Our Fair Play Discussion Signaled the End of My Marriage
a primer on Eve Rodsky's bestselling book
It was a weekend in May 2021, when I sat down at the patio table with my husband to discuss Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). A book by Eve Rodsky published in 2019, Fair Play outlines how to more equitably split household labor, formulating a system for how to shift the weight of homecare and childcare responsibilities onto both partners’ shoulders, instead of just the wife’s. It is a revolutionary book whose tenets shape much of what I write about today. I’ve referenced it in countless posts. Fair Play includes the book, the deck of cards, a non-profit that trains Fair Play facilitators, and a documentary directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom.1 The New York Times covered Rodsky and the book last year (the article also features sociologist
and her research on cognitive labor and gender inequality within families).Rodsky is a Harvard-trained lawyer who downshifted her career upon the birth of her children, and when I read her story in the beginning portion of Fair Play, I felt like she’d written my story. Of wanting to continue to work, but feeling like something had to give. And that thing was her career.
“In the end I walked away from my dream job to become an independent consultant, a move I don’t regret (but I do still think about a lot). In my case, it was because - however supportive my corporate employer was about holding my full-time position for me during my maternity leave - the company didn’t have family friendly systems in place to support parents requiring more flexibility in the early child rearing years that directly follow.”
I was a senior editor at a division of HarperCollins when I had my first baby. It was most definitely a dream job but it came with a commute that stole three hours from each day. When my company said I could no longer work from home one day a week, I quit.
Rodsky ended up going back to work full-time upon the birth of her second child but found that she was still managing most of the mental load, working to ensure that the fact that she was back at work full-time didn’t impact her husband.
She unpacks what she calls the Toxic Time Messages that we have picked up being raised in patriarchy that make us believe men’s time is priceless (like diamonds) while women’s time is infinite (like sand). We protect men’s ability to work unheeded by the demands and requirements of house and home in a way that is not reciprocated for mothers, not to mention men’s entitlement to leisure (I loved Anne Helen Petersen’s interrogation of this concept).
In part due to Rodsky’s work, as well as the titanic shift of the pandemic’s impact on mothers, we have seen a surge of awareness and discussion in the last few years around the mental load of motherhood, or invisible labor. Lately I’ve been seeing social media posts about having an “equal partner.” One man went viral saying that he doesn’t “help” his wife. But even the fact that this TikTok went viral shows how far we still have to go… that his comments were revolutionary.
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Some of what makes the Fair Play method so helpful is that Rodsky makes the invisible visible through 100 cards that encompass all the work of running a household and managing a family. But she goes beyond the “Daily Grind” cards like dishes and laundry. She lists dental (kids), clothing (for kids), vacations, packing for vacations, carpooling, signing kids up for extracurriculars (which is a different card than taking them to said activity), school forms, and even Magical Beings for things like The Tooth Fairy, Santa, and Elf on the Shelf (all of which exist thanks to someone’s labor, usually the mother’s).
Another key tenet of the Fair Play method is that Rodsky insists that if you hold a card, you must be in charge of three things: conception, planning and execution (which she calls CPE). Which means the task is yours from start to finish. No being told what to do or asking for a list. If you are in charge of grocery shopping, you coordinate with whomever holds the meals card, you make the list, you notice what is running low and you go to the store. If you are in charge of the dentist, you find one covered by insurance, make the appointment, take the children, and schedule the follow up. Everything is yours, no delegating, no help, no nagging.
Rodsky recognizes that this is a huge shift in how things are typically done. It will take time to figure out how to shift daily grind cards so one person isn’t always handling some of the most taxing jobs (like kids’ bedtime or dishes). Bustle recently published an article on how this means treating your family and household like the most important organization (see The HR-ification of Marriage). Because it is. But until now, we haven’t had a system to run said organization other than just depending on the woman in the relationship (see my post on Wifedom on more about how wife-ing, until recently, was really more a job than an identity).
I had always been the primary caregiver in our family, shifting to part-time work just like Rodsky upon the birth of children. First I had my daughter watched by her grandmother three mornings a week as I built up my freelance business. Then she went to preschool three mornings a week, but by then I had an infant who went to my mom’s. I added a babysitter one afternoon a week and tried to get the rest of my work done during nap time. When my oldest went to kindergarten, I had my youngest do full day preschool three days a week (but full day ended at 3 pm). But that was the extent of my childcare.
I look back in astonishment at all I was able to accomplish during those years (I ghostwrote 11 books). I also understand why I was so desperately grateful when my youngest finally enrolled in kindergarten in August 2019 (after an extra year of preschool because she had an August birthday). I kept myself sane by acknowledging it wouldn’t always be like this. Shuffling my paid work into tight corners allowed me to be home with them, their primary caretaker, at the park and playdates and story times. But my work life and my mental sanity (and my marriage) took a hit.
