When Equal Partners Become Unequal Parents

Introduction and Welcome

Britta: Britain. Hello folks, and welcome to transformed by birth, a podcast about the rite of passage of pregnancy, birth and new parenthood. I'm your host. Britta Bushnell, author, mythologist, childbirth educator and an all around deep diver with a side of goofball. I'm so glad you're here. Today's episode explores the potentially electric topic of partnership, fairness. So grab your comfy beverage of choice or take us along for a walk as we connect with author of fair play, Eve Rodsky, before we begin, we start the way we always do, by lighting a candle.

Lighting the Candle

Britta: If you want to join me, please do or just take a breath as I light mine. Today's candle is in honor of the mental load emotional labor and invisible work in parenthood, time fairness between partners who are parents is a highly loaded topic. Like many women headed into motherhood, I was raised to believe that modern partnerships involved a type of equality missing in the generations before us. On dates, we shared the bill when my boyfriend, who would become my husband, and I moved in together, we shared living expenses, we alternated driving, we balanced conversation time we shared, decision making, we both worked and paid our bills. When we met, neither of us had much in the way of financial resources. We were, in most ways, balanced equals. Then came parenthood and everything changed. My story is not very different from the stories I've heard from many couples I've worked with over the past 25 plus years. There is a unique setup for profound relationship struggles in new parenthood that is fueled at least in part by the insidious, systemic powers of patriarchy and capitalism left unexamined, the impacts Rob both partners of the gifts of shared parenting, personal expression and a thriving relationship. I can't think of someone more suited to help unpack these impacts on relationships, especially when we're talking about parenthood, than today's guest Eve Rodsky. Eve transformed a quote blueberries breakdown into a catalyst for social change by applying applying her Harvard trained background in organizational management to ask, what would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations. Her New York Times best selling book fair play a Gam a gamified system that helps partners rebalance domestic workload has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her follow up, find your unicorn space, which I also love. Eve explores creativity, resilience and the individual right to personal time choice as an antidote to burnout and a path to lasting change. I have recommended Eve's work more times than I can count, which makes welcoming her to the show an absolute dream come true. So Eve, thank you so much for being here and welcome,

Eve: but I've wanted to be here for a while, and I'm just so happy that we're finally making it happen. And I'm going to say this is an honor of Nora and Gallia, two women I love, who are postpartum about two weeks, and I don't really get as much one on one time anymore with so many couples the way I did from 2011 through 2019 when I was interviewing literally 1000s and 1000s of couples. So I say that because it brought me back to how hard these early stages are, and so I really, really want to be with your audience.

Britta: Oh, well, I couldn't be happier to have you here. So let's, let's dive in. And why don't you give me this short version of the blueberries breakdown and how that launched you into this work?

The Blueberries Breakdown: How Eve's Work Was Born

Eve: Well, let me just say one thing that nobody starts out as an expert on the gender division of labor, right? Nobody says that that's what they want to be, but it was not on my third grade. What do you want to be when you grew up bored? Right? I'd said astronaut or veterinarian, but I think even more importantly, because I'm a lawyer, and I think I'll tell you why that's important later on, in terms of how I crafted the Fair Play system differently than maybe a therapist would, but it's very, very therapist adjacent as we as we know now, as we work with 1000s of therapists. But in the beginning, obviously I didn't know I wanted to be an expert in the gender division of labor. And in law school, I'm resolutely Gen X. I came up in law school in the 2000s and I remember distinctly that Elizabeth. With Warren. She's a senator now from Massachusetts, but she was a professor. Then she asked us what we wanted to do with our law degree, and literally, without irony, I said I was going to be a senator from New York, a nick city dancer, because I wasn't going to give up on my dream of dancing in the iconic Madison Square Garden, and then eventually I'd be President of the United

Britta: States, right? Just, you know, just just casual, like someone in law school. Yes, my son is in law school right now. So I'm very aware of the opportunity for grandiose,

Eve: grandeur, yes, but also, right? This was the Legally Blonde era, and it was also the era where we were told the women behind us, the Gloria Steinem era of feminist had paved the way so that we could have equality.

