1.

THE CURSE OF THE SHE-FAULT PARENT

I was ready to fold.

CONSIDER:
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BLUEBERRIES

> I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.

I stared at my husband’s text and imagined him speaking these words in what I call his “porn voice”—breathless, like he gets when he’s frustrated or overwhelmed.

Instantly defensive, I thought: Um, why can’t you get the blueberries?

I’d taken the afternoon “off” in order to spend time with my oldest, who was sorely in need of some mommy reconnection time in the wake of the recent arrival of his new baby brother. After going over my long list of instructions for the sitter (twice), I hustled out the front door to pick Zach up from school—all while balancing the snacks I’d just packed, a bag forgotten by the prior day’s playmate, a FedEx package to be dropped off, a brand-new already-too-small pair of children’s shoes to be returned, and a client contract that needed a markup before tomorrow morning. I was just barely holding it together when my husband’s “blueberry text” arrived, and the tears came so fast and furious I had to pull over to the side of the road.

How had it happened that I’d gone from successfully managing an entire department at work to failing to manage a grocery list for my family? And what self-respecting woman cries over an item forgotten at the market? And, just as alarming: Would a container of off-season blueberries serve as the harbinger to the end of my marriage?

I wiped away the mascara streaks beneath my eyes and thought: This is not how I envisioned my life—the fulfiller of my family’s smoothie needs.

Hold up. Rewind.

HOW I GOT HERE

My mom and dad divorced when I was three and she was pregnant with my brother. Mom opted to forgo alimony to avoid acrimony and raised my brother and me in a one-parent home while working full-time as a professor of social work in New York City. Not a high-paying job, but she made it work for our family. Or so I thought until the first eviction notice was slipped under our apartment door. Mom had taught classes all day, picked my brother and me up from school, took us to the dentist uptown, dropped us back at home with a sitter downtown, and then . . . went back to work. When I saw the envelope on the floor, I opened it, read the letter inside, and then waited up late for Mom to come home. When she finally walked through the door, I broke the news to her that we no longer would have a place to live. I was eight years old. Mom assured me that she’d simply forgotten to pay our rent, and she would mail a check first thing in the morning.

She followed through on her promise and we didn’t have to move, but from that moment on I understood how hard life was for my mom because she carried 100 percent of the burden at home. Throughout my formative years and on too many occasions to count, I remember looking at her at the end of another long, exhausting day—my overworked supermom who tried to do it all—and thinking: That will never be me. When I grow up, I will have a true partner in life. Though it wasn’t modeled for me, I became determined to build and sustain a 50/50 partnership one day.

I worked hard and got myself through college and then law school, when I met the man who would become my partner. My best friend had set us up. Zoe said about Seth: “He’s Jewish and obsessed with hip hop.” I instantly flashed back to when I’d surprised guests with a choreographed dance to Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” at my bat mitzvah. I had to meet this guy.

I was a first-year associate at a law firm in New York City, which meant logging long hours, so for our first date Seth and I agreed to meet at a late-night bar in Union Square. But at 9:30 p.m., I received a client call that kept me on the line for nearly two hours. By the time I arrived at the bar, it was almost midnight and Seth was . . . still there. One of Seth’s friends had waited with him until I showed up. Seth told me later what his friend had said when I walked through the door: “She was worth the wait.” And so was Seth. I liked him right away.

There was just one snag to our budding romance: Seth lived in Los Angeles, and I had just taken the New York Bar Exam. We did a cross-country courtship for a year, and on our anniversary, I presented him with The Best of 2003, every single email we’d written to each other since the night we’d met. There were more than 600 pages of email exchanges that I’d printed out in the basement of my law firm and bound into a deep red four-volume book set. Seth was touched by my sentimentality (and equally impressed by my meticulous organizational skills). I think we both knew then that this was the real thing.

Within the year, I took on the arduous endeavor of studying for and passing the California Bar and uprooted to Los Angeles. And then, when Seth’s growing business required an East Coast office, we packed up and moved back to New York as a newly engaged couple. (Getting him back home was my secret plan.)

Our first apartment across from the Midtown tunnel was cramped and always loud, but we didn’t care. We were in love, true collaborators in the home, and champions of each other’s careers. As a young couple, our dynamic felt equitable, a reciprocal partnership of equals. In between loads of laundry, I marked up his client agreements as his entertainment agency expanded, and Seth gave me business pointers while he unloaded groceries.

