51: Division of Labor with Eve Rodsky
This is the show that will make you take a closer look at how the work is shared in your household. The problem cannot be solved by simply handing out to-do lists. I’m joined by Eve Rodsky, who is working to change society one partnership at a time by promoting a new 21st-century solution to an age-old problem. Still today, women shoulder two-thirds or more of the unpaid domestic work and child care for their homes and families, and this burden is taking its toll! Again, there are deeper issues to consider. Let’s talk about this topic with Eve!
Show Highlights:
● How Eve came to write her book, Fair Play
● How many wives/moms have an automatically assigned role in their homes
● How the shift in marriage occurs where women do most of the “invisible work”
● How Eve’s book is structured with information and practical ways to divide labor
● How a story about the Tooth Fairy illustrates the mindset shifts that need to happen in both partners to have fair play
● Why couples get into a measuring contest about whose job is harder
● Why we need to break down harmful norms that hurt us all and be clear about each partner’s role
● Is your home infested by RATs? (randomly assigned tasks)
● Why accountability and trust are vital in home organization
● Why the mental load is more taxing in most cases than the actual execution of tasks
● How to view boundaries with a fresh and freeing perspective and find your “unicorn space”
Resources and Links:
Connect with Eve Rodsky: Website, Instagram (Fair Play Life), Instagram (Eve), and TikTok
Connect with KC: Website, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes
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KC Davis 0:05
Hello you sentient balls of stardust, welcome to struggle care, the podcast about self care. And other things. I don't have a tagline yet. So I just wing it. And I didn't even think of one today, you'll have to excuse my frog voice. I'm under the house of perpetual Blegh. So but I didn't want to miss this recording at all. I'm here today with Eve rod ski. So Eve broadsky is working to change society one partnership at a time by coming up with a new 21st century solution to an old age problem that women shoulder two thirds or more of the unpaid domestic work and child care for their homes and families Eve broadsky. It's a pleasure.
Eve 0:41
Oh my god, I'm so happy to be here. You know, I think I was saying to you earlier before we started that, I do feel like we're friends already. Even though I can't believe this is really our first time. Really communing in person.
KC Davis 0:55
Yes. I feel that way too. I love that we have matching glasses.
Eve 1:00
Yes, we're matching glasses. Our hairs were I don't know, we have the same vibe going on today.
KC Davis 1:06
And I love it. It I feel like it's taken us like four different scheduling to actually get this recording done. But let me just tell you how this has been the least stressful process ever. Because there's various reasons why, like, you've had to change the time, and I've had to change the time. And typically speaking, I feel so much stress over that. Because I feel like there's this idea of professionalism, that's like, Oh, if you cancel something, or if you're late to something, but like, I've just had real life happen so many times this month, my kids, you know, are my husband, my family getting sick getting this. And it was actually really like a relief to feel like, you know what, it's gonna be okay with that. Like, she also has a life. And we're like, being vulnerable, authentic women who understand that, like life happens, and we'll get it done one way or the other
Eve 2:00
100%. And again, whether it was like my microphone was shut off, and I didn't know how to like do tech or childcare issues. I think, to me, this is a new way of working. And of course, that doesn't mean you don't you flake on people. But I think he's what you're saying. It's just this new way of being, which I think is hopefully came in with the pandemic. And that's one thing, hopefully a silver lining, we won't lose, which is this idea that it's really okay to be an authentic human. And I know that that is the beauty of your work. But I think that's where our work intersects, hopefully.
KC Davis 2:36
Yeah, it very much felt like the idea of professionalism was written by men who have a spouse at home handling everything. So you know, you show up and you don't reschedule and you don't do this. Yeah, yeah, it's the
Eve 2:49
we're the BBC dad. Yeah, we're literally a toddler is like coming into the frame. And you're like, taking a stick your giant hand and like smashing their face to get out of your frame. I'm hoping that that's not where we end up, or we don't go back to that's, again, to me, Where, where are the pandemic? I do think has been helpful for women. I think, you know, we don't give a fuck anymore. Are they? That's how I feel, right? I mean, the world is burning around us, we are drowning. And you know, we got to breathe that polluted air, even though it's burning, even though the air is full of smoke, Casey. And I think that's really where our again, our work intersects fair plays about the fact that yes, I wrote it to women 100%, not blaming you, for what happens to us in that society doesn't value our time, and that we hold all the unpaid labor for our homes on average. But I'm telling you that there's a way forward. And it doesn't mean I'm not fighting for you on universal childcare, and paid leave and other things that would make the world less burning or less drowning. But you still got to breathe, even though the air is so polluted.
