4 (30:56):
Right, which again I do love because that is all
things that I think everyone's gonna laugh.

Speaker 5 (31:03):
And she wants and her brain her she wants me
to be like, can you do this? And she was, yeah,
I want to do it right now.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
I love that.

Speaker 5 (31:14):
I want to do.

Speaker 4 (31:17):
That, And here's my notebook where I'm going to write
it down and I will not forget and it'll get done.
To the timely manner that that is very very very common.
But I do, I do. But but you see what though,
what happens with avoidance. With avoidant people, people where that's
their vulnerability, then they'll start to say things like well,
I might as well just do it myself, or I

(31:37):
might as well not even bring it up to Dave,
and then the rage and resentment start. So avoiding people,
rage and resentment, you know, are pretty close to the
avoidance because it doesn't go away sadly from avoiding it.
It just means that it sort of it just builds
and then it can often explode at some you know
later time. Yeah, yeah, so again. And so that's number

(32:00):
one is knowing. So let's do the opposite. So, Dave,
what would Jenny say about you? You think? Do you
remember the choices?

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah? I know, she'd say tone.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
Okay, I'd say tone because I get anxious when you
have that tone of like you don't want to be
talking about something, and it's like you're like annoyed with
me by even me asking the question.

Speaker 4 (32:23):
But I love you both one. It's the tone that
shows you're both.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Sound.

Speaker 5 (32:28):
I think it's because I get a little like my
tone gets loud because I'm trying to like get all
these thoughts out and be defensive or trying to make
someone understand, so emphatically, my tone goes up and it
doesn't stay.

Speaker 4 (32:45):
Right with sound effects like uh yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Shaking of the head too as he walks away is
another like oh man, see I should have never even
asked him to fix the damn doorknob.

Speaker 4 (32:56):
Right, Okay? That that can feel like nails on the
chalkboard when someone's tone is frustrating, And I think that
that's again what's what's fun about that number one step
is that it doesn't mean it's going to go away,
but at least you want to like you know your
but you know your patterns, so that that's step one.
So for me, it's always tone like seth with joke.

(33:17):
You know, you could be saying like let's go have sex,
but I but he doesn't want me to say anything
because it's always in a tone of like a drill
sergeant like now those parties, he's like, I have no
idea extent, yeah not you. Your tone is just so bad.
And then he becomes incredibly avoided, and I'm like, where
the fuck did he go? And then he's hiding, so

(33:37):
so that that that becomes a pattern.

Speaker 5 (33:46):
She would say of of I'm avoidant too, Yeah, okay,
because I mean I think I think to a certain extent,
everybody is like that because you just in the moment,
you don't really.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
I mean, because you try to like, am I really
feeling this?

Speaker 5 (34:01):
Is it really worth it? Are my feelings just unnecessary feelings?
Or should I really have a communication with us?

Speaker 4 (34:11):
But what I like about that is if you if
you're assuming that there's avoidance also and not assuming, but
you're you're recognizing that there's avoidance also in some of
the ways that can you know, vacillate with tone to avoidance.
What I think is interesting is both of those avoidance
and tone have the same root of the vulnerability, which
is what I like is it makes it easy for

(34:32):
us to go to step two. So the root of
avoidance and tone is to not have the feedback in
the moment. So there was something about that that the
asking you to do the thing right. And so when
you have when you're an avoidant communicator or you are

(34:53):
a tone communicator, typically you're giving feedback in the moment,
whether that's disappearing and and having a different reaction than
your actual reaction, or you're initially reactive, like like you said,
or why you bring this up now, Like it's hard
for avoidant people and people who have tone issues to

(35:16):
do something in the moment that's productive. So let's just
say that. So step two is to recognize what your
vulnerability means about the types of patterns you get into.
So I'm going to say that that's a feedback in
a not a productive feedback in the moment pattern. And
so then step three, if you're looking at that program
how to get better at golf, the third step would be,

(35:38):
you know, whether it's great that you do the podcast together,
but because you're doing this, you already have this idea
of structured conversations when emotion is low and cognition is high.
So do do your a family check in, a communication
check in right before the podcast or right after, or
when you're in a place where you have short term

(35:58):
reward substitution that's what we call it as economists, like
you're bringing alcohol with you or a cookie dough. But
this idea that there are times for avoidant and tone
people to invest in low emotion, high cognition conversations and
so that's what I would say. You want to get
better at golf, make sure you have that fifteen minute

(36:20):
check in a week. Right, Well, you say we're in,
we're highly We have a lot of cognition right now
and very little emotion.