Britta: Yep, absolutely. I addressed that in the intro. I mean, I was raised by a mom who's like, your

Eve: the world is your oyster. Yeah, right. And as you said, the world was our oyster, but for this, this big looming fact of the fact that either we were going to be mothers, or it still looms for women, even when you aren't a mother, but there's a bias, because they think you could be a mother. So we'll get there. But the blueberries breakdown is important, because when I did, when I said I was going to be all those amazing things to to my professor at the time, I really, truly thought, in 2002 that I would be smashing glass ceiling after glass ceiling after glass ceiling. But why we're here is because I'm the ghost of your Christmas future. And what I'm here to tell your audience is that 10 years later, you cut to my life 10 years later, and the only thing I can tell you I was smashing was peace, peace for my toddler. Well, desperately I wasn't President United States, but I did like my corporate job. I was smashing peas for that toddler, desperately trying to hold on to a job where they were telling me my direct reports were being taken away from me when I was on maternity leave and that I would no longer have a place to pump because we moved to an open floor plan where I'd have to go and pump in a dark stair stairwell or a broom closet and bring a battery pack because there's no outlets.

Britta: That's a whole other topic I need to address at some point. Is the open floor plan work on women.

Eve: There's so many small microaggressions, but that was one. And then at the same time, while I'm being abandoned by my workplace, I get a text from my husband, Seth, this is right after my second son, Ben, was born, 2011 you can help me picture the scene. I had a breast pump and a diaper bag in the passenger seat of my car. I had gifts for a newborn baby to return in the backseat of my car. I had open thank you notes that I was trying to write and I had gone to the post office to get stamps. I had a client contract in my lap. I had a client contract in my lap because I had decided to quit. Now I say I was forced out of the corporate workforce, so abandoned by by them, and then in the midst of all this chaos, as I'm going to pick up my son from a toddler transition program that lasts, I don't know, 10 minutes, and it costs our entire salaries. My husband, Seth, decides to send me a text, and as Brita knows, the text was, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries, and that was it that that the research became research. Because I found myself almost out of my own body watching this woman blame herself, you know, myself just crying in the side of the road in LA, we don't take traffic lightly, so we don't pull over lightly, because we know if you pull over, you're going to have 1020, minutes of traffic stacked up, but I could not drive my car. I was sobbing so hard thinking, How had this become my life, that that equal partner that you were just talking about earlier Seth and I were the same as you and your partner? How would I become the fulfiller of his smoothie needs? And that was the day that I thought later on why I wrote fair play. And I wrote fair play, and it came out, actually eight years later from this blueberries breakdown in 2019 but I decided that I was going to put my researcher hat on and figure out what was happening to me, because it was that painful. Oh, and it turns out, has a name. It's called the second shift, unpaid labor, emotional labor, mental load. I love that

The She-Fault Parent: Unpacking the Default Parent Dynamic

Britta: you name all four of those different ways of describing it. I also love that one of the terms you use is the she fault parent. What is the she fault parent? I just I mean, it's such a brilliant play on words, but unpack the she fault parent for us, because it also isn't necessarily dependent on gender per se, correct, correct.

Eve: It is the she fault, and I'll tell you why a man could be a she fault parent, but because what it assumes, the reason why I call it the she fault is. For two reasons. One is that women shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family again, something I did not know that day when I was crying on the side of the road, but I Resolved never to shut my mouth about it ever since then, because if I had known that statistic, if I knew that equal parents, equal partners, sorry, not equal parents, equal partners don't become equal parents because men and we're centering men married to women. But these dynamics, we'll talk about, how they show up in LGBTQ relationships. But the problems really stem from the heterosis gender patriarchal norms of a society where they want men to marry women and vice versa. Women in those relationships shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family. And the things that were even worse to understand were that men do five to 15 hours a week less after kids come. And not only that, it gets worse for women, the more money they make. Because a lot of people would say to me, Oh, well, what's the problem? You know, men are providers and protectors, and women own the home. That's not how it works. The more women protect and provide for their families, the worse it gets for them in the home. And so these are statistics that we can't ignore any longer, and so that's why I'm so happy we're here, because it is incumbent on me, as a person who's been doing this for almost 20 years to have a nonprofit to fight for you in the policy level. But the reason I'm here today with you, Britta and your audience, is because we can do things on an individual level in our households, so that we're not complicit in our own oppression. Yes.