KC Davis 3:54
Yeah, we got to figure out a way to wake up tomorrow and function. So let's get right into it. Okay, so fair play. So I get questions a lot on my various social media platforms about, you know, what do I do about the division of labor in my home? You know, I'm really, you know, looking at this morally neutral, I want to take all your tasks, but you know, my husband's not really on board, and how do we begin to have a conversation? And I've got to tell you, I had one idea about this topic that I put in my book, which is that instead of trying to make the work equal, you should aim for the rest. To be fair, yes, because I felt like that hit better on the time autonomy. And but besides that, I have no motivation to think more about it, because I truly believe that the book you have written is exactly the right book. Thank you. And so I just tell people to go read it.
Eve 4:46
Oh, I feel the same about yours. Again, it's so overlapping in its philosophy. And I think that that's a good thing, right? The philosophy is a philosophy of ownership, right? It's a full Philosophy of grace. And really, you know, just for your listeners who don't know me, I'll just give them you know, the two seconds of saying, you know, I didn't set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor, just how I know you weren't in your third grade. What do you want to be when you grew up born Casey and say, like, I'm going to write a book about how to keep house while we're all drowning, but life intersects. And for me, you know, I was one of the resolutely Gen X people that had so many dreams, like when I went to law school, and that's the way I look at the world. Why I think our philosophy intersects is because I'm not my cousins out there. The people who implement fairplay the most amazing humans are coaches and therapists. What I am is I look at myself as a behavior designer. I'm a lawyer, I look at governance, I work in family systems. And so I'm always looking at, well, if you want people to stop at a stop sign, what you do is you pass a law to tell them to stop at a stop sign, right? So I'm looking at things from a more holistic level of design, right how to incentivize behavior. And my career as a lawyer has been around organizational management, how to incentivize good decision making, but it was never around gender division of labor. But what happened to me was my own life intervenes, I loved my job. I wasn't the president and the Senator and the next city dancer, that I told myself, I was going to be in law school, I had big dreams. And the truth is Casey, like I thought, I'd be smashing all these glass ceilings. And really the only thing I was smashing 13 years later, after my Harvard Law experience, and I say that not just to drop that I went to Harvard, but I worked really damn hard. And it's so many loans to escape my working class background. And I was told that was going to be enough. But really, 13 years later, after I got that Harvard Law degree, the only thing I could tell you I was smashing was like, peace, the peace for a toddler. While you know, struggling to breastfeed a baby Ben, while my workplace, I wasn't president, but I did have a job I liked around these legal governance issues for family foundations and family businesses at a big bank. And that company was telling me that my lactation space when I got back from Ben was going to be a broom closet. And that that my direct reports were being taken away from me because they wanted to, quote unquote, make my job easier. And I was being paid less than my male colleagues. And all these things were happening around me. And I was feeling so abandoned emotionally, by my workplace in my career. And then the straw that broke the camel's back was the abandonment from my partner, it was Seth. And there's many stories I tell in fair play. But one of the earliest stories was Seth sending me a text that said, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. And what that meant to me that day around having a breast pump in a diaper bag in the passenger seat of my car, and gifts to return for newborn baby in the backseat of my car, and getting the emails from my workplace that I was going to have to pump in a breast in a broom closet. And then my partner, really assuming Casey that I was going to be the fulfiller of his smoothie needs, the assumptions in our house had gotten so bad. And I know as a kid, we learned that if you assume it makes an asset of you and me, but the assumptions based on my gender, about the fact that I made less money than then Seth, even though I'm way more educated. And I think I actually have a more important job. But the assumptions around what I was supposed to do in the home, it was so different than the partnership we had set up. And I was also being so abandoned from my workplace at the same time, that what ended up happening was the final straw that broke the camel's back, the final straw that broke the camel's back was because we don't have a social safety net in this country. And we're dealing with again, no paid leave, people go back to work. After two weeks, we're dealing with income inequality so bad that even two incomes can't make mortgages anymore. What was happening to me was that I was sold a lie that because we didn't have universal childcare, and paid leave that my community would be my answer that once my kids got into school, if everything would go away, your life would be easy. You get your routine back, the community around your school would be the most important people you'll ever know. And I believe that and I remember right after the blueberries, texts, and my job falling apart, I went to Zach, my older son, who was three at the time to his toddler transition program, breakfast. I remember sitting there with all these other moms and a couple of gay fathers doing pattycake with our toddlers, our three year olds, and the preschool teacher reinforcing this notion that these are the people who are going to save me from drowning. And then I looked down after she said, these are the people that are going to know you better than anyone's ever known you. And I looked down at my nametag Casey and it said it said Zach's mom. And that's when I realized you know, these are the people that are gonna know me better than anyone's ever known me. They don't even know my fucking name. And that's when I realized that I was in this like literal hellscape of sort of overweight Elementary sure at the same time.