He was my right-hand man as I worked my way up the ladder to my dream job—using my legal training, organizational management skills, and mediation background to work with individuals and companies to structure philanthropic organizations. In layman’s terms, I advised the wealthy on how to give away tons of money to nonprofits that served the greater good. We were both doing work that we felt proud of, and together we crushed it every step of the way.

Cut to married with children—everything changed.

THE SHE-FAULT PARENT

I became the default parent—or more aptly, the she-fault parent—and as such, the only thing I was crushing were peas for my baby. To be fair, Seth eagerly jumped in to diaper change, bottle-feed, and provide middle-of-the-night comfort to his firstborn. But beyond forming this early, critical connection with his son, Seth would frequently say about our new family dynamic: “There’s not a lot for me to do.”

While my husband is no Neanderthal, he was echoing what a good cave buddy had promised him during my pregnancy: “Relax. Dads don’t really do anything for the first six months. It’s more of a ‘mom’ thing.”

Like many breadwinner-working fathers, Seth returned to work just one week after Zach was born. I’d been granted three months of maternity leave to “stay home” (as if that term encompasses all that new parents do every day). Looking back, I hadn’t anticipated the endless emotional, mental, and physical effort parenthood would require. My cousin Jessica, who lived a quick cab ride uptown and who was also pregnant at the same time, hadn’t seen what was coming either. In her third trimester, she’d signed us up for a knitting class because “we’ll probably get bored on maternity leave.” Bored, yes. Idle, no. I had more than enough to keep my hands occupied without ever picking up a knitting needle or a ball of yarn. Because Seth and I hadn’t pre-negotiated how to share in the domestic workload before Zach came along, it defaulted to me. He’d leave for work in the office and I’d spend the next eight hours boiling bottles, doing dishes, folding laundry, restocking the nursery, running to the grocery store, picking up prescriptions, preparing meals, tidying up, and entertaining and attending to my little one. In his defense, after returning home from the office Seth would offer, “How can I help?” but I was unable to articulate what I needed. I’d typically reply with a sputter: “I don’t know. Just pick something!”

I was overtired and quickly became overextended. I also felt isolated and alone.

“My public life is so private now,” I confided to Jessica one afternoon at the playground.

“We’ve become ‘single married women,’” she offered, quoting a term coined by Dr. Sherry L. Blake that describes women in committed relationships who singularly bear the lioness’s share of family responsibilities. Seth could see that I was struggling in my new role, but he also felt constantly nagged. He made efforts to extend a hand but ultimately retreated because “I can’t do anything right.” The bickering between us became part of our new family routine, and when I considered returning to work, the idea of juggling a challenging office job with the ever-expanding demands of domestic life seemed impossible.

One afternoon, after an office meeting to discuss my return, I “took ten” in the company stairwell to quietly pump breast milk into plastic bags. As I sat with my back against the wall, I thought: Does this really count as a non-bathroom lactation space? And more important, How the hell am I going to balance it all? I proposed to my employer that I work full-time, but from home one day a week. That was declined. I offered to work a four-day week for less salary. They didn’t go for that either.

In the end, I walked away from my dream job to become an independent (“1099”) consultant, a move I don’t regret (but I do still think about—a lot). In my case, it was because—however supportive my corporate employer was about holding my full-time position for me during my maternity leave—the company didn’t have family-friendly systems in place to support parents requiring more flexibility in the early child-rearing years that directly follow. The day I gave notice, a colleague texted me: > Don’t blame yourself and included the following statistic: Compared to other developed countries, the United States ranks last in employment-protected time off for new parents.

Girlfriends who’d also taken a career detour by decreasing their professional workload, or who had exited the traditional workforce entirely, totally understood what I was going through. Tanya, a friend and former colleague who’d already left our company to care for her two children at home, cautioned me, “Juggling work and home is a grind, but if you think you’re going to gain more time by going part-time, think again. More time at home actually translates to less time.” How could that be? My new mommy friends were quick to point out that when you free up time spent in an office, you quickly fill it by doing more at home, including more that isn’t necessarily kid-related.