Valuing Time Equally: The Foundation of Fair Partnership

Britta: So one of the things that I love in fair play and in your work is you talk about valuing time equally. Okay, this is one of the concepts when I first read it, where I was like, boom, boom, in my head, like my head exploded a bit on this, because I'm like, Yeah, of course, like it sounded so like time is equal, of course. But, but, but, yeah,

Eve: talk to me about that. Most men actually don't think their time is equal, especially if they out earn women. Men will say to me, you know, in 24 countries, that their time is worth more than their partner's time because they make more money. Yeah.

Britta: I mean, I found that I in my marriage. I mean, my husband's work has always been more highly compensated. He works in finance. I work in birth. Who do you think gets paid a higher hourly correct?

Eve: And so you can, you can't think of time that way if you do. And also, even when you know, obviously a woman who starts out in finance and a man who starts out in finance. And if you're a woman of color, you're getting, you know, 50 cents of $1 to a man. And if you're a white woman, it's about 80 cents. So you can't really, ever really think of time as money, because then women will always be chasing, running up against the clock from the moment we wake up. So the way I really like to look at things is that we have to as a partnership, right, right? When you have a child or before that, we have to look at time as time, meaning that we both get 24 hours in a day. And so why is that important? So let's just we'll jump into why I think I was unique to creating fair play. Because it'll get back to this time question. So a lot of people in the space before fair play, so this was like 2011 I only could find like, What to Expect When You're Expecting. I did not have your podcast. I didn't have your book. I didn't have anybody explaining patriarchy and its relationship to parenthood. It was pretty bare out there in 2011 we only had the 1990s book, the second shift, and that was in sociology. No one read it. So what, what? What was interesting to me was, when I put my researcher hat on and understood these sociological dilemmas that women were facing, I looked at it differently. Because my day job, the job I was forced out of, that I was telling you about, that I started my own law firm, is I'm a lawyer who works with really highly complex families, and I bring grace and humor and generosity, bring it to these really, really complex family systems. And the number one premise I have for these families coming in is similar to the all time is created equal, is that when I'm here with you, you are going to agree that your family is an organization. And so when I started to understand that Seth and my family organization was faltering because it didn't have the two things every organization needs to succeed, which are accountability and trust, then instead of leaving my husband, which was another option, and I'm very much a huge proponent of women divorcing, right? If this is not, because I believe Fair Play is all about clarity. It's not about saving marriages, even though it obviously saved mine and many others. And the system is very effective. But if it doesn't work for you, this trigger warning, you know of an episode. This is a very highly loaded episode. We're. Here for you to say, this is about clarity. If you say, my partner would never think these things. He would never believe my time is equal. Just have it in your head that we're here for you. If that relationship decides, you decide that's not for you, but assuming that you're here with good intention, so is your partner. And we want to make things more fair as you go into having a child, I think my lens was very, very different, which made it unique and made it powerful and made it successful for so many couples, because I looked at the home as an organization. And so this all goes back to your time question, because the first thing I did with my researcher hat on, besides finding all this, these statistics that were making me depressed, what was understanding that if my home was an organization then and it needed to restore accountability and trust. I, as a lawyer, over 10 years, taught my clients there were three things you needed to restore that, accountability and trust. So there's a secret formula that I write about in fair play. You need boundaries. You need systems and you need communication. So we'll get to the systems and we'll get to communication, but the boundaries is about time. So what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that women, this is where we have to work on ourselves when you live in a capitalist patriarchy, the sad part of it is that if we valued home labor, we would have to pay for it. So instead, we convinced women that it is their duty that wiping asses and doing dishes, we need to take pride in that, and we will be punished if we don't take pride in it, we will be poor or feel shame or shame, or we will be punished for not picking up the the phone call when our kid is sick. We'll be punished when people come to our house and they see that it's dirty. We'll be punished for not offering snacks when we're hosting people with our newborn baby. We'll be punished for not sending the thank you notes in a way that our partners won't. So when you get punished over and over again, then you have to become complicit in your own oppression. So what women often say are things that start to devalue their own time, because we have to to live in this system. So we say things like, Well, my husband makes more money than me. My job is more flexible. That's why I do the unpaid labor. We say things like, in the time it'll take me to tell Seth what to do, I should do it myself. I've heard that one a million times, right? Yeah, we say things to ourselves, like, women are wired differently for care that I'm wired differently to hear my son's cry in the middle of the night. We say things like, yes, we're both colorectal surgeons, but my partner is better at focusing on one task at a time, and I can find the time, or I'm good at multitasking, or I'm good at multitasking when nobody is and actually, in this, if you really nobody, if you Well, if you look deep, men are actually better at it. But I didn't write it. I didn't write that because it would blow women's minds if I said that. So I just said, nobody's good at it, yeah, but actually, men are a little bit better. If you look at the gender differences and tasks, it's called task switching anyway. The point being that, because since birth, we're conditioned to be punished for not doing the home tasks. What, what it ultimately means is that our time choice gets chipped at and away and away and away till we're so resentful. Because, as I was, my partner had three hours after he came home from his work to watch SportsCenter workout, finish a PowerPoint deck, and I'm doing things in service of our home till my head hits the pillow two hours after he went to bed. So what does that have to do with boundaries? That is a boundary. A boundary is not saying I need you to take out the trash. A boundary is finally when I said to Seth, I'm no longer willing to live like this. I will not live in a house where every single text you send me is that this is on you text, whereas I'm doing things in service of our home till my head is the pillow, and you have such extraordinary amount of leisure time compared to me, that's not going to work. Our time is equal, and we will make it equal by entering this new system. That is a hard thing to get yourself around Britta, because imagine living in a in a in a society where you know that when women enter male professions, salaries automatically come down. Do you know that pediatricians now make 1/4 less of what they used to make, because it's a women's profession compared to what they used to make when it was a male profession. It's disgusting. Have you ever, have you seen that breast that health systems in 2025 we're still saying that breastfeeding is free?

