While there are many great approaches for sharing the load at home with a partner, like Fair Play, for those of us with partners who aren’t around consistently (e.g., some physicians, travel, military), those approaches don’t really work. A partner can’t own, e.g., taking out the trash or cleaning up the kitchen or staying on top of what groceries you need and ordering them when they’re not home when those things need to happen.
So, let’s talk about it. This is somewhat more of a personal share about our situation and how we manage things. I’m not saying it’s totally right, and I’m more than willing to hear how you do something that works for you if you’re in a similar boat! That said, I hope it’s helpful – if only to normalize the struggle of it a bit!
Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!
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Full Transcript:
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Hey, hey! All right, so today we’re gonna talk about something that someone actually emailed me asking about, and that is sharing the load at home when your partner is gone a lot. Obviously, for context, my husband fits that bill. He is an ER physician and is gone a lot and has a wacky schedule that looks really different every week. Those of you who are also partnered with medicine, maybe you’re in medicine, maybe you’re not but your partner is, so you have a similar experience that I do being married to medicine. You might have a partner who works in a different field or is in the military and gone a lot, a lot, for months on end. Whatever it might be, your partner is just not there as much as other people’s, like your friends’ partners that you watch. They’re not around quite as much. And I want to talk about today, because this was what the question was about, is sharing the load on that front.
And for context, I think a lot of us really struggle with this. A lot of us that are in this boat really struggle with this, or at least I do. So I’m gonna explain my experience of this because when I do share it on Instagram or things like that, there is usually a bit of pushback from people who are not in that boat but then there are a lot of people who are grateful for people like me talking about it where the sharing of the load can’t be as even as we would ideally like it to be.
And in addition to it being hard logistically when that happens, it’s weirdly emotionally challenging as well because I think we all grew up — at least the people I grew up with and I’m usually from North America. Maybe some people grew up in different ideas of gender roles and things like that. But for the most part, a lot of the women, at least in my generation, around me regionally in The US have grown up wanting, kind of expecting, demanding the load at home to be shared more evenly, and that’s what we wanted. And there are models like Fair Play that have come out that I think are fantastic, and I am not knocking these at all. But they reflect that. They reflect we should share the load more equitably, more evenly in the household. And I will say that the equitable tends to — from what I can tell. I have not read her book still. I really need to. [Laughs] But from what I can tell, there’s a bit of an even distribution of labor, of the load. And I know that systems like that work for a lot of couples, and I have a lot of respect for that. But as far as I can tell, it presupposes that both partners are around about the same amount of time or that there’s a consistency in when they’re around and when the other partner is not. And for some of us, that’s just not the case. And so, that kind of general assumption isn’t there, and so, we can’t build on it.
The Load Gets Exponentially Larger When You Have Kids – 3:27
I will say that this sharing of the load, I think just because the load gets so much bigger when you have kids, it really wasn’t an issue for me until we had kids. The mental load, the home load, the amount of housework just grows exponentially with children. And so, before kids I will say that I just felt like our partnership was very equal. We could have probably fit the mold with Fair Play. I’ve shared this before. My husband cooks more than I do. There’s plenty that he was carrying on at home before we had kids. But suddenly, when the amount of stuff that had to be done just grew exponentially, as I said, when we had kids, that’s when it became really hard.
Now, for context, I pushed for kids when we did. We got married, I think we were, like, 30, so around 31 I’d watched a lot of friends struggle to get pregnant and who were still struggling to get pregnant, and so, I pushed for trying to start a family, because I knew we wanted multiple kids, when we did. My husband would have happily waited until after residency just given his understanding of his own schedule. He understood what his schedule was going to be. He was like, “This is gonna be really hard to have kids during. I’d like to wait until after residency.”
But that was I think we had three more years of residency left, and I just wasn’t willing to wait that long not knowing how long it would take us to get pregnant. I didn’t know if we could get pregnant, if we could get pregnant easily or quickly. Again, we wanted multiple kids. It felt like something that I thought we should start working on. And I share this all not to be like TMI and things like that. It’s just more to give you the context that I was the one pushing for kids. And so, that caused complications later, even in my own head, of what could I be demanding when I’m the one who pushed for this on the timeline that I did.
We got pregnant not too quickly but not too long, and in the same day that our daughter arrived, he was named one of the chief residents of his program. So he kicked off his last year of residency and was a chief resident and was moonlighting to make some more money and get more experience, which helped with the job search, all while we also were entering our first year of having our first daughter. [Laughs] And that was a lot.