They were absolutely right. In addition to the nonnegotiable daily grind tasks like making sure there are clean diapers on the ready, once I wasn’t working full-time outside the home, I also took on many of the things that my husband used to do. Tasks like upgrading our insurance policies, bill paying, moving boxes to the storage unit, buying backup batteries for our smoke detectors, and countless other supplementary household sh*t that isn’t really supplementary. Because after the basics, these other tasks keep domestic life moving forward. Without any negotiation or conscious acquiescence, in my new role as CEO, task manager, and worker bee of our family’s never-ending to-do list, I performed hours upon hours of work that went unnoticed and unacknowledged by my husband—and sometimes, even by me.

On many days, feeling the full weight of exhaustion that would seize me the moment my baby was down and I was finally offline, I’d wonder, What did I do all day? When even I couldn’t answer the question, there was no doubt in my mind that I’d lost all control of my time.

Sound familiar?

WHY CAN’T WE EVER SEEM TO GET AHEAD OF OUR TO-DO LISTS?

The more I talked with my girlfriends who’d entered motherhood, I realized we were all having trouble getting it all done—and what’s more, we were all having trouble identifying exactly what it was we were doing. Why were we all so busy?

It turns out this phenomenon has a name—many names, actually. One of the most popular is “invisible work”: invisible because it may be unseen and unrecognized by our partners, and also because those of us who do it may not count or even acknowledge it as work . . . despite the fact that it costs us real time and significant mental and physical effort with no sick days or benefits. No doubt you, too, have read articles describing this “mental load,” “second shift,” and the “emotional labor” that falls disproportionately on women, along with the toll this domestic work takes on our lives more broadly.

But what are we really talking about here? Sociologists Arlene Kaplan Daniels and Arlie Hochschild started giving us the language to talk about these deeply felt (but largely unarticulated) inequities in the 1980s, and since then, plenty of intelligent women have advanced the conversation and the popular vernacular.

Mental Load: The never-ending mental to-do list you keep for all your family tasks. Though not as heavy as a bag of rocks, the constant details banging around in your mind nonetheless weigh you down. Mental “overload” creates stress, fatigue, and often forgetfulness. Where did I put the damn car keys?

Second Shift: This is the domestic work you do long before you go to work and often even longer after you get home from the office. It’s an unpaid shift that starts early and goes late, and you can’t afford to lose it. Every day’s a double shift when you have two kids’ lunches to prep!

Emotional Labor: This term has evolved organically in pop culture to include the “maintaining relationships” and “managing emotions” work like calling your in-laws, sending thank-you notes, buying teacher gifts, and soothing meltdowns in Target. This work of caring can be some of the most exhausting labor (akin to the day your child was born), but providing middle-of-the-night comfort is what makes you a wonderful and dependable parent. It’s OK, Mama’s here.

Invisible Work: This is the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps a home and family running smoothly, although it’s hardly noticed and is rarely valued. The toothpaste never runs out. You’re welcome.

In an effort to “physicalize” this heavy burden carried by women yesterday and today, I began collecting every article I could find on the subject of domestic inequality. After amassing 250 articles (and counting) from newspapers, magazines, and online sources, it was disturbing to recognize that, since women began writing about this in the 1940s, we haven’t made enough progress in sharing the burden with our partners or finding an answer to this problem that men could buy into. Same sh*t, different decade.

According to the most contemporary research, women still do the bulk of childcare and domestic work, even in two-earner families in which both parents work full-time and sometimes even when the mother earns more than her partner. As if reflecting a mirror onto my life, I stumbled upon another study revealing that men who stood up for their fair share of housework prior to having kids significantly cut back their contributions after kids—by up to five hours a week.

Wow, even the good guys?

As I considered the vast research and literature, past and present, bravely naming and articulating this problem, I thought: OK, we know there’s an imbalance. But where is the manual with a practical and sustainable solution? Sure, it’s helpful to understand the breadth of the condition and its historic underpinnings, and it felt gratifying to know that I was not alone in this predicament and that plenty of women had been fed up and writing about it for decades. But what can we do to change it? I became determined to find out.