Britta: Yeah, I know that we started on on all of the politics around, around nursing, yeah, so

Eve: 1800 hours a year is considered free. It's not free of all,

Britta: unless you value the labor that it requires as zero. Exactly, there you go. And that is just not the case, because there is. Always. I mean, there's so many different forms of cost. I mean, there's time cost and and if you're doing that, you're not doing something else. So it as well as just the power and importance of it. I mean, we could unpack that 1000 different ways, yes,

Eve: but, but it's a boundary, and it's so it's the reason why people say to me that Fair Play needs a trigger warning, because I think people are coming in and they think they're going to hear all these quick, quick hacks for how to get your partner involved. And when I say to them, it requires so much personal work to de program ourselves from being complicit in our own oppression first, and to set those boundaries. It's very painful for women to hear painful. For me,

The Nuclear Option: One Couple's Turning Point

Britta: it's, it's painful in a lot of different ways. I mean, for me, I my husband and I have had a couple of, like, brawls, right? Such that we name them like, oh, remember this one? Remember, like they have names because they're, they're catalytic fights. And we had a fight that we have named the hot tub hot tub fight, because that is where it occurred, and we it had to do. It was the only time in my marriage that I used what we sometimes think of as the nuclear option, where I said to him. Well, if, if we were divorced, you would have the kids 50% of the time, and I would have the kids 50% of the time, and then I would have 50% of my time back for my life. And it was really, I'm not super proud that I pulled the nuclear

Eve: option. No people to do it. I'm proud of you. Valuable.

Britta: Yes, so valuable. It changed things for us.