Speaker 5 (36:28):
So you're kind of saying when you recognize it, it's
kind of like my brain imagines things like it's like
a snow globe.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
You know, in that moment, kind of get shaken up.

Speaker 5 (36:39):
Yes, your triggers are flying all over the place and
you're trying to manage him as best you can.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
But maybe in that moment.

Speaker 5 (36:48):
If I fail at my reaction to what she's asking me,
is it like we're saying, like take a time out, Well,
let's get to this later.

Speaker 4 (36:58):
You can even use the word snowglo. I love that,
Like this was not I need a snow globe moment,
or really just what Seth and I did in the
beginning to practice this and now we're better, except for
you know, you can always regress. I regressed yesterday. I
have a teenager. Seth's ownership is of his all the homework,
and he wasn't on his tutor, and I like lost it.

(37:21):
I was like you're the worst. You know, Dad, that
I went verbal assassin like you know, but typically we're
you know, we've been practicing fair play for a long time.
So typically I said, I did my tone thing, I'm sorry,
you know, and then I took a break. But typically
what I like to do is write things down so

(37:41):
the person that is going who may have that tone
issue or doesn't want to approach something in a moment.
What's nice is if you know that there's going to
be accountability and trust in that check in later on.
If you feel that safety and you can agree to that,
then you if over time what happens is you can

(38:02):
write things down and not deliver that feedback in the moment,
which is actually really cool because it's happened to me
many weeks where we'll come to sit down about something
and I'll have things in like all caps, Like this
happened to me one week where just said yellow rag
in all caps and I literally had absolutely no idea,
like complete senior moment, like I had zero. I had

(38:25):
no idea what yellow rag is. But I was thinking, oh,
that's good. It's an all caps that's like me yelling
on the page. So it would have avoided the yellow
rag argument because it obviously wasn't relevant to me two
or three days later. However, maybe the fact that the
dishwasher is never unloaded is still bothering me.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Right, It's good to have a weekly check in. I
think the family as a whole.

Speaker 5 (38:46):
I think like, yes, we are four people, like sometimes
five with boyfriends here, but we need to have a
family unit check in. I mean, I'm having a staff
meeting next week. Need to do that for the family.

Speaker 4 (39:02):
Yeah, but I like for you to do it both
with each other first and you're aligned, because sometimes when
the other people sort of come in, it can derail
what the unit your joint values are together for how
as Jenny said, because there's another home out there with
different values and you copare it. It's nice for you
and Dave to align each week on your priorities. And

(39:24):
then of course you can bring the other members in
as well. But I think saying that this is at practice.
You know. One of the funny things to me is
when I do it as an analogy to exercise, Like
you would never go into your doctor's office and they said, like,
do you feel fit, and you'd say, yeah, I like exercise.
Once in two thousand and five. But that's sort of

(39:46):
how we view the home. Like I had a conversation,
yeah once about the dishes.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
It's like, we talk about having conversations all the time,
but we don't.

Speaker 4 (39:55):
We don't actually have them. Yeah right, you don't actually
have them.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
Also, many of the comp are going on in each
of our individual brains, and I'm like, wait, are you
thinking something that you want to tell me? Because a
lot of the times he and I will both be
just going about our business, getting all of our work
done and having these important conversations but not actually verbalizing
them with our partner.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
That's really funny, the invisible conversations in the brain. And
it is true because you do sort of assume that
you've said it. I don't know. It's a very strange
thing about how you communicate with a partner because you
do sort of assume that either they should know, or
that you've said it already, or that you said it
once that you wanted the garbage liner to go back,
and then now I'm going to hold it against Seth

(40:40):
for the rest of his life. It's not fair. Again,
Like if I hadn't exercise for a week, I wouldn't
expect to get back on the treadmill and be at
the same level of performance as even if I took
a week off. But yet we have these conversations again
in our head and then once maybe a year with
our partners, and we expect that we're going to have
relational health health. And I think that's what's so hard.