VISIBILITY = VALUE

Soon after my second child was born, we moved back to Los Angeles. I caught my breath as a mom and went back to work full-time. I formed my own consulting firm, the Philanthropy Advisory Group, to provide services for private individuals and family foundations. But even with my return to a paid job that took me to an office, I was still shouldering two-thirds of the work required to run a home and raise a family, a statistic I wasn’t aware of at the time but was undeniably living. I was still the she-fault parent charged with doing it all, buying the blueberries and masterminding our family’s day-to-day life while my husband—a good guy and a wonderful father—was still not much more than a “helper” rather than a collaborative partner/planner/participant in all that took place for our family.

Late one night, I was using my phone flashlight to find the outlet to plug in the baby monitor. Seth was asleep in our darkened bedroom and I was careful not to wake him up. But when I accidentally bumped my nightstand, upsetting a precariously tall, Jenga-like stack of books that came tumbling to the floor, he snapped awake.

“What are you doing?” he asked with groggy accusation. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

No, I thought but didn’t say aloud, all the invisible planning and coordination that happens when you’re asleep needs to happen before tomorrow morning in order for our household to function! In a flash, I recalled a YouTube clip a friend had recently forwarded to me of author Joyce Meyer reading from The Confident Woman where she details the endless work that “Mom” attends to before going to bed:

Wash the dinner dishes, set out cereal for the morning, prep the coffee pot, pull meat out of the freezer, fill the dog’s water dish, let out the cat, put wet clothes in the dryer, empty the wastebasket, lock the doors, look in on the kids, write a quick note to the teacher, lay out clothes, wash and moisturize her face, and then add three more things to her To-Do list for the next day. Meanwhile, her husband turns off the TV and announces to no one in particular, “I’m going to bed.” And without doing anything else, he does.

Frustrated and hurt, I crawled into bed. My mind still racing, I lay there considering all that I’d done over the course of my second shift—emailing Zach’s teacher about an upcoming field trip, lining up weekend playdates, scheduling the babysitter, registering for mommy-and-me swim lessons, and negotiating the cell phone bill with a 24-hour help line. Suddenly, our situation became clear. What my favorite childhood detective Encyclopedia Brown may have dubbed “The Case of Going Bump in the Night” would invariably continue in my marriage until Seth and I made some serious changes. That night, our options seemed limited. In fact, the only thing that came to mind was moving to a foreign country where Seth speaks the language and I don’t (an actual suggestion that made it into the New York Times). In this scenario, I’d kick back on the beaches of Ibiza while Seth, the only Spanish speaker in the family, would be forced to take on more domestic tasks and childcare communication. ¡Qué bueno!

I decided to sleep on it. By the next morning, I felt less tired and cranky and put off my late-night plans to move our family to another continent. Instead, I followed through on the plan I’d set with my girlfriends to do a local walk for breast cancer awareness.

CONSIDER:
THE CASE OF THE 30 CALLS AND 46 TEXTS

Some of my dearest friends, along with their moms, sisters, and nieces, met in downtown Los Angeles to unite as a community to honor breast cancer survivors, including some of our friends and family. We were covered in pink glitter from the signs our kids helped us make, and as we marched through the streets in pink leggings, chanting, “Not just a women’s problem,” it felt like a true girlfriends’ getaway. We all remarked on the palpable sense of high-energy sisterhood and female badassery in the air. That is, until the first text came through around noon: > When are you coming home?

It was from Jill’s husband, who’d spent the morning with the kids and was already “done.” As we watched her type back a prompt response, nearly every woman in the group felt her own phone come to life as a similar message appeared:

> When is the babysitter coming?

> Where did you put Josh’s soccer bag?

> What’s the address of the birthday party?

> Do the kids need to eat lunch?

The mutual experience was remarkable, and we began sharing each message as it came through. “Eat lunch? What do you think?” Suzy wondered out loud in amusement-turned-disbelief-turned-irritation.

As we laughed and griped in equal measure, I got my first call:

“Where’s Anna’s outfit you picked out? She doesn’t have any pants.”

It was Seth, breathless and frustrated, speaking in his porn voice. Again. “Well, I guess we’re not going to the park because you”—he emphasized—“didn’t leave me any clothes.”

Really? I’d quietly left them out after he’d gone to bed the night before. As calmly as I could, I suggested, “Try the dresser. Try the laundry hamper. And if you still can’t find any pants,” I tried not to snap, “put her in shorts.”

