February 2, 2022 • 35 mins
What would happen if you treated your home as your most important organization? This week, Eve and Aditi explore how an ownership mindset is the secret to equity, efficiency and believe it or not, more harmony in the home. From dishes to garbage to managing your kids’ activities, Eve and Aditi discuss how to share household responsibilities without resentment or doubling up on efforts—and they hear from a man who claims the ‘system’ forever changed his perception of the mental load.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the
New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.
And I'm doctor add In the Rukar, a physician and
medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience,
mental health, and burnout. We're here to peel back to
(00:24):
layers around why it's so easy for society to guard
men's time as if it's diamonds and to treat women's
time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you
are partnered with or without children, or in a career
where you want more boundaries, this is the place for
you for all family structures. We're here to take a
time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim
(00:49):
our time. Good afternoon in adity, So good to see you,
So great to be with you, Eve, as always, so
today we're really digging into ten years of fair Play research,
(01:10):
coupled with your lends around care care is really imported
in this country, but why does it fallen women? So
why was I the statistic the two thirds or more
of what it takes to run a home and family.
Why was it falling on me? What I never told
you that I do write about was how I start
(01:31):
to think about this beyond myself, How I start to
look at this. As my favorite sociologisty Right Mills would
say private lives or public issues. So I definitely wasn't
a gender studies major in college. I had really never
heard of these terms mental load, second shift, emotional labor,
invisible work. But after that Blueberries breakdown, I went on
(01:55):
a breast cancer march with nine of my closest friends
and adity, most of them are married to men, They're
in heterosist gender partnerships. They are powerhouse women. One woman
with me was the CEO of a major nonprofit. We
had the head of stroking trauma at a major hospital,
oscar winning producer, and on and on, and we were
(02:16):
honoring a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.
So we got up that morning made signs together that
said courage, strength, and power. Not just a women's problem.
It was this true girlfriend's collective experience of power. And
then noon came and like the fairy tale Cinderella, we
(02:37):
all turned into pumpkins. And it was not from a spell.
It was from our partners and the text and phone
calls that were inundating us starting at noon. The first
one that came in was when are you coming home
from the parade? Another one was where did you leave
(02:58):
Hudson soccer bag? Where's the birthday party? What's the address?
And and did you leave me a gift? My favorite
adity was my friend Kate's husband who texted her as
we looked over her shoulder, do the kids need to
eat lunch? And you know what was so hard for me?
(03:20):
It wasn't like we all decided to reverse the spell
and turned back into our version of a fairy tale
by turning off our phones. Every single woman looked at
me and said, I'm so happy you made us downtown
lunch reservation. But we left our partners with too much
to do, and they left me there. But before they
(03:41):
started to disperse, I asked for an act of resistance,
and that was asking these women to help me count
up how many phone calls and text we had received.
We had thirty phone calls and forty six texts for
ten women over thirty minutes. And that was the day
(04:01):
where I said I'm going to understand this issue and
that's really where I stumbled upon Arlene Kaplan Daniels article
think about Same Ship, different decade about invisible work. And
invisible work was such an interesting term to me because duh,
you could just make it visible. And so I opened
(04:22):
up Excel and I spent nine months with women like
you and the women at the Breast Cancer March. And
then this was a time when we didn't have social
media the way we do today, so I just called
up women in different communities and it was the first
time a d D again because I didn't have a
you to follow. I didn't have these beautiful social media accounts.
I had myself and an isolation and loneliness problem. And
(04:47):
then over nine months, I met a community of women
who helped me populate what I ultimately called my Excel spreadsheet,
the should I do spreadsheet, and it became tabs and
two thousand idem of invisible work with women I didn't
even know, saying, oh my god, thank you for putting
in taking the kids to the dentists and making school lunches.
That's ten minutes. But I don't see sunscreen. Where is
(05:10):
the application of sunscreen? And I would say, well, I
just got a scroll to tab seventy two you will
see sunscreen is there. And then they would respond, well, yeah,
there's it says two minutes for the application, but what
about the thirty minutes for the chase. I was like,
oh my god, yeah, the thirty minutes for the chase.
And it just kept on growing and growing, until finally
(05:31):
I thought my solution was sending this giant list to
Seth with all of my communication skills that we're going
to talk about in a later episode, and that's extremely facetious.
It was just the nineteen million megabyte spreadsheet with the
subject line can't wait to discuss m HM. And what
I got from Seth was predictable. It wasn't even words.
(05:55):
It was the earliest version of a monkey emoji that's
covering its eyes and in my home. And what I
realized about that list when I said it to Seth
and it landed sort of like a dud, was that
list alone don't work. And we've been making lists for
literally a century since we've been trying to enter the
male dominated workforce. And the other thing I realized about
(06:17):
that day was that this woman had called me from
the Jewish Federation of Arizona and left me a message
that said, Hey, Eve, I don't know you, but I
got your text message from a friend. I want to
let you know that after receiving your spreadsheet, thank you
so much for making it, I'm not going to stay
in my marriage anymore. WHOA. And that got me thinking
(06:37):
about they do no harm of exposing a problem without
a solution. And so that was the time in my
life where I could resign myself to continue to do
it all and continue to lose myself in the process,
or I could get my ass in gear and become
my own clients. And so I asked a question that
(06:59):
I want us to explore today, which became the basis
of the fair play system, and that is, what if
we started to treat our homes as our most important organizations.
And one man said to me when I asked him
that question, because it was a light bulb moment for me, said, Oh,
you mean like the opposite of my home where we
wait to decide who's taking the dog out right when
(07:21):
it's about to take a piss on the rug. And
I said, exactly that that thing, but the opposite. And
from that day on I started to understand that even
my aunt Marian's ma Gen group has more clearly defined expectations.
In the home, you don't bring snack twice to that group,
you're out. Whereas the home, we are literally every single
(07:44):
day doing the most efficient thing we could do, which
is make the same decisions over and over again, which
is the opposite of what we're going to talk about today,
which is a system. And the last thing I want
to say was that the second most important question I
we're asked in ten years is the basis of what
we're going to talk about today, and that is how
(08:06):
did mustard get in your refrigerator? That question ended up
being the basis of the fair play system because what
I got to see as somebody who does organizational management
for a living, as you know, I work for families
that look like the HBO show Succession, And so what
that question, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? Do?
(08:26):
For me? Was a broken answer that I kept hearing
with the should I do spreadsheet? When I asked people
in partnerships who gets the groceries we both do, who
watches the kids we both do? Who packs and unpacks
the backpack we both do? And I kept thinking, this
is not accurate because if we both did it, then
(08:49):
why is there so much resentment? Why is this issue
so triggering? So I had to ask, how did mustar
get in the refrigerator? To get away from this? Both
track up to understand what was really happening in people's homes.