Eve: Same, same, same. Like I said that the willingness to the divorce option is, of course, on the table. That's why I'm saying I think women are so afraid of using that word. But why? Why? If that can give you freedom and clarity. Again, the problem is the family law system, which we're fighting because it doesn't value women's time, so it puts women in horrific situations. But assuming that it's fair, it's a really great choice for a lot of women. Oh, it's

Britta: absolutely a great choice. We just had decided we weren't going to use that as, like a threat, just on, you know, just to pull out here and there. But the communication about fairness did it was helpful in the conversation of fairness and not even equality, because, I mean, in that it would have been 5050 but I wasn't asking for 5050 at that moment. I was asking for while I was at that point, I was going back to grad school, and that was to pivot to your your unicorn time going to grad school at the age of 39 when my kids were nine and almost seven, was a way of carving out unicorn time, and because it was a semi residential three days a month program where I left the house for three days every month, and I continued that all the way through writing my dissertation. I continued it all the way through writing my book. That's how I carved out unicorn time, because I couldn't find a way for unicorn time to happen while I was in the house looking at dust bunnies 100% Yeah.

Unicorn Space: Reclaiming Time That Is Mythical and Magical

Eve: And by the way, what I will say about that, why it's so powerful is the this idea, right of having, and we call it unicorn space and time, because it's different than self care, and it's different than friendship time. It's time that, like a unicorn, is mythical and magical for women, but they it doesn't exist unless we reclaim it. And so I think what's so powerful about that time is that often the boundary I was just talking about before we get to the systems and communication setting, that boundary of wanting equal time somebody to be an equal partner in the home and the unpaid labor only comes when you have clarity over what you want to do at that time. And so you had some clarity right about what you want to do at that time. And so I often say to women, if the boundary setting feels too hard for you, then start with your unicorn space. Think about an activity or something that really lights you up inside, where you have curiosity and you and you want to share that curiosity with the world. That's where it starts. And so whether it's starting a podcast or having that in your future or writing a book or presenting your art in a gallery or learning trapeze or a ukulele concert, or it doesn't matter. It doesn't actually matter. It just it's a way to set a boundary.

The "I Got It" Trap: Complicity and the Cost of Not Trusting Your Partner

Britta: Yeah, I love that. So. So one of the things you were speaking about earlier, and about boundaries and about our own sort of complicit nature in some of these things, is something that has come up a lot when I talk to people about their relationships and things the but my you know, but I'm just better at this. It's easier if I just do it. All of that, there is an element that women, if we're, if we're talking about, you know, a heteronormative relationship, that that we kind of keep ourselves

Eve: stuck in absolutely, absolutely, it's easier.

Britta: Yeah, so, so talk, talk about that piece a little bit, because so often there's this, it's their fault, pointing blame, without the self reflection of what part it is that we're doing in it. Like you, you talk about these different types, sort of archetypal energies in how we do things. And one of them, I'm trying to, I did my, my test on it, and I my way or the highway, yeah, there's my way or the highway, or just, just let me Yeah, like, like, I'm I got it. I'm gonna and I got it. Person, yeah, yeah. Like, the the No, no, never mind. I got it. Oh, you can't find the socks. I got it. I got it. Yeah, yeah. So talk to me. Talk Talk to my audience about that. Like, what? What can we do? I mean, I know we're going to get into the valuing time and the the actual steps, but these cop outs and the common, common patterns seem to come up a lot

Eve: well again, and I got it. Person is basically just shorthand for saying, I don't trust you.

Britta: Oh, ouch, Oh, ouch, Oh, I feel that one.