After 30 calls and 46 texts from our husbands and from the “substitute” women like sitters, neighbors, and mothers-in-law who’d been called in to rescue and cover for our husbands, Charlotte was the first to say what we were all thinking: “Maybe we should just skip lunch and go home?” She was immediately joined by Amy, who suggested, “I probably did leave him with too much to do.” Lisa shrugged and said, “It’d just be easier if I were there.”

And just like that, the same group of women who—30 minutes before—had marched together in the spirit of “courage, strength, and power” disbanded and returned home to relieve babysitters, find the soccer bag, wrap another kid’s birthday present, and prepare lunch.

As I drove home that day, I reflected on a line I’d read somewhere—resentment grows out of perceived unfairness. Darn right, it wasn’t fair! I was so frustrated on behalf of my girlfriends and all mothers who receive texts that require us to rush home or return a call to educate our husbands about basic stuff they should know or be able to figure out about caring for our kids and the home. The biggest problem in our marriages, it seemed, were the small details. As I pulled into our driveway still fuming, something new occurred to me: Visibility = Value.

In a bolt-of-lightning moment, I realized: There was another option to shift the imbalance of work in my home that did not involve moving to a foreign country or joining the 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce (which would leave Seth doing more, but I’d be doing no less). Rather, if I wanted to stop scorekeeping with Seth and have him “own” some share of responsibility for all it takes to make our life happen, I had to stop sneaking around in the middle of the night, elfin-like, silently and magically making sh*t happen. If I expected Seth to be an informed partner, well then, I needed to first treat him like one by making the full breadth of what I did for our family visible. You can’t value what you don’t see, right? And neither could Seth. And my girlfriends couldn’t expect their men to value it either. But . . . if our partners recognized the small and large details that go into keeping the ship afloat, maybe they’d appreciate all that we do. Heck, maybe they’d even volunteer to take a few things off our lists.

SH*T I DO

Like a woman obsessed, this lightning moment led me to embark on a quest to create a system for domestic rebalance. It began with a list called “Sh*t I Do.” From grocery lists and Costco runs to replacing lightbulbs and laundry detergent to making sure the bathroom has at least one back-up roll of toilet paper, I began writing down every single thing I did day to day with a quantifiable time component. Tallying every time-sucking detail was no small feat. For any woman who’s ever considered sitting down to enumerate every single one of her domestic responsibilities but hasn’t, let me say: I get it. I understand why you may not have gotten much past the inspired idea of letting your partner in on all that you do; the very notion of articulating the hundreds of small and large to-dos of any given day requires more thought and time than you have in an already time-constrained life.

So don’t think about it. Because I did it for you.

More accurately, my friends and I did it for you. After the breast cancer walk, I sent Jill, Amy, Charlotte, and Suzy the following text: > Ladies, remember all the things our husbands needed our help with that day? I’m working on a master list of all the sh*t we do behind the scenes that our partners don’t see, or aren’t aware of. Can you help me out?

Their responses were immediate and affirming. My phone started buzzing with texts. Within minutes, Charlotte wrote: > Great timing as I sit here planning Jacob’s birthday party—create invite list, find class emails, send Evite, book party room, order cake, pizza, balloons, paper goods, buy the favors, thank-you cards, what else am I forgetting???

Amy jumped on the text chain: > What about school “work”: volunteering in the classroom and PTA meetings, buying school supplies, creating posters for Student of the Week, managing back-to-school needs like new clothes and backpack, registration forms, requesting immunization records, setting up parent-teacher conferences . . .

Suzy added: > Don’t forget school pictures, teacher thank-you gifts, planning for dress-up days, securing childcare on half days, school closures, and spring break and effing summer camp!

Jill said: > Did anyone say “Make the lunches” every single night? And beyond school, what about medical needs? Wellness checks, flu shots, and being the automatic parent who stays home when kids are sick . . .

Charlotte looped back: > And here’s another: buying holiday and birthday gifts for the entire extended family.

Amy added: > And sending them on time!