KC Davis 10:02
And let me ask you this. First of all, I love the blueberry story that you tell, and you told it here. But this picture of, you know, you're dealing with these outside stressors, you're sitting in the car, you're pumping breast milk, you've got gifts in the back, you have this whole list in your head of the sort of invisible labor of the home that needs to get done. And the text that comes through is not even, why didn't you get blueberries, but I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. And I think that is such a picture of how many moms and wives feel like we have this automatically assigned role in our homes. And I don't know about you, but I feel like for me, it that didn't come quite clear in my vision until after children. It's like before children, and I'm an elder millennial, right. And so I'm married to an elder millennial. And so I feel like our generation of men are Yeah, of course, I'm a feminist. Yes, I want, you know, to have an equal egalitarian role. Yes, of course, I ascribe to these things. And yet, if you're not explicit, I found that after the birth of children, everything started to shift. And I remember the first conversation about the first time I saw this shift, and I pointed out to my husband, and literally, our baby must have been weeks old baby a couple of months. And I said, Can I tell you something that I've noticed? And he said, Yeah, and I said, I've noticed that every time you take the baby, I use that time to either meet my basic needs, or take care of the house. So I use that time to go shower, I use that time to shove some food in my mouth, I use that time to do the laundry, or the dishes, or the grocery shopping. And every time that I take the baby, you use that time to recreate. So you get to watch TV, you got to play video games, you get to do your thing. And it wasn't either of us having like deciding to do that it wasn't him deciding that my time is valuable. Like, it was just this weird, unwritten script that we took on, you know, we could talk forever about all of the cool other so many cool things in your book, and I want to get into it. But one of the things that I really want to talk about is that I feel like when we talk about a woman who is overburdened with the home labor, and their partner who is not pulling their weight, we often picture someone who's like a deadbeat dad, or a husband that doesn't love their family or appreciate their family, or someone who's a misogynist, or someone who, you know, just isn't a good guy. And I'm actually and yes, those guys are out there. And those guys do behave like this. But what I think is more fascinating. In the hundreds of women that I've now talked to, is it's the good men. It's the good men who participate in this shift and don't see it happening.
Eve 13:01
100% Well, it is and that is why fairplay became a love letter to men, because what I started to do in my own marriage was trying to unpack what was happening to us. And what I found out Casey is that this has a name right there. It's been called the second shift emotional labor, the mental load. But my favorite term was a term called Invisible work. And because a we also knew around that term, that work gets more invisible for women as they have kids, men do five to 15 hours a week less. And one study, right? So this is not about an individual men, we love you. We're not here to bash on a gender. This is called the gender division of labor for a reason, because this is a systemic issue that helps nobody. And the reason why it doesn't help anybody is because I started to ask around the time that I heard the term invisible work when I was going through this myself and starting to feel really, like you said what happened your own marriage, this shift happening of assumptions. I started to you know, basically ask women you know what's invisible. That takes more than two minutes of your time and I started to write it down in this giant spreadsheet. And actually, Casey that was the first time in my life since having kids I didn't feel alone. It wasn't my partner that got me out of that it wasn't my community. With my Zach's mom nametag it wasn't my workplace. It was actually the mother's like you because this is before I had your book or anything could go viral. There was no tic tac there was just sort of word of mouth You know, it was I had Zach in 2008 when like how do you expect when you're expecting or whatever that book is was like the only resource we had we didn't even have iPads back then. And so this should I do spreadsheet that was created over nine months was really this antidote to my loneliness and it became this giant exercise around the country of women I didn't even know contributing it to it saying like thank you for putting making school lunches that takes five minutes or taking the kids to the doctor cuz I'm always the one who has to do that. That takes an hour, but you don't have elf on the shelf and on here you You've like that's, you know, 20 Nights time is an hour. And what about sunscreen? You know, like, what about sunscreen?
KC Davis 15:11
And that I have to tell you Eve, that is the thing I love the most about like your list. So and if people don't know, you also have a deck of cards so that because fairplay the first half,
Eve 15:21
it became a deck of cards. Yes, it became a metaphor, but it started as a list.