Enter the pandemic when I quit work completely. My husband made more money than I did, not just because he could work full-time but because he owned his own financial planning company. He couldn’t downshift his career easily. I could.
I didn’t realize that becoming a full-time mom with no income would lead to the death of my marriage.
When we sat down in May 2021, a year into our new arrangement, I understood that since I was no longer even working part-time, it made sense that at least the childcare fell to me. What I didn’t like was how everything else was on my plate as well. The cooking and cleaning, the arranging of the housecleaners who came every other week (and the tidying up in the 30 minutes before they arrived), the scheduling of doctor’s appointments, the planning of birthday parties and gifts. This was during the pandemic when we couldn’t schedule summer camps or even extracurriculars, so it was much less than usual yet it still felt overwhelming. It was a time when we were all so tired, so drained, from this virus killing millions, and our year of sequestration, our dependence on only those in our house. (It also didn’t help that I was in charge of all 21 meals a week, their prep and cleanup since we were not going anywhere).
I knew that my husband was busy. His income was now the sole one paying our bills. But I didn’t like how my job never ended, how I somehow ended up feeling like nurse, cook, and maid. I had also begun writing in my own voice, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t working. I just wasn’t getting paid for it. Scary Mommy had published an essay, and I was at work on another essay that The Lily ended up publishing in July. I was building a writing career of my own, not one hidden behind the ideas of other people. So I was working, at this time. Just not making much money at this work. (And to be clear, writing wasn’t a hobby of mine. It was a job. I have worked in publishing for twenty years, first as an editor, then as a ghostwriter, and now, writing my own stuff. This is what I do for income. This is a career I have spent two decades developing skills in. Art is work).
I was fine managing the kids and their school schedules during the day. But then, when he finished his workday, I wanted more. Maybe for him to cook a meal or two each week (but of course that would require that he be home before 6 since the kids often demanded nourishment by 5:30 or they’d start melting down). Maybe for him to do some of the meal planning. But we were in the all too common just tell me what to do to help conundrum. I wanted the weight of the mental load to be lighter, not to dole out tasks like a sergeant in the army. This was some of what I found so appealing about the Fair Play method. It eliminated the “just tell me how to help, just make me a list” phenomenon.
As it was in our household at the time, I was the holder of most of the cards2 and then would try and dole out various responsibilities that I hoped he would be able handle. Sometimes that meant giving him a grocery list. Other times it meant ordering Blue Apron and asking him to cook one meal per week. For the most part, he did dishes (though we had varying definitions of minimum standard of care). One time, I asked him to be in charge of flu shots, always one of the very worst days in motherhood as both children were afraid of needles, one so scared she’d flee down the hallways of the doctor’s office, trying to hide behind the vending machines. When he got home from that outing, that daughter had gotten the nasal mist instead of the shot. I couldn’t believe it. The point was to go and make her do it! And he’d failed at even that (or perhaps I had failed to make clear that success = shot in arm, not ineffective nasal mist. Again, minimum standard of care).
*Note that even though I held most of the cards, this doesn’t mean he was an absent father. We took turns putting the kids to bed (once they were older and went to bed at the same time. Before that one would take the infant and one the toddler). He read them the entire Harry Potter series. He coached softball. He drove them to school most mornings. He made sure I had some time on the weekend to do something for me. He was one of the “good ones.” And yet….
It always felt like these were my responsibilities that he would help me with, instead of part of his job as the parent to these two children. When I was working part-time, I was still managing all of these matters. It just was more obvious when I didn’t have the distraction of part-time work to keep my mental sanity. Instead, all of my labor was unpaid. All of my labor felt…taken for granted. All of my work felt invisible, undervalued, erased.
So we sat outside at a table, the “cards” printed out illegibly from my work printer. Despite having read the book and agreeing to the concepts presented in theory, at the end of our conversation, after we had tried to dole out the cards in a more equitable fashion, my husband picked up his computer that he had brought to the discussion and had set off to the side while we talked.
Can we discuss a few other items? He asked.
He then pulled up a spreadsheet of all he did for his clients, all the tasks he was tasked with at work. He felt like his paid work, and how much bandwidth that required, should be factored into the equation.
I stared at him in disbelief. I didn’t understand. I knew he had a never-ending list of to-do’s for his clients, that he went above and beyond for each and every one, that even though he now had additional employees, he still did the bulk of the work. But it wasn’t a part of this discussion. This was about running the household and caring for the children.
At this point, we were both exhausted from our discussions and I was dumbfounded at his insistence that his work load at work be factored into these discussions. I went to put the children to bed, but my mind was spinning.
He still doesn’t get it. If he doesn’t get it, how can I stay married to him?
It would take another two years for me to admit the marriage was over.
There were a million factors that went into the end of our marriage. But this discussion looms large in my mind. It was after this conversation that I texted my therapist and said: we need a couples’ therapist. Now.