And so, also to give more context, I had previously been the breadwinner, and now I literally had been at home barefoot and pregnant, and now I had a little baby and my fledgling business. I had a lot of weird ego stuff going on with now I wasn’t a lawyer anymore, and I didn’t realize that role of my ego and it was suddenly smarting. There were a lot of emotional things going on in my own head as well.
And in the context of all of that, I had this societal voice in my head that I’d heard for a long time that had been telling me that my partnership should be equal, that our parenting should be equal, that the division of labor at home should be equal. And I wanted it to be, and I saw that my husband was working crazy hours. He physically wasn’t looking so good because he was so tired. He was so stressed out. He had no juice in the tank. And as I said, he had not really sent — he had agreed to the timeline, but he had not pushed for it. I was the one who pushed for it. He had known his limits, he had communicated them with me, and I had kind of taken this on.
And that was really hard because, I mean, I have a theory that none of us really give informed consent to parenthood. I don’t think we all have any idea of what it does to your life. I’m not ragging on it. But just objectively, your time freedom completely disappears, and especially as a mom, especially in that first year, and it’s just jolting. It’s very jolting. So while I’d been the one to push for it, obviously I had not fully appreciated what it would be like, and it was really hard.
And I’m looking around at a lot of couple friends who are sharing the work more evenly, and I even had a few people throw out, “Hey, you’re doing, like, 95% of this. Are you okay?” And there was an element of, I felt like, and I was probably projecting, but asking, kind of pointing out that we weren’t dividing it evenly and a little bit of judgment I felt like even at me for allowing that, for facilitating that, and for enabling that. I kind of felt like somewhat failing as a feminist, which I am, and I very much believe that women have equal rights and shouldn’t be siloed into the home and all this kind of stuff. But here I am, essentially, in that spot. It was very confusing. It was all these things I’d wanted, I had to push for. But I was really struggling because I, again, felt like I was failing as that feminist, but then I’m trying to look around and struggling to see that, you know, I just didn’t have a lot of options. My husband was working all the time. There just wasn’t a lot of availability for him to help.
Words of Wisdom From a Friend of Mine – 8:20
And I am so grateful that I had a friend at that time. She gave me a call. I think she gave me a call and was just checking in, and I think she could hear it in my voice. It was just a tough time in my life. The exhaustion, the inability to share the load, and she really kind of gave it to me straight. Her husband at the time was a professional athlete, and she shared these words of wisdom to me that were basically like, “Your husband is gone a lot? My husband is gone a lot. Their sleep really matters. Your husband’s sleep matters more because he’s actually in a hospital.”
And she was saying that sleep and those hours away are critical to their performance of their job where it really matters, and it supports your family and also there are, for my husband, real lives at stake of him getting good sleep and being able to show up in that way. And she said, “It is okay that you are prioritizing that, and you get to call more of the shots at home. That is your domain right now.” Obviously she said, “Your husband can be part of those big decisions, but he also does not get to micromanage your day to day in terms of how you raise your baby and how you run the day because that is micromanaging your day-to-day job right now, and that’s okay too.”
At that point, you know, our baby was so little. I don’t know if there was anything really to micromanage. It felt like a chaotic whirl, and I wish we could micromanage it, but it really gave me the permission, I guess, that I needed to just kind of surrender to our situation where my husband really wasn’t able to pull the equal weight in the house because of his obligations outside of the house. And because I had left law and was in the house, that was gonna kind of be my domain for a bit. Now, this is very — I would say home versus work, you know, in the house, out of the house, that’s very limited to that initial context. This was happening when my baby was really little. I’m not at all trying to say that all women’s domains should be in the house. I really hope you know that by this point. But that was a conversation at that time that I needed to hear, just to have someone understand the situation, have someone understand the reality of our life and let me, then, embrace that reality of our life.
This was a really powerful moment for me because it allowed me to just kind of embrace the reality of the situation, and instead of constantly wishing the situation were different and then being upset that it wasn’t and being resentful because it wasn’t, I could suddenly just be like, “This is our situation. How am I gonna get the support I need? If I can’t continue to do all of it and my husband can’t contribute in the way that I, of course, idealistically would love for him to, then how do I get the support outside of me? How do I still get where I want to go?
Outsourcing and Community Support – 11:24
And that really helped me start getting more childcare support, outsourcing a lot more on getting house cleaners. And we had had house cleaners, but I think we stopped them for a period of time when the baby was really little. And so, to just get more house cleaners, to really embrace things like Instacart, to get more childcare support to give me the breathing space because my partner wasn’t able to do that for me during that phase of life.