KC Davis 15:25
Yes, the first half of the book is this incredible unpacking about division of labor about this shift about how we got here about the myths that we believe about our times as men and women. But the second half of the book is a down and dirty, practical and you call it a game, like let's play the game of how to design your division of labor. And the thing I love the most is that yes, on the cards you have, you know, who's taking out the trash and who's cleaning and who's making dinner. But the things that I feel like overburdened women the most are the literal invisible, like Christmas magic, who is stuffing stocks. And those are always the TIC TOCs that I see is the mom sitting there going, if I don't stuff, the stockings, they don't get done. And every Christmas, there's nothing in my stocking, because I'm the one doing it for everyone else.
Eve 16:14
Ah, I love that so much. It reminded me of the kind of tell you a small story that it's not in my book or anywhere. It's sort of a newer story. But I think it sort of brings to home, what we're talking about here, it's a really small story. But again, it's what I love about your book so much too, is that you're also breaking down these assumptions. And you also have practical, prescriptive help. So like you also have that beautiful combination. But I want to tell you the small story because it just reminded me of that, as we talked about how I found out when I finally sent set that should I do spreadsheet, that list alone don't work. And I really had to take a step back and say, Do I live like this? Do I Eat Pray Love it out of my marriage? Because that was a popular narrative back then? Or do I get my ass in gear and become my own client and use what I've known, you know, now, you know, at that time, a decade now 15 years of organizational management, and really put a system into place. So I'll tell you the small story because reminds you, it's the magic stuff we're talking about. And it's so small, but it shows how the shift, pre and post fair play can really work for you. And reminds you a lot of your tick tock videos of just how a mindset shift can be such a difference. So there's this couple I'll call, I think I'll call them Richard and Amy because that's another couple I love. And this couple hasn't given me permission yet to use their story. But they're, you know, they came to fairplay during the pandemic, and they really wanted to do some work on their relationship. And so this couple comes to me. And as you said, part of the beauty of fair play is that I give you a system, it's a game, it's reliant on you understanding that you should have boundaries that your time as you said, you deserve leisure, you deserve a permission to be unavailable. It's the system handed to you on a plate. It's also a lot of communication tips. So this couple is doing fair play. And I love data. So they come to me and they say, Richard decided to take on one of those magic tasks that I really, I do presents for the school. I'm the one who puts notes you know, in my kids lunchbox, whatever. So Amy tells me Richard decides to take on magical beings. So that is Santa. And that's like Lucky leprechaun for them because they have Irish thing. They have a trap or something they were telling me about and then they had Tooth Fairy. So Richard takes on the tooth fairy, and he reports back to me that they do this in advance. That's what fist fair plays about these practice of like exercise, you have high cognition, low emotion conversations, he says I will own that's also fair play ownership. You carry through your mistake. You own it, you don't ask me what's for dinner. If you're in charge of dinner, not hard to understand. That's what we do in the workplace. Even my Aunt Mary's Mahjong group, you're out if you don't bring snack, we're used to owning things. So I bring that to the home. So he basically says the first night, it was his daughter's second tooth. The first night he's Tooth Fairy. He forgets the money doesn't go into the pillow. And his daughter wakes up and she you know, says the Tooth Fairy didn't come super disappointed. Amy tells me before a fair play. This is the dynamic of their relationship. She would have said to Richard, you've ruined our daughter's magic back to the magic. That's why I thought about this. You can't do anything for our house. I will never let you do anything again. You will never touch our living will. Because you can't even get $1 under the pillow. Richard told me that he would have blamed me for not reminding him to put the dollar under the frickin pillow. That's their dynamic post fair play. This is what happens. Richard tells me he opens his mistake. Because he said what my bad. This is totally my card. So that disarms Amy, because now she's feeling like oh shit. You know, he's actually owning something. It wasn't the assumption that I was supposed to remind him. She says, Okay, I will let you carry through your mistake and see what happens. Richard emails tooth fairy@gmail.com, he actually tells me he gets a response. There's somebody who answers that email address, he prints it out for his daughter, because she said something really beautiful, like, Sorry, there were so many teeth lost last night, I couldn't get your home in time. And then he told his daughter, when the tooth fairy is late, she brings double the money. No, I love it. That's the story. It's nothing big. It's nothing dramatic. It's just a shift in the mindset very similar, again, to how I love your work. Because it's not that hard. It feels so hard, because there's so much that we have to unpack around why we got here, it's not your fault. But when you can start to move and invest in these types of conversations in these types of systems and believing in your own boundaries, then things start to change.
