A little background: right after Peter and I got married, he left his job and we moved to a new state together. While I started my residency, working up to 80 hours a week (sometimes more,) he was home, job hunting and taking the lion’s share of the household chores. Prior to marriage we were always living apart, so we never really had a traditional division of those kinds of duties as a couple. That being said, I had always wondered why I was the only one stressing about finding and interviewing nannies and sitters, shopping for the next size up of clothes for E, or researching affordable cross-country moving companies.
Fair Play, by Eve Rodsky, is all about the ‘why’ behind this question. I really enjoyed the book- it was well researched, thoughtful and eye-opening (if, at times, rage-inducing.) But what I really appreciated was that, unlike many books in the nonfiction genre, it didn’t just present a depressing problem with no hope of a resolution- Rodsky not only came up with a strategy for couples to re-allocate both visible and invisible tasks, she beta-tested it and it’s now available as a game couples can play to make things a little more equitable- fair play.
The concept is surprisingly (almost embarrassingly) simple. The game consists of a card deck of different tasks- from things you do every day (cooking, laundry, dishes,) to the planning and mapping out of life (think meal planning, managing the family calendar,) to things that come up occasionally but still occupy brain space (think taking your car in for repairs and arranging childcare.) There are other cards that I won't go into much detail on - primarily cards to ensure each person is getting not only self care time, but unicorn space time- aka time to pursue your passions as well. The goal is to sit down with your partner and distribute the cards as they're done now- ex, Peter does cooking and dishes, I do laundry, etc. This not only shows you both what each of you are doing to maintain the home and family, but opens opportunities to discuss and redistribute workloads if one person is particularly overwhelmed with duties. This can be repeated as needed when one person goes through a busy week or has an unexpected disruption, but ideally these swaps are planned. Most importantly, the rules stipulate (and the book repeatedly drives this point) that whoever holds the card MUST do the task from start to finish, following the conceptualize -plan- execute model. So if you're the meal person, you need to pick out the recipe, figure out what ingredients need to be picked up, and cook and plate the food. More on this later.
We got our cards in the mail a week ago, and I was eager to get started, mainly because I was curious how our cards dealt out. I had a hunch that while Peter did more than the average husband around the house, I was still taking on quite a bit of the mental load. And my hunch wasn't far off!
We ultimately didn't swap or pass off too many cards. I'm lucky to have a husband who's always done his fair share of the visible labor, and is a better cook than me. Plus, I'm focusing on being home with the kids this year, so my workload is significantly lighter. But it did spark a nice conversation about a lot of the work that I do that goes unnoticed - planning out and shopping for holidays, gifts, social calendar, school and childcare, and more (the section of the book on thank you cards gave me a chuckle.)
We had a false start after Peter got a nasty cold over the weekend and we backslid into survival mode. But a week in, I wanted to share how it's going for us and my honest opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
The good: right off the bat, I noticed in the book that Rodsky's approach is not punitive or even accusatory. The goal is not to incite conflict .If anything, I found the experience of listing out what each of us did generated some healthy conversations and appreciation of what each of us does to keep things going without a major hitch. Having a visual marker of what I do for us as a family in the form of a pile of cards was also validating for me, since a lot of things I was doing fall under the invisible load category and often go unrecognized. What's more, the rest of the week I found myself thanking hubs for doing things I used to take for granted.
The tricky. I'll call this section tricky because none of this is necessarily bad. But I did notice certain 'rules' of the game didn't gel with our current system. Which is not a big deal- the point of the game is to make life flow more easily, not to make things more complicated. But I did find myself unsure of whether to pivot from something that seemed like it was working for the sake of following the game to a T.
The most common example of this was sticking to the CPE model. According to this framework, whoever does laundry DOES laundry - they recognize we're low on clean clothes without being told, gather up the laundry, wash, dry, fold and put it away. For Peter and I, he often would start the load and I'd fold and put things away. Another example is cooking - at some point I took charge of our meal planning and shopping list, while he would get groceries and cook most days (I would work as a sous chef and do whatever prep I could during the day, or throw together easy meals some nights.) If we're being purists when following the rules if fair play, we really need to bust this system and each of us has to commit to our assigned tasks. Ultimately we found a compromise that worked for us: instead of one person being the dishes person or cooking person, we swap off, with Peter cooking most weeks while I do dishes, and the opposite on my days. Same with laundry: we split it into cloth diapers and regular laundry, so that one person wasn't drowning in this massive task. The only CPE we truly split for now is that I still meal plan, because I enjoy it. And it's worked pretty well for us. The only problem with this is my next point: the baby.
Our sweet, adorable bundle of joy is not a big fan of being put down. This is totally normal at this age, and it's slowly getting better, but as the breastfeeding parent, I find myself stuck on a couch or in the bedroom feeding M right when I'm in the middle of trying to get something done, and I often get frustrated that the kitchen is a mess or I left some hands-on task unfinished. This is, of course, a temporary problem - babies grow way too fast and before I blink I'm sure we'll be missing these exhausting, lovely days of the fourth trimester. But for now, I find myself feeling a bit guilty for barking orders at Peter while I'm snuggling with M (ok, I'm not really barking orders at anyone, most of the time.) It's not a huge flaw, but worth noting that the game is probably a little easier to play when a family is past it's young infant stage.
It's too early to say how long and how intensely we're going to adopt this approach. At some point I'd like to ditch the cards and make our own spreadsheet, with descriptions of each task and colors to designate who is in charge of what. But we've had our first sit down discussion and both agreed it's going well enough that we're going to stick to it. I've already taken a few more cards after my consulting gig wrapped up and Peter's job started to ramp up for the quarter. At the very least, it's sparked some healthy conversations and helped us both feel seen in a household with two working parents and young kids.
Have you tried this approach? Or something similar? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