And we'll center the heterocyst gender partnership here because that's
where a lot of these norms come from. I would
hear in seventeen countries, including the Nordic countries. Oh yes,
(09:12):
I'm the mom, I'm the woman, and I notice my
second son, Johnny needs yellow mustard on his protein otherwise
he chokes. And that is conception. That is something we
know well from organizational management. We get paid big bucks
for conception, for coming up with new ideas and noticing
in the workplace. And then that mom would say to me,
(09:32):
I'm responsible for monitoring the mustard for when it it's
running low. And I'm also getting stakeholder by in from
my family for what they need on that list. And
that's also something we get paid the big bucks for,
and that's planning. And then I would hear I send
my partners to the store to pick up the yellow mustard,
and you know he brings home spicy dijon eve every
(09:56):
fucking time, and you want me to trust him with
my living will. We can't even bring home the right
type of mustard. And that's when I realized that as
a mediator, we often say the presenting problem is not
the real problem. Similar to medicine, the real problem wasn't
about mustard. It was about accountability and trust, and the
(10:17):
only way to bring back accountability and trust in the
workplace and the home. From fifty years of organizational scholarship
that I know from ten years of working with families,
as you come to the table with an ownership mindset,
you hold together the conception, planning, and execution of a
task that is life changing. That is the life changing
(10:38):
magic of mustard. You have demystified something that has plagued
us for generations and generations. It's universal, like you have
that spreadsheet. Because we're all going through this, and we've
talked about it in other episodes. We're having this communal
isolating experience. We're doing so much work, we feel this
(10:58):
burden and we feel all alone. And yet if you
were to knock on your neighbor's door, everyone is going
through the same experience. There is a way to take
agency in your own life while living in polluted air. Right,
we know our air is polluted. We know there's a
lot of systemic reasons, especially in America, that things are
are harder for women, and especially for mothers without a
(11:20):
social safety net, and especially for single mothers like my
mother or the millions of others you know out there
that are in different types of family structures. But the
beauty about understanding that the air is polluted is recognizing
that we still have to breathe. Right, we can't stop breathing.
We don't want to suffocate and die. That is a
(11:41):
radical act to say we can do things differently. You know,
when I first came up with the idea of a system,
it was confusing to people. They didn't understand what a
system is. And when I said, who cares what the
system is as long as you know what the outcome
is of that system, which is accountability and trust. Explicitly
define expectation ends where you know your role in your home,
(12:02):
where there's fairness and transparency, that's a thriving organization. And
in that type of organization, you know how you're making
that decision. Before you make that decision so that you're
not like that man who's deciding who's taking the dog
out right when it's about to take a piss on
the rug. That, to me is the reason why we
are burning out. And the other great thing about a
(12:24):
system is that it's the opposite of assumptions. So what
was happening even in gay families that I would talk to,
was this same type of assumptions, not gendered assumptions, right,
because it's you say, it's two men raising kids. But
what happened is that other assumptions would sneak in. Many
gay families would tell me that the school would say, well,
(12:45):
who's the mom is sort of in a joking way,
trying to put these heterocis gender norms onto other family structures,
or even in the own family saying well, we decided
the person who makes more automatically did less, and so
we end up in these dentful assumptions, which is the
opposite of where fair play can take you. System sounds
(13:08):
very high tech, and the reason, as you've mentioned in
the many stories you've told about how people feel that
like factor when they hear the word system for their
home is because the home is supposed to feel like
a respite, like a high touch environment, right, there's no
room for that high tech language in a high touch environment.
What I love about fair play and about systems in general,
(13:31):
it distills down the home into very concrete, manageable parts.
The other thing that systems do is that it removes
human error. And that's why we have all of these
checks and balances in the medical world with systems is
because then we don't rely on the individual So when
the individuals feeling tired. You know when I think about doctors, right, like,
(13:53):
we're tired, we're on call, we haven't slept. There's all
of these other human factors. But when we have systems
in place, we can override a lot of those as
you call it, low cognition, high emotion states and make
good decisions. It's a way to automate something that is
(14:14):
very complicated, can get really messy. It removes the human error. Yes,
So as we talk about fair play, there's kind of
three main concepts, right, So we have the CPE ownership mindset,
the minimum standard of care, and the daily grind. So Eve,
can you walk us through all of those concepts. So
(14:36):
CPE the ownership mindset, as we set up was the
opposite of the mustard story. If you actually want to
see what we call the CPE checklist, you can go
to fair play life dot com. We actually have free
resources there for you, but I'll explain it briefly. C
p E as an ownership mindset is the opposite of
(14:57):
a both trap. It's the opposite of understanding who's doing water,
who will make a decision because you both are stuck
and thinking you both do it. Let's talk about extracurricular sports,
because that was the first one that Seth and I
started with. Seth honestly thought he was owning he was
in charge of extracricular sports a d d. Because he
(15:19):
would show up to the Little League field with my
kids when they were young, with a water bottle that
I packed for him and in sunscreen that I put
on for my kids. When Seth finally understood that the
conception was serving my kids friends to see what sports
they wanted to play. Even in the first place, that's
(15:41):
all involved in a conception. The planning is person car
pool text chain, plus the ordering of the equipment or
borrowing the equipment, to signing up to the portal that
never seems to work and crashes all the time to
zero saying five copies of your kids birth certificate, and
on and on. And when Seth understood that that that
(16:05):
whole thing, from the serving to the planning two the
actually showing up on the field, the execution was the
ownership mindset that changed our lives. You got me six
hours of my week back, So that's CPE. The other
two concepts that we really need to understand are the
(16:28):
minimum standard of care and the daily grinds. As you said,
daily grinds are there's thirty of them in the deck
of a hundred fair play cards and what they signify
our tasks that are normally done by women. Professor Darby
Sacks Be, a friend of mine, forced me to double
weight the cards to say not all cards are created
equal dishes. Is not the same as lawn and plants.
(16:52):
And once I understood that, her research shows that men
often take tasks that could be done at their own
leisure time, whether that's mowing the lawn or paying bills.
Women often do the tasks that are the repetitive tasks
that interrupt their time, that chop it up like time confetti.
(17:13):
Once you realize that the daily grind cards are the
ones we should focus on, the ones we should go
to first, the ones we should understand that they're not
a gendered responsibility. The closer we get to that, the better.
Those are the cards like dishes and card transportation and
what I like to call daily disruptions where if a
(17:34):
kid is sick, who is the one picking up that
kid from school and interrupting their day. Now, finally, let's
go to the meat of the resistance. The meat of
the resistance to fair play is the minimum standard of care,
This idea that my partner and I will never agree
on what's important, or as one man said to me,
(17:56):
my wife does all these unnecessary things. But the beauty
of fair play is it's not a list, even though
you can use it that way, and I hope nobody will.