And I will also note that as I’m sharing this it kind of weirdly reflects some of my time management journey also. Instead of beating myself up for not knowing how to manage everything naturally or just remembering to do everything I needed to do or all those kind of things that we do on the time management front, there is a freedom and peace that comes from just surrendering to, “Hey, my brain’s not gonna remember how to do this by itself, so what do I do to still help me get where I want to go?” Which is really how I started relying on a system to still help me get to where I wanted to go and remove that self-judgment from it.
This experience, now that I’m sharing it, kind of mirrors that. There was an element of instead of being so angry at my situation and wishing it were different and just kind of hoping it was different and then being disappointed when it wasn’t and knowing that those hopes did not square with the reality based on my lived experience and everything I could see, I just could embrace it and then get the support outside of us that I needed. And that included paying for some of that, but it also was a big push to help me want to move home from California to Minnesota to be near my family. Not to have my parents become large caregivers in our life but to help those kind of smaller moments that come up each week when you need some bridging, but you can’t hire someone for, like, 15 minutes to help.
An example that comes to mind was when my youngest daughter had to go to an allergy appointment, and we didn’t know how long it would take because it was, like, a challenge-type thing, I just needed someone to be able to meet my oldest at the bus and then bridge the gap until I got home, and I knew it would be probably 20 minutes if we needed it. And we ended up getting back home actually before the bus that day, but just having that backup person and being around family and people I knew to get that was huge for me. So I’m just sharing that. I know that not everybody has the flexibility to move home when they want to, but I also just wanted to share it in terms of, yes, we hired some of this outsourcing, but I also was like I need more community support around me in the way that I’m looking for.
Making The Work Visual For Your Partner – 14:06
One other thing — actually I think I have two more things. One of the things though that I do want to point out is even though I have to carry a lot of the load on my own, one thing that I love about The Bright Method — but you could do this using another system or just verbally as you talk — is really showing the work that I’m doing. My husband doesn’t see that on his calendar all the time, by any means. But I have a visual way to show him all that I’m managing that just comes up as we’re like, “What are we doing here? What are we doing here?” He sees my calendar even if we’re just both looking at it on my computer, and it helps him to appreciate how much I’m doing.
And I will say that, again, if you can share the load more equitably or evenly, even if whoever’s listening to this can, awesome. But if you can’t, that appreciation — like, he is in awe of all that I do at home and in our life, and that goes far. If he were dismissive of it or not appreciative of it, I would have a lot harder time thinking that this works and that this feels like an equal partnership. And the fact that he has that appreciation is incredible for us.
So I want to share that part of that appreciation comes down to me making that work visual to him and visible to him, so it’s not just invisible labor. And that is partly through the calendar system that I tech, and it’s also just partly about me talking about it, and not in a like, “I did this, blah, blah, blah,” but more like, “Oh, yeah, this came up today, so I did this, and then we had this,” and just sharing about my day. Making that work visual really, really helps that appreciation component, which really helps me to feel like we’re in an equal partnership that we respect what each of the other is doing.
Appreciation For How Your Partner Shows Up – 15:50
I will also note, before I keep going, that life outside of residency and fellowship is very different, and since then — again this was all happening in my very first year of my first daughter’s life. And when my husband was in residency and a chief resident and all that kind of stuff, that was a rough context. And since then, he’s now an attending. He has a lot more time. We’re not in that grueling, little baby phase anymore, and I also have the benefit of now knowing what an awesome father and partner is when he does have energy and time to give. As we talk a lot about here, about time and energy limits, and when he actually has time and energy it’s amazing, which really does help because then when we had our second daughter, one, he was out of residency, and that was very helpful. But also I knew that once the baby’s not such a baby, he’s able to really help so much more. That was also incredible and really helped alleviate all of that.
So again, I’m sharing all this because of the context of my life, but it was kind of a pressure-cooker situation that allowed this breakthrough to be very needed and also maybe more obvious and profound than it would have been had we, you know, waited to have babies until his attending years like he had probably advocated. Who knows what would have happened. But I just share that, thankfully, the situation is not remotely as dire as it used to be, but still the situation is comparable in that we still cannot divide the work completely evenly in the way that my younger, growing up feminist self probably would have envisioned for my life.
All right, so hopefully that’s some helpful context of how kind of how I’ve gotten to where I am maybe mentally about sharing the load at home and having just the freedom and the peace of mind that comes with embracing your reality of the situation. Thankfully, the situation has gotten a lot better. But it’s still not the same as a lot of my friends’ situations on sharing the load at home, and there are pros and cons to that. It is what it is.