KC Davis 20:54
I love when you talk about these time myths. And I love that you specifically talk to the stay at home parent, which is usually the woman because that's one of the questions that I get is, or one of the comments that I get is, I feel like because I'm a stay at home parent, I don't have the right to ask for more, or I don't have the right to demand time to myself that I have the easier gig, right. And that's where we kind of get into this measuring contest of whose job is harder. And in reality, whose job is harder, is a totally unrelated conversation. Because if you have children, they belong to both of you. And that has nothing to do with whose job is harder. If you have a home that belongs to both of you, that has nothing to do with whose job is harder. And that the time you spend. Taking care of your family taking care of your home is just as valuable as the time your spouse spends earning his paycheck, and that you both deserve the right to rest and recreate. And I think the other thing that's that's really powerful about fairplay is that as you're kind of in the midst of learning about oh, yeah, you know, it's that, you know, the division is unfair, and we should be able to make it fair. And it seems like that's all it is. Because I've heard women say, it's so much work to get my spouse to be involved, I would rather just do it all. And I could see someone ending there. But the thing that you say that's even more powerful is that you have this whole section where you talk to couples that have divorced after a long marriage. And you have this finding. And I wonder if you could talk to us about this about what the men typically tend to say about why they ended that marriage?
Eve 22:42
Well, it's such a beautiful question, because it was never like I ended this marriage. And actually women are the ones who initiate divorce over 80% of the time, because they I do think it's a resentful meter 10, you can't take it anymore. But what's interesting is that so many men and this gets back to the love letter to men. It was never that Oh, I hate taking my kids to school. No, it was women told me the overwhelm is too much, it gets too much to the point where they literally wanted burst with anxiety and resentment. But men said to me that for them, it was this quiet death by 1000 cuts of not knowing their role in the home. And I think what's so fascinating about that, again, it's not like, Oh, I didn't want to help. These are good men, this sort of this dynamic. It also happens in LGBTQIA couples that I have broken up to where these assumptions are not just for heteronormative couples, you know, these heteronormative assumptions can really affect us all even single parents, because they're assumed to not be as competent because they have caregiving responsibilities. So we're trying to break down these harmful norms that hurt us all. But I think what's so fascinating is that so many of these men, especially the ones who ended up in second marriages did so much more. I never found a man in a second marriage who did less. And I think it was this understanding that it is really psychologically unsafe to not know your role. And so what I mean by that is we now know in the work context, that context not control is a way to make people feel safe. If you give people context for what you're asking of them, they're more likely to do it. If you just give an order KC, upload this for me. And they don't know why it makes people feel controlled, and that they don't have autonomy over their life. That type of control is what men were reporting to me. We call it nagging, but that's too gendered. So I started to call it the rat. If your home was infested by rats, you're not gonna want to live there. And that was a random assignment of a task. And as because ultimately, what I found was that in most homes, women were the ones and that's why, you know, treating our home as our most important organization was my most important realization. But my second most important realization, Casey was that I had to ask a deeper question to get to what we're talking about. Now, why was this all happening to us? And once I could ask the question, how does mustard go in your refrigerator, everything changed for me in 2011, because I asked that for over a decade and what happened in 17 countries, even the Nordic countries that have paid leave, and all the other, you know, bells and whistles that we need here. What was happening to women partnered with men was that overwhelmingly, I'd say 80 90% of the time, women were saying to me that they were the ones mustard is in the refrigerator, because their second son Johnny likes yellow mustard with his protein, otherwise he chokes, they were the one noticing, conceiving of that mustard, they were the one telling me that they were getting stakeholder buy in for what their family needed on the grocery list. And they were the one monitoring the mustard for when it was running low. That's planning. And then they were telling me that their partner participates in the grocery shopping by going to the store for the mustard, but they bring home spices Dijon every fucking time. And so if you want me to trust my partner with, again, with my living will with my organ donation card with my DMV registration, absolutely not because this person can't even bring home the right type of mustard. Once I realized that that was a dialogue happening, I realized we can isolate the two words that make organizations function that we were losing in the home. And those two words that every healthy organization needs, our accountability and trust. When you start losing accountability and trust, everything falls to shit in every organization. And that dynamic of holding the conception and planning and having somebody else execute on your behalf is where this accountability and trust break down what's happening. So fairplay is all about rectifying that
KC Davis 26:34