The beauty of fair plays when you onboard into a system,
you build your deck together, you decide it's a collective
unit what matters to you, which is often missing in
(18:17):
this discussion. And we're going to do an exercise to
really unpack the minimum standard of care when we do
our time out today. So it's really cool today, Eve,
is that we're meeting someone who's putting all of these
larger concepts into practice in their daily lives. Can you
tell us a little bit more about Fergil King. I
(18:39):
met Fergil while I was giving a key note, and
he actually wrote to me. He wrote me a letter
about how the fair play systems were changing his life,
and we're getting to meet him after the break m
(19:03):
I'm so excited to have Furgal here with us today.
He sent me a letter after going through a really
difficult time with his partner Laren and their two kids. Hi,
furgo so, Furgal. I loved the letter you shared with
Eve about your experience, and I would love for you
(19:24):
to share how you came to this pivotal point and
what ultimately led you to talk to us today. So
I'm in a common law relationship. We're not actually married.
We're engaged or have been for a long time. We
have two toddlers, two girls, age one and three. They're
twenty months apart, and I typically work in a office
(19:46):
environment Monday to Friday nine while my wife Laren is
at home with the kids most of the time, and
so last summer out of probably sheer frustration on her
part with me or how the household is managed or not,
and how a lot of the burden typically falls on
her because she's at home most of the time. And
(20:06):
learn started googling some ideas for a system that would
work for the home, and it's a system that's more
more fair and more equitable. And that's when she really
came across the fair Play and the book. So we
decided to take a look at it. We bought the audiobook,
we bought the cards, and we fully intended and did
put a new system into place. And so up until
(20:28):
this point, I considered myself and still do to be
this kind of modern day dad, pretty progressive views. I
carried my own weight around, help out a lot. I
was doing the jobs that were asked of me, and
often doing a good job of it too. I think
it was complimented on how good of a job I
did sometimes and sometimes I would even do these things
without being asked, so I felt I was like doing
(20:49):
a great job with these things. But despite these values
or beliefs that I have, I still would have probably
carried a number of cultural norms with me that don't
always necessarily a line up with the values that I have.
So at the time when Learned first broke out these cards,
and so this is the thing we're going to do now.
So I took a look at it. I'd say there
was probably a lot of resistance for me to begin with.
(21:11):
I felt like I needed to defend myself and quite
worried about the increased workload that was probably going to
be upon me, but you know, I agreed to go
along with it to keep her happy. There were at
least two game changer things that I reflected upon nearly
straightaway upon adopting the new system, like, first of all,
immediately allowed to learn to switch off from certain tasks
(21:33):
as she knew that I was now responsible for them,
and not just responsible for doing the tasks, but as
Eve has in her book, like the responsible for the
conception and the planning and the execution of them. So
this idea of CPE was very new to me, and
it became like a household name in our place for
a while, like we should often say, like you need
to CEP it, just go and c p e it.
And of course at the start I didn't know what
(21:53):
this was, but I very quickly learned that it's doing
a job is not just the execution but also the
conception and the planning of it. And so the second
thing is that gave me much greater insight into the
work that typically goes on behind the scenes, the invisible
work as Eves called it. And it's really about the
mental load and who's carrying that and what does a
fair system look like. So, for example, it's not just
about getting a gold star to take the kids to
(22:16):
the dentist, but it's about recognizing that, hey, our kids
aret of age now that we need to think about
getting them to a dentists, so doing the research, whereas
a dentist, who's going to book an appointment, who's going
to bring them? So it's all of those things. So
it's quite a bit of an eye opener in that regard.
So overall, I'd say there was a pretty extensive rebalance
of the household chores and responsibilities in our home in
a way that was definitely more fair and more equitable.
(22:38):
So but then learn stuffered a concussion and so this
was another game changer. So she was moving some things
around in our storage room that day she somehow managed
to knock acount of paint on her head. And I
still refer to this incident as paint gate joke that
it's a conspiracy for her to keep her go on.
But like joking aside, it was a really big moment
(22:58):
and it's a really incapacitated her for quite some time.
So the first few days she lay in the dark
room by herself. She couldn't handle any stimuli. She was
very sensitive to screens including phones and laptops and lights
and movement and noise and couldn't read it. It hurt
her brain. She was dizzy, she was nauseous, she had
headaches forgetfulness. So I mentioned I have two toddlers at
(23:20):
home as well, so trying to explain to them what
was going on was a challenge in upon itself as well.
And our eldest daughter, Olivia, who's three, had also just
started preschool, so just lots of big changes, one on
top of the other. Compounding it kind of forced me
to have to take a leave of absence from work
for up to two months. And it was really during
that period that I like stepped in fully into the
(23:42):
role of a primary caregiver. And so we adopted this
new system and things were better, and they definitely were
i'd say in the past preconcussion. I was sympathetic to
her situation, but It wasn't until I really stepped into
this role of primary caregiver that I had a really
true understanding of what she had been up against for
over three years, and I was able to get a
(24:03):
sense of like what it really means by carrying the
mental burden on a daily basis, and also the loneliness
that comes with it too, Like there's a less adult
conversation and stimulation, a loss of who you are as
a person, and much less meaning and purpose to life.
I was off work doing this for a couple of months,
she was doing for three years, and it really wasn't
until then that I got a true sense of what
(24:24):
she'd been up against. This is where that I'm crying again.
How is it still triggering to me for ago after
all these years, when I've done this for ten years,
I still feel like really emotional hearing what you're saying. Well,
there's PC and a C. It sounds like we have
our preconcuccussion and after concussion. Do you think Lauren felt
(24:45):
the difference after this period? Did your conversations in your
communication did it feel different to you after you went
through this leave of absence? Yeah, So I've been back
at work for about a month and a half now,
and I'd say there's still a couple of things going on.
She's still not fully recovered, but she's getting back to it,
and I think the silver lining of the concussion has
(25:06):
been that she's recognized that, actually, I need to value
my own space a lot more, of my own time
a lot more, in a way that she hadn't done before,
and in a way that I probably did. So there's
still some concern from her that returning to her state
of preconcussion was a state of really deep burnout. And
she did reflect a few times that when she was
(25:27):
getting better, she was saying she's taking all more things,
and by virtue, I was taking on less of them
as a result of that. So she did not want
to go back to this state of preconcussion. So we've
been trying to reframe it a bit more. This is
an opportunity to talk about what the new normal wants
to look like, what we want the new normal to
look like for her and for us. So we're still
getting there. I think it was we only broke out
the cards again about a week ago, so we've been
(25:48):
redivvying them up basically, and we preconcussion again, we did
this thing. That how we managed it was we would
have a weekly meeting just half hour along in the evening,
just talking about what's what kind of went well the
past week, what's on our plate over the next week.