Examples of How My Husband and I Divvy Up the Workload – 17:56
And now that we’re in a better situation and we’re just embracing it, I’m gonna give you some examples of how we divvy it up. I will say I kind of annoyingly does fall on gender roles to an extent. I wish it didn’t, but, you know, just trying to be frank here. It works out kind of because of our interests and also that time sensitivity thing I was talking about. I will say that this is ever evolving. We are always shifting this, and I also am not saying it’s right, so I’m gonna share examples just because I think it’s helpful to hear examples so that it can get your wheels turning. But I’m now pretending that it’s right, and I also am more than open. If you have ideas and it works better for you and you’re in this boat as well, I would love to hear what your ideas are, and I will try and share this over time as well.
On the whole, broad strokes, as I said, are mainly we’re trying to aim for equitable not even, and I’m always looking for things that I can completely hand off to him on a going-forward basis. Like we don’t even have to talk about it anymore. He handles this going forward, and the main thing that I look for are less time-sensitive things. So anything that can wait, like, six days. If he’s working four overnights and then has to recover, if something can wait that long and it’s a repetitive thing on an ongoing basis, then I look to hand that off to him entirely. I’ll give some examples of that. And then also when he is around things that are easy to delegate, that I can just hand off a whole thing to him on that, and that’s more of a one-off delegation thing, which I know isn’t the most — it’s not great. But it also, when I get in my rhythms and routines of running the show on my own, there is an element of, “Hey, this is what we do, and I need you to handle this part of it.” There is a delegation element that just is inherent in that.
So I’ll share on kind of the we don’t even have to talk about it, he knows that this is his domain stuff is paying medical bills. That’s a really good one for us that he can have because a medical bill can wait a couple weeks, and any medical bill that’s about the girls, about me or him go to him. I just hand them to him. He pays them, and then he also tracks them for HSA.
Paying kids’ bills is also another one, like tuition, things like that. All that kind of stuff goes to him because, again, it can wait a week or two, and it’s no big deal. So that’s a good one for him.
Yard work, handling yard work. That one weirdly sometimes comes back to me because they have my email. But on the whole that’s his stuff.
When he is home, one thing we don’t even talk about, too, is pick-ups and drop-offs with kids. In the morning, if he’s home and awake, he takes the youngest to school. I take the oldest. Right now, we’re renovating, so I have to drive her to our house to get the bus. So that’s how we divvy it. Just always every morning. If he’s home in the afternoon, he also picks up the youngest and also maybe the oldest when he’s around but always the youngest, and then I do the oldest, and then we just hangout as a family after that.
Other things I would say are cooking sometimes. I’ve just shared before that we have someone come in and cook some meals. So sometimes we’ll just eat that as a family. But if someone’s gonna cook a meal, it’s gonna be him [Laughs] at night for dinner.
And then I will say one thing we have tried to divvy up that just didn’t work, candidly, is bedtimes with kids. So my oldest is six-and-a-half. My youngest is three. Particularly my oldest, I think she just likes the routine of knowing who — we just have our routine of how we do bedtime every night, and we used to try and divvy it up. I used to try and hide, and he would do bedtime, and I just think that because he’s not around consistently enough, we can’t follow a routine of when he does bedtimes and when I do bedtimes. It just didn’t work. Candidly, it was just too stressful on the kids, and it just wasn’t working for them. As much as we tried it, as much as I wanted it, it just wasn’t working for the kids. It was causing bedtimes to be big, explosive things because I think the little kids just didn’t know what was going on.
So, unfortunately, I am still stuck with that, which is a real bummer. But it is what it is. I still, if I go out to dinner, if I leave, then it’s fine. But on an ongoing basis, we’ve just come to the conclusion that I do bedtimes, and what he does is he helps with those bedtimes in the sense that if someone’s asking for water or a string cheese or needs to go to the potty again or things like that, then he helps with that element of it. And at the same time, he’s usually cleaning up the kitchen and cleaning up the downstairs so that I come down when I’m done to a clean downstairs, and it is magical because when you’re home alone, then you get to do that after bedtime. So that is just really like a cherry on top of a night after bedtimes to come back to a clean kitchen, be able to go to bed when I want, and things like that. It’s kind of a bummer to have to keep that, but I do feel like it was kind of in the best interest of the kids.