that's where everything gets screwed up. Because good men will say, tell me what to do. Good men will say make me a list. Good men will say, What can I take off your plate? But even if you are going to the store to get mustard for me, first of all, many of us can so I can order that and have it delivered. Right? Like the execution is not actually the major part of the burden on me as a wife and mother. It's the other it's the mental load of who likes the mustard monitoring the mustard? When does the mustard get low? Is it one brand over the other that they tend to notice? At what point did they stop liking mustard and start liking something else. And I think the beauty of fair play is that it makes those things visible, and then ensures that whoever is owning the execution of that task is now owning the mental labor of it. So if dad gets the, you know, grocery store task, the conversation and what you learned through reading the book is that he now must also own the mental labor of that task, who likes what food, what food is low, what food needs to go out what food needs to come in, you know, what is being cooked for dinner this week, so that it is on the whatever. And that to me is what makes your book and system so different than any other thing I've seen out there. Because it doesn't help me to make a list. Now I'm just your manager. And I think what we see or what I've seen as a therapist in couples is that they come in as equal partners, they come in typically even as the man pursuing the woman, and then they become equal partners. And they both have careers. And then they have children. And then what happens is this slow shift, whereby the woman takes on more and more and more of this mental labor, she becomes more and more frustrated at her husband. And anytime he tries to insert himself, he's he doesn't see enough of the picture to actually be helpful. So you know, at best, he does nothing at worst, he makes it harder. And then she gets frustrated and sort of nag them down and talks him down. And now she's saying you didn't do this. And you did. And they begin to shift into this Mother Son dynamic. And he resents her for it, and she resents him for it. And then at the end of their marriage, right, when they're trying to figure out what went wrong. The most powerful thing your book said to me was the amount of men that said, When I married my wife, she was so interesting. And then I begged her to quit her job and be a stay at home mother. And here we are 25 years later. And you know, she's just not interesting anymore. So I left her. And it's like, these men aren't realizing that they participated in the assassination of their wife's spark, and personality and passion. And I'm not saying it's all their fault, because as women, you know, we don't even know what to do to get out of this. Or some of us even think, oh, there's some reward in this role. I'm doing my great little duty as a wife not realizing how much it shifts, not realizing how much I begin to martyr myself for the role of mother and I don't have time to be interesting anymore. And one of the things about my book and my work is that it yes, it's about dishes and laundry, but at the end of the day, it's really only about this more powerful message of worthiness that says you deserve to function. And I feel like fair play. Yes, it's about who's taking out the trash and who's doing the dishes. But actually, it's about a more fundamental message of worthiness, which is that you deserve to reclaim the right to be interesting.
Eve 30:18
Wow, can I take you on the road with me? Like, you're just Yes, please do whatever you just said to can you do that? Yes, you need to be my Tiktok representative, because that was so beautiful, because it is exactly that. We talked about systems, we really spent the majority of this podcast really breaking down the fairplay system. And we talked when we talked about Richard and Amy about sort of how they started to communicate. But I think if we could end on boundaries, what you just said, You gave me chills sort of repeating back, because this stuff still triggers me so much. It's so sad, right? But it's also so empowering. Because, Casey, I wish I could tell your listeners that. And again, whatever family structure you're in, it's valid. And I'm speaking to all the stay at home parents who, you know, the core premise of fair play, as Casey said earlier, is that an hour holding a child's hand at the pediatricians office is just as important and valuable as an hour in the boardroom. But I think, you know, when you get down to this idea of what a boundary is, that's the unlearning for why the system was so hard to introduce the society people were saying to me, I can't even get to the fairplay system, I can't get to fairness, this makes so much sense. But because I am being held back by my own assumptions about how I'm supposed to use my time, my time is predetermined for me. My time is, as a parent, a partner or a professional, God forbid, I use my time outside of those roles, I am not allowed. And when I say who's not allowing you who's not giving you permission, right? It's this overwhelming societal idea that women are really not allowed to be anything outside of those roles, we don't availability to those roles becomes part of our identity. And so like I said, if I could tell you anything about boundaries, it is one thing. A boundary is not a walk around the block. A boundary is not a drink with a friend. A boundary is your consistent interest in your own life. That's the boundary when you can take your reclaim your time and say, That's why the fair play, and KeePass, wide drowning, like that's why all of these messages are important, because it gives you some time back to think about how to reclaim but once you reclaim that time, it is not to fill it with more work, or to fill it with mommy juice or to numb your way through your life, like so many of us are told to do and we normalize it is to be consistently interested in your own life. And we're here for you those active pursuits, I call them unicorn space, because they're mythical. They're magical. They're the tie and the key to your mental health and your longevity. But they don't exist, like a unicorn does not exist until we reclaim that space.