Are we going to manage these things? So we just
started that again. And you know, there's a bigger picture
and doing these things makes us a better couple. It's
(26:10):
not just about the impact on me. If you can
do something to enable a happier relationship, better family dynamic,
than that's the bigger benefit from it all. I suppose
here here for a go for president. Thank you for
being vulnerable and sharing your story with us today. I
(26:30):
don't know, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciated. Hi, it's me Eve. Are you a therapist,
counselor coach or nutritionists that has thought about introducing the
fair Play System directly to your clients? Well, now you
(26:52):
can come and roll in the fair Play Method, a
new online program that provides you with hands on training,
a ton of valuable resource, and a community of certified professionals.
We are all part of a greater cultural movement for
systemic change. Learn more about how you can help your
clients shift the domestic workload in their own homes towards
more equity, more fairness, and greater connectivity. Visit fair play
(27:15):
method dot com. So eve this week's time out. Since
we've heard from Fergal all of the practical implications and
how to really bring this into our lives, I'd love
for us to pick a card, talk about it, and
(27:39):
really bring this into our lives and bring it home.
So the card I picked for you was Garbage. Oh
my god, I love this so much. This is my
favorite card. Carbage was an interesting card because it was
a minimum standard of care that Seth and I were
really budding heads on. So to make that distinction the
(27:59):
concept planning and execution the ownership mindset, Seth understood. He
understood the cpe of garbage. He understood that to own garbage,
and in California it's more complicated. We have to get
these bins out onto the road. He understood that a
garbage liner goes back in, goes back in the garbage can.
(28:20):
So he understood the steps of the conception thinking about garbage.
Planning of when those bins will go out, execution of
putting the liner back in and getting those bins out
and back. What we were struggling with was I was
still his garbage shadow, a D D. And so what
would happened was, even though Seth took the card, and
(28:42):
this was very early in the practice, I still didn't
trust he was going to do it. Back to the
accountability and trust why CP is not enough because we
had not had a conversation other than that you got
the CP of this have fun. But because of all
of our old patterns, I was not trusting him. So
I was doing as I was his garbage shadow. Seth
(29:02):
is very tall, so I'd go into the kitchen, I'd see,
you know, the garbage can almost getting full. So I'd
say to myself, I'll just open the door into the sink,
because if Seth walks over there, he'll hit his knee
on the open door and he'll fall. When he's on
the ground scrambling as his knee hurts, he'll see the
garbage liners in there and then replace it, you know.
Or in kinder days, I just pull out a liner
(29:24):
and just like throw it on there, or un kinder days,
I would put a milk carton on the floor next
to the garbage so that he would see that it
was overflowing. CPE alone was not working. It was feeling
like a list. So then what I realized is that
actually having deeper conversations about the decisions we make the
(29:45):
things we value is actually really important. And so I
sat set down when emotion was low and cognition was high.
We probably had alcohol or more likely some ice cream,
and I said to him, look, I'm gonna tell you
a story that I realized you probably don't know about me.
You know my mother, you know my my disabled brother.
You know in concept, I grew up as a latch
(30:06):
key kid. But what I don't often talk to you about, Seth,
is what it felt like to get my brother water,
to put my brother to bed when I was still
a kid, and have to turn on the lights and
watch cockroaches and water bugs scatter. I closed my eyes
for ten seconds, let them scatter before I go get
the water and bring it to the other room. Because
(30:27):
we didn't have a garbage can growing up. We had
a garbage bag on a knob and that was it,
and it would spill out over the floor and the
floor was always sticky, and that was how I grew up.
And so when I see a banana peal sticking out
of the garbage. I'm transported to being a latch key kid.
It brings up abandonment, and it brings up so many
(30:50):
issues that are bigger than the garbage. This took me
a while to understand about myself a deity. That's why
this is a time out to practice understanding our story.
So we could tell them, which we're to discuss next
week to others. But Seth was able to say to me, well,
I don't give a shit about garbage. I had a
housekeeper growing up. In fact, in my fraternity, I actually
(31:11):
think I probably slept on Domino's pizza boxes and not pillows,
So garbage was my friend. So what happens is that
it do I give up? Do you give up on
the fair play system? Or just say like we did
an episode one and the time it takes me to
tell him her they what to do or remind them,
I should just do it myself. Should I have taken
garbage back and say, well, I value it more so
(31:32):
I'll just do it. No, because then it would lead
exactly back to the place where I was crying on
the side of the road. So what I said to
Seth firmly was I appreciate you valuing garbage because I
value garbage even though you don't value garbage. But you
know that this is something that has to be taken out,
and you've already said you would do it. So what
(31:55):
can we agree on so that I am not your
garbage shadow and that also I'm not being triggered from
my childhood trauma. And what he said was garbage can
go out once a day. I will take the garbage
out once a day. I put it in my calendar
like a freaking work appointment, as long as you never
mentioned garbage ever again. And that was the first time
(32:18):
in my life where like the Red Sea, it was
a freaking miracle. It parted. It was the first time
in my life where there was a light bulb, the
system was working. We really, very rarely had to talk
about garbage over again. It was happening because I had
the expectation and Seth had the trust. And that is
(32:40):
the beauty of a minimum standard of care investing in
these conversations. So for this week's time out, we are
going to use Eve's example of garbage, and there are
twelve what Eve calls that dirty, doesn't These are like
the twelve heated hot button cards, tidying up groceries, dishes, meals, cleaning, garbage,
(33:04):
discipline and screen time, kids, friendships, homeschool projects and supplies
watching your kids or your pets, laundry and home supplies.
Check out the list on fairplay life dot com. We're
gonna pick one of those twelve and use the minimum
standard of care that Eve has described to talk through
(33:28):
how we're going to tackle one of these twelve. And
what I love about this is it's really about you.
Before we talked to any partners, anybody. It could be
a roommate, it could be your parents. It's about understanding
you're a minimum standard of care and starting to think
about yourself. Talk how you would articulate it, what you
(33:49):
remember about this task growing up. And next week we're
actually going to start prepping for the invitation for how
to invite someone to stay down to actually discuss these issues.
We're moving from the internal work to more external facing
work and it's going to be really impactful. The next
(34:12):
episode is one of my favorite because communication will always
be the hardest and the most important practice at least
of my life. Thank you for listening to Time out
A production of I Heard Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm
Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
(34:32):
Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social
media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our work
at fair Play Life. And I'm doctor at dd NERUCAR,
a Harvard position with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout,
and mental health. Follow me on social media at dr
A d D The rootcar and find out more about
(34:54):
my work at doctor d D dot com. That's d
R A d I t I dot com. Our Hello
Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker.
Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett,
and Jessica Krinschitch. We hope you all love taking a
much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe
(35:17):
to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your favorite shows.
Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the
New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.
And I'm doctor add In the Rukar, a physician and
medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience,
mental health, and burnout. We're here to peel back to
(00:24):
layers around why it's so easy for society to guard
men's time as if it's diamonds and to treat women's
time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you
are partnered with or without children, or in a career
where you want more boundaries, this is the place for
you for all family structures. We're here to take a
time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim
(00:49):
our time. Good afternoon in adity, So good to see you,
So great to be with you, Eve, as always, so
today we're really digging into ten years of fair Play research,
(01:10):
coupled with your lends around care care is really imported
in this country, but why does it fallen women? So
why was I the statistic the two thirds or more
of what it takes to run a home and family.
Why was it falling on me? What I never told
you that I do write about was how I start
(01:31):
to think about this beyond myself, How I start to
look at this. As my favorite sociologisty Right Mills would
say private lives or public issues. So I definitely wasn't
a gender studies major in college. I had really never
heard of these terms mental load, second shift, emotional labor,
invisible work. But after that Blueberries breakdown, I went on
(01:55):
a breast cancer march with nine of my closest friends
and adity, most of them are married to men, They're
in heterosist gender partnerships. They are powerhouse women. One woman
with me was the CEO of a major nonprofit. We
had the head of stroking trauma at a major hospital,
oscar winning producer, and on and on, and we were
(02:16):
honoring a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.
So we got up that morning made signs together that
said courage, strength, and power. Not just a women's problem.
It was this true girlfriend's collective experience of power. And
then noon came and like the fairy tale Cinderella, we
(02:37):
all turned into pumpkins. And it was not from a spell.
It was from our partners and the text and phone
calls that were inundating us starting at noon. The first
one that came in was when are you coming home
from the parade? Another one was where did you leave
(02:58):
Hudson soccer bag? Where's the birthday party? What's the address?
And and did you leave me a gift? My favorite
adity was my friend Kate's husband who texted her as
we looked over her shoulder, do the kids need to
eat lunch? And you know what was so hard for me?
(03:20):
It wasn't like we all decided to reverse the spell
and turned back into our version of a fairy tale
by turning off our phones. Every single woman looked at
me and said, I'm so happy you made us downtown
lunch reservation. But we left our partners with too much
to do, and they left me there. But before they
(03:41):
started to disperse, I asked for an act of resistance,
and that was asking these women to help me count
up how many phone calls and text we had received.
We had thirty phone calls and forty six texts for
ten women over thirty minutes. And that was the day
(04:01):
where I said I'm going to understand this issue and
that's really where I stumbled upon Arlene Kaplan Daniels article
think about Same Ship, different decade about invisible work. And
invisible work was such an interesting term to me because duh,
you could just make it visible. And so I opened
(04:22):
up Excel and I spent nine months with women like
you and the women at the Breast Cancer March. And
then this was a time when we didn't have social
media the way we do today, so I just called
up women in different communities and it was the first
time a d D again because I didn't have a
you to follow. I didn't have these beautiful social media accounts.
I had myself and an isolation and loneliness problem. And
(04:47):
then over nine months, I met a community of women
who helped me populate what I ultimately called my Excel spreadsheet,
the should I do spreadsheet, and it became tabs and
two thousand idem of invisible work with women I didn't
even know, saying, oh my god, thank you for putting
in taking the kids to the dentists and making school lunches.
That's ten minutes. But I don't see sunscreen. Where is
(05:10):
the application of sunscreen? And I would say, well, I
just got a scroll to tab seventy two you will
see sunscreen is there. And then they would respond, well, yeah,
there's it says two minutes for the application, but what
about the thirty minutes for the chase. I was like,
oh my god, yeah, the thirty minutes for the chase.
And it just kept on growing and growing, until finally
(05:31):
I thought my solution was sending this giant list to
Seth with all of my communication skills that we're going
to talk about in a later episode, and that's extremely facetious.
It was just the nineteen million megabyte spreadsheet with the
subject line can't wait to discuss m HM. And what
I got from Seth was predictable. It wasn't even words.
(05:55):
It was the earliest version of a monkey emoji that's
covering its eyes and in my home. And what I
realized about that list when I said it to Seth
and it landed sort of like a dud, was that
list alone don't work. And we've been making lists for
literally a century since we've been trying to enter the
male dominated workforce. And the other thing I realized about
(06:17):
that day was that this woman had called me from
the Jewish Federation of Arizona and left me a message
that said, Hey, Eve, I don't know you, but I
got your text message from a friend. I want to
let you know that after receiving your spreadsheet, thank you
so much for making it, I'm not going to stay
in my marriage anymore. WHOA. And that got me thinking
(06:37):
about they do no harm of exposing a problem without
a solution. And so that was the time in my
life where I could resign myself to continue to do
it all and continue to lose myself in the process,
or I could get my ass in gear and become
my own clients. And so I asked a question that
(06:59):
I want us to explore today, which became the basis
of the fair play system, and that is, what if
we started to treat our homes as our most important organizations.
And one man said to me when I asked him
that question, because it was a light bulb moment for me, said, Oh,
you mean like the opposite of my home where we
wait to decide who's taking the dog out right when
(07:21):
it's about to take a piss on the rug. And
I said, exactly that that thing, but the opposite. And
from that day on I started to understand that even
my aunt Marian's ma Gen group has more clearly defined expectations.
In the home, you don't bring snack twice to that group,
you're out. Whereas the home, we are literally every single
(07:44):
day doing the most efficient thing we could do, which
is make the same decisions over and over again, which
is the opposite of what we're going to talk about today,
which is a system. And the last thing I want
to say was that the second most important question I
we're asked in ten years is the basis of what
we're going to talk about today, and that is how
(08:06):
did mustard get in your refrigerator? That question ended up
being the basis of the fair play system because what
I got to see as somebody who does organizational management
for a living, as you know, I work for families
that look like the HBO show Succession, And so what
that question, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? Do?
(08:26):
For me? Was a broken answer that I kept hearing
with the should I do spreadsheet? When I asked people
in partnerships who gets the groceries we both do, who
watches the kids we both do? Who packs and unpacks
the backpack we both do? And I kept thinking, this
is not accurate because if we both did it, then
(08:49):
why is there so much resentment? Why is this issue
so triggering? So I had to ask, how did mustar
get in the refrigerator? To get away from this? Both
track up to understand what was really happening in people's homes.