(41:02):
So many people now are so focused on functional health
and they're obsessed with these metrics. But I'm going to
just say one of the most interesting things I ever
learned in my fair play journey was a study from
Robert Waldinger's project at Harvard. He studied men, and this
is important for you, especially Dave, to listen to. He
studied men over seventy five years. They've been looking at

(41:23):
men and they control for everything smoking, poverty, ethnicity, genetics,
and what they found was there was actually really only
one predictor of whether men were alive at eighty five,
and that was the quality of their relationships at fifty five.
So everyone's like doctor Atilla and this and I'm going

(41:44):
to maximize my VO two MAX. What I wish men
especially understood was that instead of working so hard on
your VO two max, if you want to live, if
you want longevity, if you want life and health span,
invest in the quality of your relationships.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
Yeah, and that work is some of the time the
most difficult work.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
I think it is the most difficult work. People always
say that this work needs a trigger warning, like this
episode will need a trigger warning, because I think so
many people will say I can't talk to my partner
about these issues, and it seems so many.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
People it's just it's just how do we divvy up
the household responsibilities? But emotions can really charge the conversation
and cause avoidance, cause tone, all the things that we're
talking about. So how do we not avoid the conversation.

Speaker 4 (42:40):
Well, the first thing I just want to say is
back to that formula. There's a secret formula, right, it's boundaries, systems,
and communication. But I want to say one more thing
about communication, because you just brought up avoidance, and I
want to just say I thought this was really interesting
during the pandemic, given that fair Play had launched in
twenty nineteen, so I was arguing it vos that year,

(43:01):
right before the pandemic, that the home is an organization
and that our home and our work spheres are not
that different. And then bizarrely, like two weeks later, our
home and work spheres were not different at all. But
during the pandemic, there was a group that someone referred
me to out of the UK that it was called
the Reasons I Hate my partner and kids. During COVID

(43:24):
there's this big, like monster like graphic design. And this
person alerted me to this woman who wrote in this
chat it's twenty seven thousand members at the time. I
wonder if it's still active. I wonder what it evolved into.
But it was twenty seven thousand members. And this woman said,

(43:45):
if my husband dies during COVID, it's not going to
be because of the disease. It's going to be because
of me.

Speaker 5 (43:53):
Yeah, there was a lot of like separation and divorce,
oh for a.

Speaker 4 (43:57):
Sure, for sure. But it was so funny was that
I reached out to her though on DM and I said, hey,
I'm a researcher on gender, division of labor and resentment
and communication. I want to know how do you communicate
with your partner about domestic life. And this woman wrote back,
I don't communicate with my partner about domestics life. This

(44:19):
is my safe space, so can we just reflect on
the fact that publicly threatening to murder her partner in
front of twenty seven thousand strangers felt safer to her
than talking directly about these issues. Wild, that's how hard
this is. So I just want everybody out there to
understand it's not just a why can't you discuss who's

(44:42):
taking the dishes? We started with a perfect example of like,
is this really about who unloves the dishwasher? No, the
presenting problem is never the real problem. So it's not
about the dishwasher or anything like garbage or even the
hard questions. This is about how we want to relate
to each other and our humanity. And that's why I
said it's this. It has to be a secret formula
of investing in a practice of these systems the communication

(45:06):
check ins those Emotion is low, cognition is high, and
also boundaries, which is you respect each other's time enough
so that you're willing to sit down. That's what people forget,
like nobody wants to be the nag or the like
it's time for our check in, And it sounds terrible.
Most people have to say, you know what, we respect

(45:26):
each other's time enough that we're both there. We treat
it like an important meeting and we really don't miss
that investment time.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
You want to get that on the calendar. Yeah, yes,
weekly check.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
We need our weekly check in.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Yeah. How do.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
Now, for people that are listening, how do we find
the balance with household duties in our marriage like in
our home?

Speaker 1 (46:00):
How do we find it? What's the key?

Speaker 4 (46:01):
There is one important key that again I've been studying
this for ten years now. You have to start stop
looking at fifty to fifty as any sort of metric
for a marriage. It literally is this fifty to fifty
we're equal partners. I don't know where that came from,
but it's highly, highly toxic because it means that you're

(46:24):
in the scorekeeping disaster of like, well I did the
dishes last yesterday, so you should do them today. It
just it becomes really really horrific and toxic and so compared,
we have to burn this idea of fifty to fifty
and we have to move instead to the way that
it Marian and Hermazon group does it, or corporations do it.