Eve: Oh, I feel it. That's all it is. It's just saying, or it's a you're not going to take accountability for this. So I'll give you a quick story that I think illustrates sort of the pre and post, pre and post, post fair play, because it's really, it's a small story, but I think it gets a lot of the main themes inside. So fair play is a system, and I'll say it's a system based on ownership, not partnership. And that started with an understanding that when, as you know Brett, maybe your audience doesn't that I took the advice of a lot of people in 2011 who said, If you're so overwhelmed, make a list. That was only advice out there. And I did that. Didn't work. Spoiler alert, didn't work. I did put together the best list of all time that became the fair play cards, and I know it's the best list of all time because now we're, like I said, 15 years later, and no one's added to the list, because it's that complete. But the should I do spreadsheet was a great it was a great research tool, because I could get it a core problem that was happening in marriages. And then we'll lead back to how this leads to this story of how it could be solved. But the core problem I saw was really an organizational, management breakdown problem, and the I GOT IT people were the ones who were telling me again that accountability wasn't there. They had lacked trust. However, when they were telling me they were I GOT IT people, they were still saying when I said, who does groceries, who handles transportation of kids, who does medical appointments, they were still telling me they both handle it. So I was like, well, this person is resentful. They're saying they're the I GOT IT person, but then they're also telling me they all both handle everything. So I couldn't get the right data until I changed my question. So instead of asking, who handles medical and healthy living for your kids, who handles buying, you know, getting the clothes, getting them dressed, I started to instead of saying who handles groceries, I started to ask, How does mustard get in your refrigerator? This became the core data question, literally, over the past 15 years. Because when I asked it in 25 countries, even Sweden and Norway and all these places you think it'd do it better. It was. I was very surprised to learn, or not surprised, that there's three steps of any project, conception, planning and execution. And when I said, How do you How does mustard get in your refrigerator? What I was able to see was that women, single handedly, in 25 of these countries, are the ones who are hearing from a pediatrician that their son is low on iron and they need to get them to eat more protein, and so they buy yellow mustard so their kid can douse their protein, and yellow mustard, that's what we would call conception, right? There's a big idea in the workplace, and you're figuring out how to handle it with your idea, we get paid big bucks for that. So right? You, I'm not working for Brita. If I come into our office and say, Hey, what should I be doing today? I'll just wait here to tell me what to do. Conceiving and planning of your own day is how managers how employees. These get promoted. So women were the ones handling conception. Women were also the ones monitoring the mustard for when it ran low, and they were also the ones telling me they get stakeholder buy in from their family for what they need on the grocery list. They didn't actually say stakeholder buy in, but that's listening, but that's your language, so I mapped it off, yep. So that was conception that was planning. And then the reason they were saying they both handle groceries was because men were going to the store to buy the mustard for the family, but because they bring home spicy Dijon every fucking time, right? And we asked for yellow, women started to say to me, Eve, you want me to trust my husband with our living will, with the estate planning card of your system, the dude can't even bring home the right type of mustard. I got it back to right. And so what that showed me was that the big people who are taking things back the I got it when we become complicit in our oppression, it's because we're actually saying I don't trust my partner, and we don't trust our partners because they have no context for what they're being asked to do that is not a man's problem, it is patriarchy's problem, but we are incredibly complicit in that, because we cannot hold the mental load and then expect somebody to go buy balloons and have no idea what they're buying balloons for. Are they buying balloons for your best friend's gender reveal, or for your kid's birthday party. It's such a lack of psychological safety for men that Fair Play became a love letter to men, because I never heard a man, thank God I didn't interview any abusive men, but the average man, I never heard him say, I'm trying to hurt my wife here by losing her trust. It just was never like that. It's a pattern that happens over time by women saying I got it, because they're basically saying I can't trust you. So the only solution is holding the conception, planning and execution together. Doesn't mean you have to hold it forever. You can redo the cards. I can do meals on Saturday. You can do meals on Sundays, but when you do those meals, you know what you're making, and you have the groceries in the refrigerator to make it that is accountability and trust, and that's how you restore it. So can I just tell that's one quick story. It's back to what you made me think of when you said I got it. I call them Richard and Amy now because I still haven't gotten permission to use the story yet, so I'm going to change their names. But there's a couple who uses fair play. They understood the conception, planning, execution framework. They went through the 100 fair play cards. There's four suits, there's home caregiving, out magic. What Richard noticed was he did a lot of the home tasks and some of the out tasks, like garbage, transporting the kids to school, home maintenance, cash and bills. But he was really lacking in the caregiving and the magic cards. We keep those suits separate Brita, because those are the 50 cars that are not outsourcable. This whole if you're so overwhelmed, get help does not work because there's only 50 cars that works for there are 50 other cards that the household does not outsource

Britta: Yeah, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus money are not outsourceable? Yes, that