And we'll center the heterocyst gender partnership here because that's
where a lot of these norms come from. I would
hear in seventeen countries, including the Nordic countries. Oh yes,
(09:12):
I'm the mom, I'm the woman, and I notice my
second son, Johnny needs yellow mustard on his protein otherwise
he chokes. And that is conception. That is something we
know well from organizational management. We get paid big bucks
for conception, for coming up with new ideas and noticing
in the workplace. And then that mom would say to me,
(09:32):
I'm responsible for monitoring the mustard for when it it's
running low. And I'm also getting stakeholder by in from
my family for what they need on that list. And
that's also something we get paid the big bucks for,
and that's planning. And then I would hear I send
my partners to the store to pick up the yellow mustard,
and you know he brings home spicy dijon eve every
(09:56):
fucking time, and you want me to trust him with
my living will. We can't even bring home the right
type of mustard. And that's when I realized that as
a mediator, we often say the presenting problem is not
the real problem. Similar to medicine, the real problem wasn't
about mustard. It was about accountability and trust, and the
(10:17):
only way to bring back accountability and trust in the
workplace and the home. From fifty years of organizational scholarship
that I know from ten years of working with families,
as you come to the table with an ownership mindset,
you hold together the conception, planning, and execution of a
task that is life changing. That is the life changing
(10:38):
magic of mustard. You have demystified something that has plagued
us for generations and generations. It's universal, like you have
that spreadsheet. Because we're all going through this, and we've
talked about it in other episodes. We're having this communal
isolating experience. We're doing so much work, we feel this
(10:58):
burden and we feel all alone. And yet if you
were to knock on your neighbor's door, everyone is going
through the same experience. There is a way to take
agency in your own life while living in polluted air. Right,
we know our air is polluted. We know there's a
lot of systemic reasons, especially in America, that things are
are harder for women, and especially for mothers without a
(11:20):
social safety net, and especially for single mothers like my
mother or the millions of others you know out there
that are in different types of family structures. But the
beauty about understanding that the air is polluted is recognizing
that we still have to breathe. Right, we can't stop breathing.
We don't want to suffocate and die. That is a
(11:41):
radical act to say we can do things differently. You know,
when I first came up with the idea of a system,
it was confusing to people. They didn't understand what a
system is. And when I said, who cares what the
system is as long as you know what the outcome
is of that system, which is accountability and trust. Explicitly
define expectation ends where you know your role in your home,
(12:02):
where there's fairness and transparency, that's a thriving organization. And
in that type of organization, you know how you're making
that decision. Before you make that decision so that you're
not like that man who's deciding who's taking the dog
out right when it's about to take a piss on
the rug. That, to me is the reason why we
are burning out. And the other great thing about a
(12:24):
system is that it's the opposite of assumptions. So what
was happening even in gay families that I would talk to,
was this same type of assumptions, not gendered assumptions, right,
because it's you say, it's two men raising kids. But
what happened is that other assumptions would sneak in. Many
gay families would tell me that the school would say, well,
(12:45):
who's the mom is sort of in a joking way,
trying to put these heterocis gender norms onto other family structures,
or even in the own family saying well, we decided
the person who makes more automatically did less, and so
we end up in these dentful assumptions, which is the
opposite of where fair play can take you. System sounds
(13:08):
very high tech, and the reason, as you've mentioned in
the many stories you've told about how people feel that
like factor when they hear the word system for their
home is because the home is supposed to feel like
a respite, like a high touch environment, right, there's no
room for that high tech language in a high touch environment.
What I love about fair play and about systems in general,
(13:31):
it distills down the home into very concrete, manageable parts.
The other thing that systems do is that it removes
human error. And that's why we have all of these
checks and balances in the medical world with systems is
because then we don't rely on the individual So when
the individuals feeling tired. You know when I think about doctors, right, like,
(13:53):
we're tired, we're on call, we haven't slept. There's all
of these other human factors. But when we have systems
in place, we can override a lot of those as
you call it, low cognition, high emotion states and make
good decisions. It's a way to automate something that is
(14:14):
very complicated, can get really messy. It removes the human error. Yes,
So as we talk about fair play, there's kind of
three main concepts, right, So we have the CPE ownership mindset,
the minimum standard of care, and the daily grind. So Eve,
can you walk us through all of those concepts. So
(14:36):
CPE the ownership mindset, as we set up was the
opposite of the mustard story. If you actually want to
see what we call the CPE checklist, you can go
to fair play life dot com. We actually have free
resources there for you, but I'll explain it briefly. C
p E as an ownership mindset is the opposite of
(14:57):
a both trap. It's the opposite of understanding who's doing water,
who will make a decision because you both are stuck
and thinking you both do it. Let's talk about extracurricular sports,
because that was the first one that Seth and I
started with. Seth honestly thought he was owning he was
in charge of extracricular sports a d d. Because he
(15:19):
would show up to the Little League field with my
kids when they were young, with a water bottle that
I packed for him and in sunscreen that I put
on for my kids. When Seth finally understood that the
conception was serving my kids friends to see what sports
they wanted to play. Even in the first place, that's
(15:41):
all involved in a conception. The planning is person car
pool text chain, plus the ordering of the equipment or
borrowing the equipment, to signing up to the portal that
never seems to work and crashes all the time to
zero saying five copies of your kids birth certificate, and
on and on. And when Seth understood that that that
(16:05):
whole thing, from the serving to the planning two the
actually showing up on the field, the execution was the
ownership mindset that changed our lives. You got me six
hours of my week back, So that's CPE. The other
two concepts that we really need to understand are the
(16:28):
minimum standard of care and the daily grinds. As you said,
daily grinds are there's thirty of them in the deck
of a hundred fair play cards and what they signify
our tasks that are normally done by women. Professor Darby
Sacks Be, a friend of mine, forced me to double
weight the cards to say not all cards are created
equal dishes. Is not the same as lawn and plants.
(16:52):
And once I understood that, her research shows that men
often take tasks that could be done at their own
leisure time, whether that's mowing the lawn or paying bills.
Women often do the tasks that are the repetitive tasks
that interrupt their time, that chop it up like time confetti.
(17:13):
Once you realize that the daily grind cards are the
ones we should focus on, the ones we should go
to first, the ones we should understand that they're not
a gendered responsibility. The closer we get to that, the better.
Those are the cards like dishes and card transportation and
what I like to call daily disruptions where if a
(17:34):
kid is sick, who is the one picking up that
kid from school and interrupting their day. Now, finally, let's
go to the meat of the resistance. The meat of
the resistance to fair play is the minimum standard of care,
This idea that my partner and I will never agree
on what's important, or as one man said to me,
(17:56):
my wife does all these unnecessary things. But the beauty
of fair play is it's not a list, even though
you can use it that way, and I hope nobody will.