KC Davis 33:07
Well, I have to tell you, one of my best friends is a marriage and family therapist. And she and her partner specialize in helping couples, and they're also sex therapists. And one of the things that they taught me about sort of their work, which is really pretty countercultural to her a lot, a lot of family and sex therapy do now. And she was telling me, you know, the common thing for marriage and sex therapist to do now when a couple comes in, and they're saying, Oh, we, you know, he wants it more, you know, we want more passionate in the marriage is they try to push them more together and say, Oh, make date nights. Ooh, schedule your sex. Oh, you know, you need to do this. This isn't the other. Oh, no, exactly. No, no. And she and her partner has those the most life changing view on it. And she said, the thing is, is that duty and eroticism can't live in the same place. And attraction is not something that you can turn on by spending more time with someone. Attraction is something that happens because you see someone as different and other than you, and you see them in their passionate place. You see them in their unicorn space. And they talk about how when you ask a man, you know what attracted you to your partner, when you first met, they're describing I remember seeing her give that performance. I remember watching her to date, talk about rescuing dogs, and how her face would light up. And she said, You know, there's these things that attracted us to each other that made us sort of an all of this person in front of us and sometimes what happens as we get married as we have kids as we get these careers as we're sort of trudging along, creating a life together, we'd become companions, but we can get so bogged down and she was saying this is kind of where it hits women, right? Like all of a sudden, every waking minute for me is childcare and home stuff and my career in childcare and home stuff in my career. And people want to make this superficial sort of, well, you know, you don't ever put makeup on anymore, it's like, that's not really what it is, it's that she does not have the time or the space to be an interesting person anymore to go home. And it doesn't have to be some world changing pursuit. But I love the stories in your book about, you know, one of them was that it was like, crochet, like, that was what she loved. And when she got the time and energy to do that, again, her husband's talking about van just to see her create these things, and then she connected with other women about and then she started going to these little fairs about it. And, you know, so they, when they started talking to me about we don't actually want to push couples closer together on, you know, scheduled date nights, we want to talk about how can we get this woman the time and energy to go be passionate person, because when their spouse can observe them be a passionate person, they can discover that attraction that's always been there. And vice versa for the man too, because sometimes men can get so you know, nose to the grindstone on I've got to make the money, I've got to make the money, I've got to climb the ladder, I've got to do my duty, that they won't let themselves to have space to go and do and say and be. And I remember reading your book and thinking this is exactly what they're talking about.
Eve 36:21
Oh my god, I love them. I love them. Please tell them that they're literally they're the best. That's exactly right.
KC Davis 36:27
Well, I have to tell you that your book changed my life. Thank you. And that's no small thing. I was in the middle of paying the pandemic. And I was buried and I am a upper middle class woman, I have the funds to outsource a great deal of care tasks. But in the pandemic, it was not safe to do so. And my husband had just started his first corporate law job. And so he was working seven days a week, and I was at home with a newborn and a toddler. And I was losing myself. And I was drowning silently. And I didn't even realize how much pain I was in. And when I started my Tiktok channel and it started to take off. You know, it gave me this little line of meaning and interest. And I still remember like I went to see my mom, I had seen a therapist actually because I was losing my mind I got to the point where I went to the water burger. I just walked out the house I said you have the kids are watching the house. I'm sitting in the drive thru line. And as I'm waiting in the drive thru line, all of a sudden, I start to panic. And the only thing that goes through my head is get out of the car and leave get out of the car and leave get out of the car and leave. I'm telling you I was on the precipice of psychosis, like I, all I wanted to do, and I had on like pajamas was get out of my moving car, leave it in the drive thru lane and just walk into the night, I had nowhere to go. But it was like that's the only thing left. And I called a friend. And I told her about it. And I said, Something's wrong. I started seeing a therapist, that therapist said you have to get away for a week, and I don't care what it takes. And I went to my mother's house. And I told her about this little tic tock channel that I had. And I was thinking about paying someone to make me a logo, but it was $300. And I just really didn't know if I could afford that. And, and you know, maybe my partner would be mad at me for spending $300 on this little hobby. And I remember my mom looking at it being like, I think you really have something here. And that was the process that I was in when I read fairplay and read about reclaiming the right to be interesting, and realized that I had lost a part of myself that I missed. And it was the part of myself that I was afraid if I lost it, I would lose my whole family, eventually, that this would bury me. And that's when I started taking my own unicorn space seriously. And it was really difficult. And I'm still in that process. But I'm just so grateful for your book, I'm grateful for your presence. I'm grateful that you didn't just to make it about equal division of labor. I'm grateful that you took that step and said, This is a systemic issue that will bury you and you deserve better. And I'm just so grateful that you gave us this Oh,