The Tooth Fairy Story: Ownership, Accountability, and Trust in Action

Eve: is what this story is about. So he pulls the magical beings card, which is exactly what Britta said all those magical beings. And he says, this is one card I want to take their daughter had only lost one tooth so far. So he takes it over, and they do a minimum standard of care. Everyone forgets that step in, that step in fair play, but there's two chapters in the book devoted to setting a minimum standard of care. That's how you restore accountability in organizations by onboarding people to what your quality standard is. So important, yeah, very important. So their minimum standard of care is not crazy glitter and, you know, giant presence. It's just getting either $1 coin or $1 bill in an envelope under their daughter's pillow. That's their minimum standard for the tooth fairy. So Richard takes it on, and guess what happens the first night that he has a tooth fairy? It's their daughter's second tooth. The tooth fairy doesn't come. So what I love about the story is that they were able to reflect on before fair play and after. So this is the dynamic that would have happened before fair play. Back to the I got it in an extreme version, she would have been a verbal assassin. She would have been become a verbal assassin. And not just that I got it, but say, I'll never let you do this again, right?

Britta: Take it over year over year. Yeah, you've been fired from

Eve: the job. Fired. You are terrible. You ruined our child's magic. Okay, that's what she would have done, and he would have triggered that response, because he would have blamed her for not reminding him to put the dollar into the pillow. That's a very common lack of accountability and trust dynamic. So what I love so much about this couple was that post fair play. This is what happened. Richard in advance had taken accountability right for this card. So the first thing. When his daughter wakes up and she's like the Tooth Fairy didn't come, Amy doesn't say anything, and watches what Richard's going to do, and he says that he immediately takes accountability. I can't believe I slept through this. It's totally my fault. I will carry through my mistake. Because he said that Amy was able to back off, and she actually didn't say anything. She just said cool. She didn't wasn't effusive, and was like, Oh, great. She was just like, cool. Kept, kept her mouth shut, feedback in the moment, clamped down on not a verbal assassin. So because she didn't say anything, and he could tell she was uncomfortable with what was happening, but he understood he was carrying through mistake. He tells me that he emails tooth fairy@gmail.com and that he has a response. He gets a response from Tooth Fairy gmail.com Are you good? This is not 245 see, I just that was my verbal assassin to Seth trying to get me to hit my minimum standard of care with my son, which is not be late for his volleyball game. So you can keep that in, of course. So so the tooth fairy, gmail.com response. So thank you, whoever is out there in the world helping us to our emotional labor, and she says, I'm backlogged on teeth. He prints out the email for his daughter, shows her the Tooth Fairy responded, she's backlogged on teeth. And then he added that when the tooth fairy is late, she brings double the money. And so that night there were $2 under the pillow or whatever, $5 under the pill or whatever, ownership, ownership. So I don't know why I love that story so much, except for that, it's small, but in it, everything is so big, the stakes were so high for that family, and I love, love how they handled that. That's how you go from being an I got it family to a partnership family.

Advice for Expectant Parents: Setting Up for Success Before Baby Arrives

Britta: I love that. So I know we're short on time, and I want to make sure that you get an opportunity to speak specifically to expectant parents about like, prevention or or like, how do you, how do you get to a place even before having kids, where you've set yourself up for success, especially because one of the things that I hear often is in that early postpartum period, is this place of, I mean, well, there's the Scott Galloway version of of this that we've just recently been hearing all about, but that, that energy of, oh, there's nothing I can do, or something that that I've seen Over the past 25 years is the energy of, oh, I can't get this baby to calm down. I must not have the mechanics or the biology or the whatever, and handing the baby off and kind of the birthing parents being in a place of of kind of reinforcing that learned helplessness. So what? Anyway, I mean, that's kind of a little story that I'm hearing, because I often hear the learned helplessness and the rescuing that happens that ends up actually shooting a lot of new a new moms in their own foot. So what? What Can folks do prenatally? And do you have any recommendations for that early, early transition into parenthood?