The beauty of fair plays when you onboard into a system,
you build your deck together, you decide it's a collective
unit what matters to you, which is often missing in
(18:17):
this discussion. And we're going to do an exercise to
really unpack the minimum standard of care when we do
our time out today. So it's really cool today, Eve,
is that we're meeting someone who's putting all of these
larger concepts into practice in their daily lives. Can you
tell us a little bit more about Fergil King. I
(18:39):
met Fergil while I was giving a key note, and
he actually wrote to me. He wrote me a letter
about how the fair play systems were changing his life,
and we're getting to meet him after the break m
(19:03):
I'm so excited to have Furgal here with us today.
He sent me a letter after going through a really
difficult time with his partner Laren and their two kids. Hi,
furgo so, Furgal. I loved the letter you shared with
Eve about your experience, and I would love for you
(19:24):
to share how you came to this pivotal point and
what ultimately led you to talk to us today. So
I'm in a common law relationship. We're not actually married.
We're engaged or have been for a long time. We
have two toddlers, two girls, age one and three. They're
twenty months apart, and I typically work in a office
(19:46):
environment Monday to Friday nine while my wife Laren is
at home with the kids most of the time, and
so last summer out of probably sheer frustration on her
part with me or how the household is managed or not,
and how a lot of the burden typically falls on
her because she's at home most of the time. And
(20:06):
learn started googling some ideas for a system that would
work for the home, and it's a system that's more
more fair and more equitable. And that's when she really
came across the fair Play and the book. So we
decided to take a look at it. We bought the audiobook,
we bought the cards, and we fully intended and did
put a new system into place. And so up until
(20:28):
this point, I considered myself and still do to be
this kind of modern day dad, pretty progressive views. I
carried my own weight around, help out a lot. I
was doing the jobs that were asked of me, and
often doing a good job of it too. I think
it was complimented on how good of a job I
did sometimes and sometimes I would even do these things
without being asked, so I felt I was like doing
(20:49):
a great job with these things. But despite these values
or beliefs that I have, I still would have probably
carried a number of cultural norms with me that don't
always necessarily a line up with the values that I have.
So at the time when Learned first broke out these cards,
and so this is the thing we're going to do now.
So I took a look at it. I'd say there
was probably a lot of resistance for me to begin with.
(21:11):
I felt like I needed to defend myself and quite
worried about the increased workload that was probably going to
be upon me, but you know, I agreed to go
along with it to keep her happy. There were at
least two game changer things that I reflected upon nearly
straightaway upon adopting the new system, like, first of all,
immediately allowed to learn to switch off from certain tasks
(21:33):
as she knew that I was now responsible for them,
and not just responsible for doing the tasks, but as
Eve has in her book, like the responsible for the
conception and the planning and the execution of them. So
this idea of CPE was very new to me, and
it became like a household name in our place for
a while, like we should often say, like you need
to CEP it, just go and c p e it.
And of course at the start I didn't know what
(21:53):
this was, but I very quickly learned that it's doing
a job is not just the execution but also the
conception and the planning of it. And so the second
thing is that gave me much greater insight into the
work that typically goes on behind the scenes, the invisible
work as Eves called it. And it's really about the
mental load and who's carrying that and what does a
fair system look like. So, for example, it's not just
about getting a gold star to take the kids to
(22:16):
the dentist, but it's about recognizing that, hey, our kids
aret of age now that we need to think about
getting them to a dentists, so doing the research, whereas
a dentist, who's going to book an appointment, who's going
to bring them? So it's all of those things. So
it's quite a bit of an eye opener in that regard.
So overall, I'd say there was a pretty extensive rebalance
of the household chores and responsibilities in our home in
a way that was definitely more fair and more equitable.
(22:38):
So but then learn stuffered a concussion and so this
was another game changer. So she was moving some things
around in our storage room that day she somehow managed
to knock acount of paint on her head. And I
still refer to this incident as paint gate joke that
it's a conspiracy for her to keep her go on.
But like joking aside, it was a really big moment
(22:58):
and it's a really incapacitated her for quite some time.
So the first few days she lay in the dark
room by herself. She couldn't handle any stimuli. She was
very sensitive to screens including phones and laptops and lights
and movement and noise and couldn't read it. It hurt
her brain. She was dizzy, she was nauseous, she had
headaches forgetfulness. So I mentioned I have two toddlers at
(23:20):
home as well, so trying to explain to them what
was going on was a challenge in upon itself as well.
And our eldest daughter, Olivia, who's three, had also just
started preschool, so just lots of big changes, one on
top of the other. Compounding it kind of forced me
to have to take a leave of absence from work
for up to two months. And it was really during
that period that I like stepped in fully into the
(23:42):
role of a primary caregiver. And so we adopted this
new system and things were better, and they definitely were
i'd say in the past preconcussion. I was sympathetic to
her situation, but It wasn't until I really stepped into
this role of primary caregiver that I had a really
true understanding of what she had been up against for
over three years, and I was able to get a
(24:03):
sense of like what it really means by carrying the
mental burden on a daily basis, and also the loneliness
that comes with it too, Like there's a less adult
conversation and stimulation, a loss of who you are as
a person, and much less meaning and purpose to life.
I was off work doing this for a couple of months,
she was doing for three years, and it really wasn't
until then that I got a true sense of what
(24:24):
she'd been up against. This is where that I'm crying again.
How is it still triggering to me for ago after
all these years, when I've done this for ten years,
I still feel like really emotional hearing what you're saying. Well,
there's PC and a C. It sounds like we have
our preconcuccussion and after concussion. Do you think Lauren felt
(24:45):
the difference after this period? Did your conversations in your
communication did it feel different to you after you went
through this leave of absence? Yeah, So I've been back
at work for about a month and a half now,
and I'd say there's still a couple of things going on.
She's still not fully recovered, but she's getting back to it,
and I think the silver lining of the concussion has
(25:06):
been that she's recognized that, actually, I need to value
my own space a lot more, of my own time
a lot more, in a way that she hadn't done before,
and in a way that I probably did. So there's
still some concern from her that returning to her state
of preconcussion was a state of really deep burnout. And
she did reflect a few times that when she was
(25:27):
getting better, she was saying she's taking all more things,
and by virtue, I was taking on less of them
as a result of that. So she did not want
to go back to this state of preconcussion. So we've
been trying to reframe it a bit more. This is
an opportunity to talk about what the new normal wants
to look like, what we want the new normal to
look like for her and for us. So we're still
getting there. I think it was we only broke out
the cards again about a week ago, so we've been
(25:48):
redivvying them up basically, and we preconcussion again, we did
this thing. That how we managed it was we would
have a weekly meeting just half hour along in the evening,
just talking about what's what kind of went well the
past week, what's on our plate over the next week.