I will say that the fact is that I still want more support, and he can’t always provide that. And so, we’ve gotten really into outsourcing, and I know that I’ve talked a lot about this. Episode 29’s a lot about outsourcing and the emotional complications around it. We’ve had some other people come on about hiring a household manager and also Faye, which you can kind of outsource the mental load to them. So there’s a lot on outsourcing. I will say that that’s just something we’ve really embraced as well because, again, I can’t do it and I don’t want to do it all alone, and if he can’t help bridge that gap, which he can’t because of the realities of his job, then we just have to get creative and look for help outside of that.
So I’ve talked about how, as I just said, we have someone come in and help us with some of the meals each week. We rely heavily on Instacart. We have people mow the lawn. We have people do snow removal of the driveway. We still have to shovel out the patio and the walk to the front door, but that is what it is. We have house cleaning come every other week, and then I also have a lot of childcare on the weekends when he’s gone. So if he’s working a full weekend, I usually get about four hours of childcare on a Saturday or Sunday morning to just give me a little bit of time as well.
I Hope By Sharing, That I Can Do For You What My Friend Did For Me – 24:16
So I share that — I know it’s very me-focused, but I hope that for the people who relate and are in these boats, I know that all these options maybe aren’t an option or not something you would want to do, or you would divvy it up differently. But the more important point that I hope you hear and that you believe as well, and I don’t know, if you don’t, I hope that I can play the role that that friend played for me of there just are relationships where you can’t divvy everything up as evenly as we would ideally want to. But I do think there are ways to have real partnerships and understand the value that each person is bringing to the table and still work to creatively get both of those people the support that they need to be happy in their relationship and life and partnership and all of it.
So I hope that even if you shake out differently than we do on how we divvy things up, I hope that it gets those wheels tuning or gives you an idea or two of ways that you could divvy it up at home in a way that would feel good to you.
I also think it really helps, just from my own mindset stuff around this stuff, to also really appreciate, even though the job is so wacky — like his job is so weird, and it’s really hard in a lot of ways, and it’s hard on both of us in a lot of ways. Focusing on what it provides, too, is really awesome. In addition to he’s paid very well for his job, there’s that element of it, but also there are really great parts about his job that I really love, like when he is home, he is home. He’s not working. There are no clients emailing him all the time or things like that, which coming from law I’m still amazed that when he’s home, he’s home. Like, he’s not on email or things like that. That’s amazing. That’s something I super, super appreciate.
We also know when he’s working. So that’s something that I didn’t mention, but when he’s home, that’s when I schedule a lot of my work stuff that cannot be moved, and he’s on kid backup or things like that, like taking care of sick kids if there is a sick kid at home so that I can do my job. And part of that, what’s really cool about that is that he has a predictable job like that. I have a lot of friends, also married to lawyers, and you can’t always plan that way. You know, things get scheduled, and things shift, and suddenly the person who was playing backup can’t play backup, and that can be really hard. And so, I just think that that’s a real perk of his job is his shifts are all over the place, and they’re weird, but at least we know them ahead of time and can plan accordingly, and I get a lot of benefits from that.
Similarly, we can plan vacations because, I mean, we can request days off. We can see when they’re coming ahead of time. They’re very — I just don’t think they (knock on all the wood) get shifted on us in a way that would disrupt a vacation. It’s really incredible in a lot of ways.
So while his schedule is weird and wacky in a lot of ways, there are some major perks, and it really helps me when I’m feeling bad for myself [Laughs] in this scenario, because sometimes I do, sometimes we have those days, it helps to remind me of the perks that we get to do, that we get to go on vacations and things like this because we know ahead of time that he’ll have that time off, and I can plan my business and my job around that. I have a lot of control over that too, and so, we can go into a vacation really confident that we’ll have that vacation, which is really incredible and something I don’t take lightly. So that helps me a lot. Just sharing, reminding myself of the benefits of a job can be really, really helpful when you’re dealing with the cons of that job.
So I hope that was helpful! I know it was very me-focused, but as I said, someone asked that I share more about it because it’s hard. I mean, it’s hard in some ways when — it’s hard, obviously, logistically, but it is really confusing emotionally when all of your friends have more even partnerships, their partners can carry more weight just because they’re around more and you want that, and you feel like you should be doing that to have advanced women’s rights and things like that. But when your partner’s job, the reality just doesn’t allow for that.
So I hope that this helps in its own weird way to hear, whether you are in this boat or you have friends who are and maybe it helps to understand it a little bit more and just be there for the friend, too, then to understand where they’re coming from. It is a wonderful life in a weird, weird way. It just requires some creativity and flexibility and, hopefully if you can swing it, some more outsourcing to still get you the support and free time and time for yourself that we all deserve and need.
So I’d love to hear what you think, and thank you for being here, and I will catch you in the next episode!
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