Eve: I do. I have three things, because I think it's all about norms, even if that you were learned helplessness with a baby, that's still fine, because there are 20 other daily grind tasks that still have to be done, and we know that men have increased their their time with their children, but not one hour of housework has increased since 1970 so the first thing I'd like to say is every man married to a woman, I want you to take a picture with you and your partner with you, on your knees scrubbing a toilet before you have a child. I want to see a picture, send it to us with a big smile on your face. I want to see a man on his knees with a toilet brush in his hands that, to me, shows commitment to the child more than anything else, I will see about you feeding the baby, giving it a bottle like I don't care about that. I care about your commitment to the house, and the most important thing I can see is upending those norms. And we want to see a lot of men on their knees scrubbing toilets. That's number one. But the two less provocative things I like to say is we actually have the data for the cards that men hold that have in our we don't have this as a peer reviewed study yet, but we have it as 10 years of data that women perceive fairness over the first three months of having a child, when men hold meals so you discuss the minimum standard of care of what you want now before you have the child, what do you want to eat? What do you need for breastfeeding? When do you. Want lunch on the table? When do you want dinner? When do you want breakfast? Even if the man has long hours. The good news about America especially is we have DoorDash. We have ability to meal prep. We have a free we have freezers. So when women say to me, they never had to think about a meal for the first three months, that's what I ask women married to men to do. And then number two is thank you notes. So when you come up with minimum standard of care in advance, whether you want stamps stationary and a spreadsheet to account for every gift, it's either a written thank you note or Paperless Post, but that there's accountability and trust that that will go out. Those are the two things that we've seen set people up better than any other card in the Fair Play deck, owning meals and in the first three months and owning thank you notes the most beautiful thing. Back to Nora, who I dedicated this episode to. Just yesterday, Ezra sent me a thank you note her husband thanking me for a baby shower gift, because we had this discussion, I felt like crying. It was so beautiful to see the note written by an expectant father, and it's still so unique, because, again, emotional labor is so gender coded women that seeing the man write thank you note in the 21st Century, it should not be provocative or interesting, but it still is. It is, and it was handwritten, and there was a stamp on it, and it was really beautiful. Again, your minimum standard of care can be email, if it works for both of you. But gratitude is important. It keeps your community with you, and so when you understand your why of why you're doing those thank you notes, I think again, men become much more invested. So that's always the prescription. A picture of you on your knees scrubbing a toilet, and then the meals for the first three months with a minimum standard of care, and then thank you notes for three months with a minimum

Britta: standard of care. And people can play the game. Oh, and, of course, yeah, no, you can play the walk

Eve: and play the game, of course, and get really, really ready beforehand. But again, if it feels too overwhelming to play the game, you can listen to this episode, understand CPE, the minimum standard of care, and just do those two cards. The two cards being Thank you, notes and meals. Look, there's 98 cards in the deck that you still have to go through. That's why parenthood is so hard. But you're starting somewhere.

Neuroplasticity and New Parenthood: The Best Time for Change

Britta: Yeah, I love that. And normally I end with a last question. Okay, you got enough time? I know we're right on the edge. Okay, what's one thing you feel passionately about, and you may have already answered it, but that you want new or expectant parents to see, hear, feel, or know during this profound period of their lives,

Eve: the most important thing to understand is that you are in the most amazing period since you were a child. The neuroplasticity of your brain, not just for the birthing parent, but for men, is so insane when we look at studies. Now, my co writing partner, Darby Saxby, is coming up, coming out with a book called dad brain. I recommend that everybody read it. But the TLDR, the too long didn't read version, is that men just as much as the birth if women who are birthing again. We're talking about the traditional heterosis gender norms. But this is neuroplasticity for all LGBTQ parents as well, and it feels it's because of your oxytocin and your the all the chemicals that are coming into the brain when you're taking care of a something that can't live on its own. You are the most neuroplastic time of your life, meaning this is the best time to play fair play. It is the best time to listen to Britta. It's the best time to implement new systems, because your brain is open to learning. Absolutely.

Closing

Britta: I love that so much. Eve, thank you so much for joining me. It's just been such a privilege and a pleasure to get to talk with you. And I do feel like we could have talked for five hours. I know our time is limited, so thank you so much

Eve: for being here. I gotta go like I said, Be In My

Britta: and thank you listeners for sharing this time with us. If something shared today impacted, supported or moved you, please share this episode with a friend. I produce this podcast myself, and your support makes it possible to show a little love for the podcast and these conversations. Please follow rate and review. If you'd like to continue the conversation, please join us on Instagram at transformed by birth. I look forward to being with you again on the next episode of transformed by birth, and now let's gather what we want to take away from this episode with an inhale and with an exhale, I'll blow out our candle until next time bye. Friends.