(46:45):
And what we found over ten years and this is
now actually we have it in a quantitative study that's
published in the Journal of women's mental health, that women's
burnout and men's relationship satisfaction go up if you move
to an ownership mindset. I mean by that, Well, you
have the fair Play cards, and again for people who
can't afford them, we're a nonprofit. We have them at

(47:06):
fairplaylife dot org. You can put them the show notes.
People can find all of our resources. But what we
would do with these is understand that I'm giving you
the resources to have these conversations. There are one hundred
cards that make up a home organization. God forbid. Hopefully
you don't have to play with them all because some
of them are wild cards like death or an aging parent,

(47:26):
where you'll have to come back to the table. Most
people are playing with kids about seventy five cards. Without kids,
you're playing with about fifty fifty five cards, or maybe
it can be in the eighties amount of cards you're
playing with. So you're starting with these tasks. So the
goal is not, oh, you hold forty and I hold

(47:48):
forty like that is absolutely not what we're looking at.
What we're looking at is the key insight is how
did Mustard get your refrigerator? I'll give you, I'll tell
you what I mean by asking that question with each card.
So that was the grocery's card, but for each card,
I asked how the proverbial how did mustard get in
your refrigerator? The old way was typically, and especially in

(48:12):
co parenting, because it's really hard when you're coming in.
Typically it was that the woman married to a man
was saying to me, well, I know that Johnny, my
second son, likes yellow mustard, not anything else with his protein,
otherwise he chokes. So in a project management framework, we
call that conception. In the workplace, we're paid big bucks

(48:33):
to notice new things, so that's the conception part. Then
women were the ones reporting that they monitor the mustard
for when it runs low, and that they get stakeholder
by in from their family about what they needed on
the grocery list. We can map that to what we
call the planning phase. Over ten years, what we realized
was that men were stepping in at the next phase.

(48:55):
They were going to the store to go buy the
mustard day. But you're bringing home spicy djawn every fucking time.
And I asked you for yellow and.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
It says yellow mustard? What do you list?

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Yeah, what are you dumb? And then all of a sudden,
here's my verbal assassin. Can you not read and then try.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
To make it better?

Speaker 4 (49:18):
It's better, And so then what happens is we're losing again.
It's not about the mustard, but we're losing the thing
an organization needs, which is accountability and trust. So if
you believe me that the home is an organization, then
you have to believe me that the two things you
can't lose is accountability and trust. And so to restore
accountability and trust, the one key is to move away

(49:41):
from that fifty to fifty and to move towards ownership.
If I have dishes this week, I have dishes, as
my son say, that's from the secret oils that go
in the dish drawer, all the way to unloading that
dishwasher and going away and carrying through my mistake. If
it doesn't happen with laundry, I carry through many mistakes.
I keep it in there, it smells like crap. I

(50:01):
forget to put it. I have to redo the cycle.
I'm carrying through lots lots of Laudroym mistakes. When it's
my turn, you don't hold these forever. You redeal at
your check in and then you just keep on going,
and so, like I said, I loved I'm a student
by heart. I love doing homework with my sons. It
brought me so much joy until my kids turned thirteen

(50:24):
and I looked at my husband. I said, you either
have two choices. Are in a low emotion and high
cognition conversation, not with that tone, but I basically said,
you can homeschool them, or you can keep them at
these schools, but you're I need you to take ownership
of the homework card. It is too hard for me.
It's too triggering. It's ruining my relationship with my sons.

(50:46):
I'm using verbal assassin with them. I'm calling them mediocre.
I'm saying, how are you my child? I'm doing the
same things that I did with with you. It is
not going well. I'll keep it with Anna. You can
always be a kid split as long as they're ownership.
So I own Anna and he took over for the
two kids, for the two boys. It doesn't mean I
don't even know who's holding which cards right now. I

(51:07):
mean we know who's holding which I don't know who's
holding more cards. I just know that right now. That
was the hardest thing for me to hold. I said
to him, I will take dishes, I will take garbage,
I will take buying gifts, I will take hard questions.
I will take all these other things because I know
how hard homework is and schoolwork is for our two sons,
and so that is how you have those types of conversations.