This discrepancy in how we viewed my work, my sacrifice, my efforts to hold up the scaffolding of our family is still present in our divorce as we seek to divide our assets, discuss the business that he built while I was holding down the fort at home, as we determine what and how much alimony I should receive.
Next week I will publish a conversation with Eve Rodsky herself and we discuss how to bring the feminist concepts of Fair Play (and the value of women’s unpaid labor) into divorce. I didn’t realize this is an area in which she is now focused, as the systems of family law do not currently have a way to calculate all the labor women do, unpaid, during the course of a marriage. You won’t want to miss it.
In the meantime, below are a list of other must-read books about the division of labor in marriages. You can watch the Fair Play documentary on Hulu or listen to Rodsky’s podcast Time Out here.
Did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers? If you are reading this as an email, there is a heart button at the top and bottom of this email. Click on it and it will take you to the Substack website where you can also leave a comment. If you are reading it online, again, just click the heart button at the top or bottom of this post. I appreciate your support so much!
Also, I’ll be the inaugural guest for The Chamber of Mothers Book Club! Sign up here to join our discussion on March 7 at 9 am PCT/12pm EST. It’s free!
ICYMI in The Mother Lode
The Math of Motherhood: on the unpaid labor of the caretaking parent
GOING FURTHER: READING LIST
Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward,
All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, Darcy Lockman
Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power, Rose Hockman
Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home,
Women’s Work: A Personal Reckoning with Labor, Motherhood and Privilege, Megan K. Stack
GOING FURTHER: FOLLOW LIST
aka @thatdarnchatZachary Watson aka @realzachthinkshare
Sam Kelly aka @samkelly_world
Paige Turner aka @sheisapaigeturner
Fair Play is now jointly owned by Rodsky and Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s production company of which Eve’s husband Seth is a co-founder.
My husband held 1) Home Purchase/Rental, mortgage & insurance; 2) Money Manager; 3) Auto; 4) Cash & Bills; 5) Electronics & IT; 6) Estate Planning & Life Insurance; 7) Health Insurance; 8) Bedtime Routine (Kids) - we traded this every other night; 9) Extracurricular (Kids; Sports) and 10) Garbage. Pre-pandemic he dropped the kids off at school. He also coached softball for my older daughter.
I don't know if this comment is helpful... Please feel free to delete it if it's not. But as someone on the other side of this conflict, I would like to offer an alternative perspective.
For some husbands at least, the problem is absolutely not how many "cards" we hold, or how much work we do/don't do around the house. The problem is the attitude of the wife, which I think is captured rather nicely in your post. The wife wants us to do some work; but we must do it her way; and if we don't, we are judged very harshly. It's very unpleasant!
The dynamic, from my perspective is this:
(1) My wife would want me to do some bit of housework, e.g. cleaning the floors. But when she says "do," she means do it to her standard, which is different to mine. Importantly, she does not recognise that her standard is a choice. She regards it as simply "correct." (In your post, this is "minimum standard of care.")
(2) If I set a different standard, e.g. cleaning the floors once a week instead of every two days, she judged me to have failed. (In your post, "He'd failed at even that...")
(3) She communicated that attitude to me. This was the part that I had the most trouble with. Everyone thinks negative thoughts about their partner sometimes, but you can choose not to communicate them. She didn't. (You don't mention in your post whether or not you used this kind of negative language.)
As a result, I do no housework at all. This was all very explicit in my relationship. If she was going to say unpleasant things to me when I do housework, then I wasn't going to do it... She explicitly said that she couldn't watch me clean the floor wrong without criticising, so I don't do it. Housework is bullshit, and I think that like me, many men are not willing to do it if we will only be judged harshly for it.
Childcare is not bullshit, and so we just had to fight over the childcare. But with childcare, those fights have meaning, because you're both fighting for something you jointly love, so it's... grounded, I guess? For me, any fight over housework was just insane. (The result is that my spouse did the housework until she got fed up with it, then we hired a maid, and now neither of us do it.)
Anyway the point of my comment is that sometimes the problem is not about how much men do. Rather, it is about whether the wife can fully cede control of some task and accept the outcome.
I actually have two friends who started reading the book, fiddling with the cards, and decided NOT to take it to their husbands because they knew it would go nowhere and they didn't want to have to face down what you faced down in having that conversation. We can have our husbands read Fair Play all day, have them hold the cards in their hands, but as long as they are socialized to believe household management is a wife's/mother's JOB, they won't be able to embody their role in a true partnership. It's really something else. ... I thought about what you said about your ex being one of the "good ones." The "good one" bar is SO LOW. It's like: He... participates! Inconsistently and on his schedule! Cool, cool. ... I think that one of things that never goes away is this default we have that the woman in a hetero marriage keeps track of it all. The man slots himself in when it suits him. I believe Rodsky has addressed this: but the fact that Fair Play itself is almost exclusively first read by the woman in the couple and then presented to the man. Heaven forbid a husband should pick it up independently.