Eve 39:08
my God, then like I'm crying. I'm just like, such a beautiful story. And like I said, I feel so similar. And I think the reason why I was attracted to you, your work is because you are a walking unicorn space. And I'm here to tell you and to all your listeners, whether you make $0 from what you're doing, or a billion dollars from what you're doing, your work is as or more valuable than your partner's work. Because you are also changing lives. And I think there's three things that I see in your work. And you when I watch you on tick tock and you make me happy and normalize everything, always at the right time. The thing I want to end with I think that's so important is what I see in you what you're doing and how as a role model because again, let's just put the money aside Of course, we all need it. But that is not a unicorn space, it is not a side hustle, it is not a way to get rich. It is not contributing to the patriarchal capitalist narrative that time equals money. It is looking at how mental health needs to be redefined. And what I can say I think that you would agree with me and it's I put this in my second book, find your unicorn space. But it's just as relevant for fairplay is that for too long, we've been fed this narrative that we can gratitude journal ourselves to death. And as you said, this is a systemic problem, we cannot gratitude journal ourselves to death. Instead, what we have to realize is that the true definition of mental health is not how to be happy. And I feel like in the same 10 years of boss bitch, we had the same 10 years of how to be happy books. The true definition of mental health is a version of having the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time. And here's wait for it. This is the kicker, and the ability and strength to weather
KC Davis 41:03
how to hold on to yourself in the face of those emotions.
Eve 41:06
You and I had the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time, you were in a fucking takeout line. I was on the side of a road raging and throwing shit over blueberries. But the ability to you and I what we have now that we didn't have then is we have the ability and strength to weather the mundane does not mean life is easy. We which is what the global pandemic, we see things happening all over that are hard. But what we can say is that the unicorn space is your umbrella, when you have experiences that give you happiness and meaning together, not happiness without meaning not the binge watching the Netflix and again, the edibles and the wine, that sort of we've gotten through to numb ourselves and not the meaning without happiness, which is raising kids. But really these happiness and meaning bursts. What you're doing here, you have curiosity, you brought me out, I wonder what he was gonna say maybe it's good, maybe it's not, you connect, you had the we have the ability to connect with each other. And then even if you're not happy with what happened today, you're still willing to edit it and upload it to complete something. This podcast, your book is a cycle of curiosity, connection and completion. That is meaningless and happiness together. That is what we need to weather, the shit storms of the mundane of what it feels like to be a parent. And to be a caregiver, even if you're not a parent, or to be a single parent or to be somebody in charge of your aging and ailing uncle, we're here to say that you still deserve to be interested in your own life. And so I think that's again, where our work intersects. And it's different. It is different than other messages out there. Because it's a practice, like exercise. And we're not giving people a quick fix. We're saying this is a lifelong practice. And that's harder.
KC Davis 42:55
I love it. Well, thank you so much. Even and if you're listening, check out fairplay you have an audio book as well.
Eve 43:00
Yes, it's fun to listen on audio, especially if you're busy. But I would say that, you know, not everybody can afford all resources. Even today's we said that logo was expensive. So there we have a lot of free resources if you want to sign up for our newsletter at Fair Play life. Also, we have the cards again, all free resources in the Fair Play Life website.
KC Davis 43:18
Awesome. And if people want to follow you or learn more about you, where can they do that?
Eve 43:23
Also, all things fair play or fair play life. If you want a more raging political version, then you can always follow my personal account, which is just a Brodsky.
KC Davis 43:33
I love it. Well, thank you so much. And if you're listening here today, we're glad you're here and we just want you right now to know no matter what stage of life you're in, what family makeup you have, that you do have the right to be interesting, and to have the spaces in your life where meaning and happiness overlap and it doesn't matter what came before or after. You can absolutely start that journey today. So thank you for listening and II. Thank you for being here.
Eve 44:01
Love you, KC. I want to do this again.
Unknown Speaker 44:03
Absolutely.