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 Allison Daminger 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, an accommodation they had offered when I came back from maternity leave, 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 we have absorbed 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. But to be clear, I had “part-time” childcare, but full-time work. Not at first. Initially, 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. At this point in my career, I was taking on a full-time workload, making more than I had at my job at the publishing house. 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). 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 desperate for my youngest to finally enroll 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. 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.
It was incredibly hard to guarantee deliverables to clients with no child-care in sight. So I hit pause on my ghostwriting. With what little time I had, I started writing in my own voice. I began the seeds of this Substack, which I would launch in November 2021. Scary Mommy published an essay in February, and I was at work on another essay that The Lily ended up publishing in July, on how hard it was to sacrifice my career, even as I felt like I had no other option.
When we sat down a year into our new arrangement to discuss Fair Play, with my ghostwriting career still on the backburner since our kids had just returned to school a few weeks before, and we weren’t sure how long it would last, I understood that I would still hold a lot of the cards. His income was now the sole one paying our bills. I was fine managing the kids and their school schedules during the day. But when he finished his workday, I wanted him to take on more responsibilities. Maybe for him to cook a meal or two each week. 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. Make me a grocery list and I’ll go to the store. 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.
When I had to ask, it 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 (and an adult who needed to feed himself). 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.