(51:29):
So right now he's owning it.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
And you're really suggesting to let go of that fifty
to fifty mentality.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
I love that idea because.

Speaker 4 (51:36):
You know what, when I was on my book tour,
Seth had a hundred of the cards. When you're filming,
maybe Dave, right, yeah, yeah, Dave is holding one hundred
of the cards sometimes. Yeah, So that in the mornings,
maybe you're he's sleeping in because he worked really late,
you're holding more of the cards. But as long as
in advance you know what your responsibility is. It sounds

(51:57):
daunting at first because I'm asking you to invest in
looking at one hundred cards and deciding how to build
your deck. But it's so valuable. We call it the
present bias. You don't want to do it now because
you think it's going to be easier later, but I
promise you the investment now makes it so much easier
later because I know who's doing what in my family,
and I can take accountability when I drop the ball.

(52:20):
Like our minimums, I talk about the minimum standard of care.
Just make sure there's a minimum standard of care for
Seth and I. For dinner, it's just having one vegetable
somewhere around, like maybe it's an iceberg piece of lettuce.
I grew up on Bodega food. So he said, you know,
when you do dining, when you do meals, I notice
that it's Lucky Charms. Is the only green I've ever seen.

(52:42):
It's a green shamrock. And that's what our kidsy for dinner.
Maybe make it so there's a little bit of vegetable
adjacent food, and when he makes dinner, he'll do like
the Kraft mac and cheese and just like steam broccoli.
But we have a minimum standard, so we understand the
page we're on, and then you know, if you exceed it, great,
you want to make the gourmet meal, go for it.

(53:02):
But also he's saying to me in advance, it's not
acceptable for you to keep feeding our kids coca pebbles
for dinner, which we pretty much did for a whole
year until we had these conversations, and I didn't know
he was raging about it internally because he's avoided and
he didn't feel like he could say anything, and he's
like he hated the way our kids ate.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
I think I've heard you mentioned. I think I read
it in the book The mental Load h that I
know I will go to work and I feel as
if I'm still fully running the household, raising the kids
and working at the same time. And I know, I
know every woman out there who is, you know, working

(53:44):
and raising a family feels the same way like it does.
It never stops in our minds. How can we get
any freedom from feeling like we have to bear the
load of all the mental load of running the house
and making sure things are in the cupboards that they
need and that they're doctor's appointments are scheduled and handled,
and the orchestration of just the logistics of running a

(54:07):
family and a household.

Speaker 4 (54:08):
Well, here's the beauty, and this is what we learned
from the study that we just published. Ownership alleviates the
mental load. If you know that Dave had dishes for
the week, or he had dinner for the week, then
you're not thinking about it, right, You're not asking him
to go get the mustard, because you're still the one

(54:29):
getting the stakeholder buy in for what mustard you need.
It is this, and I'll give you just a quick example.
So we had this couple during the pandemic. She was
sick of the mental load for the caregiving what we
call caregiving and magic cards. Her partner was actually really
great at what we call the house cards. He was
great at dishes, He was really helpful with the mental
load of dinner. But as we said earlier, those magic

(54:52):
cards like the hard questions and whether or not your
child's learning to ride a bike, what we call informal education,
what we were talking about earlier with gifts caregiving like
medical adenoids or your sinuses, back to that, whether your
child's adnoids and their sinuses are being taken out. They
were falling on her, and so what she said was

(55:14):
that she needed more help with that. Those cards. Yep,
but she felt the mental load of taking care of
his in laws, of remembering the tooth fairy, of remembering
gestures of love, which is bringing the flowers to the recital,
felt too much for her. So she wanted him to
own some of those cards. So the first one he
decides to take on is the tooth Fairy, and I'll

(55:36):
explain why this is important about the mental load. He
takes on the tooth Fairy in advance in one of
their check ins. I love this man, Richard, and so
what happens. It was this daughter's second tooth. The tooth
Fairy doesn't come. So what they recognized was that she
had been holding the mental load up until that point,
meaning before fair play. He would have said, it was

(55:59):
your fault. You didn't mind me to put the dollar
under the pillow. That's a mental load, right. He was
gonna get up and do it, but she's gonna have
to set the alarm. She's gonna have to remember he
does no no, but because he owned tooth Fairy. This
is what she tells me happens. He says, I messed up.