Are we going to manage these things? So we just
started that again. And you know, there's a bigger picture
and doing these things makes us a better couple. It's
(26:10):
not just about the impact on me. If you can
do something to enable a happier relationship, better family dynamic,
than that's the bigger benefit from it all. I suppose
here here for a go for president. Thank you for
being vulnerable and sharing your story with us today. I
(26:30):
don't know, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciated. Hi, it's me Eve. Are you a therapist,
counselor coach or nutritionists that has thought about introducing the
fair Play System directly to your clients? Well, now you
(26:52):
can come and roll in the fair Play Method, a
new online program that provides you with hands on training,
a ton of valuable resource, and a community of certified professionals.
We are all part of a greater cultural movement for
systemic change. Learn more about how you can help your
clients shift the domestic workload in their own homes towards
more equity, more fairness, and greater connectivity. Visit fair play
(27:15):
method dot com. So eve this week's time out. Since
we've heard from Fergal all of the practical implications and
how to really bring this into our lives, I'd love
for us to pick a card, talk about it, and
(27:39):
really bring this into our lives and bring it home.
So the card I picked for you was Garbage. Oh
my god, I love this so much. This is my
favorite card. Carbage was an interesting card because it was
a minimum standard of care that Seth and I were
really budding heads on. So to make that distinction the
(27:59):
concept planning and execution the ownership mindset, Seth understood. He
understood the cpe of garbage. He understood that to own garbage,
and in California it's more complicated. We have to get
these bins out onto the road. He understood that a
garbage liner goes back in, goes back in the garbage can.
(28:20):
So he understood the steps of the conception thinking about garbage.
Planning of when those bins will go out, execution of
putting the liner back in and getting those bins out
and back. What we were struggling with was I was
still his garbage shadow, a D D. And so what
would happened was, even though Seth took the card, and
(28:42):
this was very early in the practice, I still didn't
trust he was going to do it. Back to the
accountability and trust why CP is not enough because we
had not had a conversation other than that you got
the CP of this have fun. But because of all
of our old patterns, I was not trusting him. So
I was doing as I was his garbage shadow. Seth
(29:02):
is very tall, so I'd go into the kitchen, I'd see,
you know, the garbage can almost getting full. So I'd
say to myself, I'll just open the door into the sink,
because if Seth walks over there, he'll hit his knee
on the open door and he'll fall. When he's on
the ground scrambling as his knee hurts, he'll see the
garbage liners in there and then replace it, you know.
Or in kinder days, I just pull out a liner
(29:24):
and just like throw it on there, or un kinder days,
I would put a milk carton on the floor next
to the garbage so that he would see that it
was overflowing. CPE alone was not working. It was feeling
like a list. So then what I realized is that
actually having deeper conversations about the decisions we make the
(29:45):
things we value is actually really important. And so I
sat set down when emotion was low and cognition was high.
We probably had alcohol or more likely some ice cream,
and I said to him, look, I'm gonna tell you
a story that I realized you probably don't know about me.
You know my mother, you know my my disabled brother.
You know in concept, I grew up as a latch
(30:06):
key kid. But what I don't often talk to you about, Seth,
is what it felt like to get my brother water,
to put my brother to bed when I was still
a kid, and have to turn on the lights and
watch cockroaches and water bugs scatter. I closed my eyes
for ten seconds, let them scatter before I go get
the water and bring it to the other room. Because
(30:27):
we didn't have a garbage can growing up. We had
a garbage bag on a knob and that was it,
and it would spill out over the floor and the
floor was always sticky, and that was how I grew up.
And so when I see a banana peal sticking out
of the garbage. I'm transported to being a latch key kid.
It brings up abandonment, and it brings up so many
(30:50):
issues that are bigger than the garbage. This took me
a while to understand about myself a deity. That's why
this is a time out to practice understanding our story.
So we could tell them, which we're to discuss next
week to others. But Seth was able to say to me, well,
I don't give a shit about garbage. I had a
housekeeper growing up. In fact, in my fraternity, I actually
(31:11):
think I probably slept on Domino's pizza boxes and not pillows,
So garbage was my friend. So what happens is that
it do I give up? Do you give up on
the fair play system? Or just say like we did
an episode one and the time it takes me to
tell him her they what to do or remind them,
I should just do it myself. Should I have taken
garbage back and say, well, I value it more so
(31:32):
I'll just do it. No, because then it would lead
exactly back to the place where I was crying on
the side of the road. So what I said to
Seth firmly was I appreciate you valuing garbage because I
value garbage even though you don't value garbage. But you
know that this is something that has to be taken out,
and you've already said you would do it. So what
(31:55):
can we agree on so that I am not your
garbage shadow and that also I'm not being triggered from
my childhood trauma. And what he said was garbage can
go out once a day. I will take the garbage
out once a day. I put it in my calendar
like a freaking work appointment, as long as you never
mentioned garbage ever again. And that was the first time
(32:18):
in my life where like the Red Sea, it was
a freaking miracle. It parted. It was the first time
in my life where there was a light bulb, the
system was working. We really, very rarely had to talk
about garbage over again. It was happening because I had
the expectation and Seth had the trust. And that is
(32:40):
the beauty of a minimum standard of care investing in
these conversations. So for this week's time out, we are
going to use Eve's example of garbage, and there are
twelve what Eve calls that dirty, doesn't These are like
the twelve heated hot button cards, tidying up groceries, dishes, meals, cleaning, garbage,
(33:04):
discipline and screen time, kids, friendships, homeschool projects and supplies
watching your kids or your pets, laundry and home supplies.
Check out the list on fairplay life dot com. We're
gonna pick one of those twelve and use the minimum
standard of care that Eve has described to talk through
(33:28):
how we're going to tackle one of these twelve. And
what I love about this is it's really about you.
Before we talked to any partners, anybody. It could be
a roommate, it could be your parents. It's about understanding
you're a minimum standard of care and starting to think
about yourself. Talk how you would articulate it, what you
(33:49):
remember about this task growing up. And next week we're
actually going to start prepping for the invitation for how
to invite someone to stay down to actually discuss these issues.
We're moving from the internal work to more external facing
work and it's going to be really impactful. The next
(34:12):
episode is one of my favorite because communication will always
be the hardest and the most important practice at least
of my life. Thank you for listening to Time out
A production of I Heard Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm
Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
(34:32):
Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social
media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our work
at fair Play Life. And I'm doctor at dd NERUCAR,
a Harvard position with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout,
and mental health. Follow me on social media at dr
A d D The rootcar and find out more about
(34:54):
my work at doctor d D dot com. That's d
R A d I t I dot com. Our Hello
Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker.
Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett,
and Jessica Krinschitch. We hope you all love taking a
much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe
(35:17):
to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your favorite shows.
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