(56:19):
He takes accountability. So she's like, wait a second, I
didn't have the mental loads. Something went wrong. But instead
of having to fix it, I'm hearing something different from
my partner. He's taking accountability. So she gives him the
space to say, Okay, it's still your mental load. I'm
gonna let you carry through the mistake. So he does
and this is the fun part, he tells me. He

(56:41):
emails Toothfairy at gmail dot com. He writes, like, hey,
what's going on? You know the tooth is still onto
the pillow? Like did we not put it in the
right envelope? Do we need more neon colors?

Speaker 2 (56:52):
Like?

Speaker 4 (56:52):
He writes this letter in front of his daughter. What
he didn't expect was he was actually going to get
a response. During the day, he gets a response from
Toothfairy at gmail dot com. So thank god for whoever's
doing that meant to load work out there saying sorry,
supply chain issues, I'm really late at picking up teeth. Yes,
please live it in a bigger envelope, and then her

(57:15):
the dad added, oh when she brings when she's late
because of these issues, she brings double the money and fix.
That's just what I'm saying is these are small changes,
but that mental load was on him. He made a mistake,
just like we all do. But he took the accountability

(57:35):
to say I own this, and so I'm going to
correct my mistake. They have this cool story. Now we
now know that tooth fairygmail dot com is like a
real person, and that's that's what I mean, that's how
the mental load starts to ship when you get when
you empower somebody to own a task, to say I
trust you, and if mistakes happen for that person to say,

(57:57):
I love you enough so I'm not saying, well, if
you you care about it more than I do, you
should do it. Instead, it's you care about this so
much so I should do it. That's the mentality that
sort of fair place starts to. When you practice, it
starts to change.

Speaker 1 (58:11):
Babe. We got to get these cards.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
Yeah, they're fine.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
I like the cards a lot. I was down to
do a couple more.

Speaker 4 (58:17):
We got to.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
I think they need to live like in the living room.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Where I love the idea.

Speaker 5 (58:24):
I mean, we need to have a family check in.
We need to do our check in.

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Yes, yes, yeah, and maybe do a couple more with
each other, please, like before you even look at them, like,
spend the time with the cards, just telling some more
stories before you say this is the system we have
to get into. I loved your stories. I actually thought
your stories were really beautiful and profound, and I feel
like again being with you for an hour, I would

(58:49):
know you more now than if we had been at
a whole dinner party together. You know, I really do
feel like the hard questions that we learned and those
dynamics and you know what it looked like to to
to shake your presence and to get your you know,
to get your Michael Jackson album. Like, those are things
that you know that becomes part of our joint connection
in humanity because we have those stories together.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
That's so true. This has been really fun.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Really good.

Speaker 5 (59:14):
I'd love to talk more about ownership and stuff like that. Yeah,
there's so much.

Speaker 4 (59:19):
There's so much.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
There's so much bay Before we let Eve go, do
you want to ask her the question?

Speaker 2 (59:25):
What question?

Speaker 1 (59:26):
The question at the end of every I Choose Me podcast?

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Oh? Oh yeah, I think I know this, you do. Eve.
What was your last I Choose Me moment?

Speaker 4 (59:37):
Hmmm. I'm going to say it was the active putting
on which I do every morning of my necklace. That
is my initial.

Speaker 1 (59:48):
Nice.

Speaker 4 (59:49):
I don't have any mom charms. I don't wear my kids.
I don't tattoo them on my body or wear them
on my neck. I wear one initial. It's mine, and
I choose me because I want my kids to know
that I have a life, I have a name, I
have an identity outside of my role as their parents,
at outside of my role as being the fulfiller of
Seth Smoothie needs. And so for me that I choose

(01:00:12):
me as the reminder for myself. It's putting my own
initial physically on my neck every day.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
I love that so much. I never heard that one blueberry.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
No blueberry moments here now. Gosh, thank you so much
for spending your time with us. We really appreciate you,
and you're so fun.

Speaker 4 (01:00:31):
I love you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
You're great, all right, have a great day.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Thanks.

Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
Bye,

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Host

Jennie Garth

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}I Choose...To Play Fair (or at least try) with Eve Rodsky