On and on this went. My eyes widened as the list doubled and tripled in length as my friends contributed to the number of childcare and domestic tasks. I remember staring down at the seemingly endless list, taking in the sheer magnitude of the unseen, unacknowledged, unappreciated, and largely unpaid labor that mothers do, all of the things that weigh us down and encumber both our minds and time. I remember hoping that by showing this list to my husband, I was going to change my marriage for the better, because I’d gotten over a major hurdle that prevented nearly all women from getting this far. I’d begun to create a comprehensive list that makes the invisible visible . . . and thereby, quantifiable. (More on the evolution of this master list later.)

A NEW SYSTEM

I emailed my working “Sh*t I Do” list to my husband one triumphant afternoon with the enthusiastic subject line: CAN’T WAIT TO DISCUSS!! I’m not sure what I expected. Roses? A celebration? Grateful tears?

Here’s what really happened. My husband was pretty blown away when confronted by all that I did for our family. But not quite in the way I’d hoped. His first response wasn’t: “Wow. You do so much. How can I help?” Instead, he sent me back an emoji of a monkey covering his eyes.

Like, you know, just one monkey. Not even the courtesy of the full trio.

Regardless, I got the message—he didn’t want to see, hear, or speak of it. And that’s when I realized, beyond making the invisible visible, if I wanted to stop being the she-fault parent who serves as the chief family nag, and if I truly wanted Seth and I to rebalance our domestic workload, then I had to really put it all on the table. I needed to provide my husband with more context, in which every task that benefits our home is not only named and counted but also explicitly defined and specifically assigned.

This was going to be harder than just forwarding him a list.

I ruminated and soon thereafter it hit me: Lists alone don’t work; systems do. For more than a decade, I’d consulted with hundreds of families in my professional life by providing my expertise in organizational-management strategy. What if I applied these strategies in the domestic sphere by creating a new home system with delineated roles and clear expectations, along with a measurement of accountability? As Peter Drucker, management guru, always said: “What gets measured gets managed.” Preach! I began channeling Drucker when it occurred to me: By treating the home as our most important organization, wouldn’t my household run more smoothly? Heck, wouldn’t this work for every family?

I began to fantasize about what my life and the lives of all of my friends would look like if—in partnership with our husbands—we brought systematic function to what was currently a sh*tshow of family dysfunction. I couldn’t think of a couple out there who wouldn’t benefit from a practical plan of action to optimize productivity and efficiency, as well as a new consciousness and language for thinking and talking about domestic life.

A systematic shift is a tall order for any partnership, but given my professional training, I was eager to give it a shot. And guess what? It actually did work. Over margaritas at our favorite taqueria one afternoon, I borrowed a page from the playbook of every great CEO who seeks to inspire change within her organization. I outlined for Seth how we were both positioned to win from engaging in a time- and sanity-saving system for domestic life: far fewer explosions and less nagging, resentment, and control. Less doubling up on efforts and things falling through the cracks. More confidence and trust in each other. More levity. And probably more sex, too.

He was in.

GAME THE SYSTEM

Today, years after the “blueberry text” that almost ended my marriage, the “Sh*t I Do” list evolved into Fair Play, a figurative game played with your partner, with four easy-to-follow rules to be applied sequentially, along with 100 playing “cards” to represent all of the invisible tasks that go into running a home. The objective—rebalance your home life and reclaim your “Unicorn Space” (as in, the space to develop or rediscover the skills and passions that define you beyond your role of partner and parent). Task cards are dealt strategically between the two players in accordance with the couple’s shared values. No player holds any cards by default, each person’s responsibilities are transparent, expectations are explicitly defined, and both partners are set up to win.

If even a game sounds like more work than you have time for, relax—Fair Play is designed to be easy. And fun! Most important, irrespective of whether you implement all or none of what you’ll soon read about, Fair Play provides you with a new way of thinking about how work can be shared within your family, creating solution-based, sustainable change that you no longer have to think about.

Seth and I were the first to “play,” and believe me, we made plenty of mistakes along the way. But with a more equitable way to divide the childcare and household workload, we’ve eliminated breathless texts and “What should the kids wear?” phone calls. It’s revolutionized our marriage. I’ll rewind and tell you all about our journey from start to finish and exactly what the Fair Play system entails, including stories selected from men and women from nearly all walks of life, family configurations, and income and ethnic groups across the country and the world, many of whom have also tested Fair Play. Along with input from clinical psychologists, neuroscientists, behavioral economists, law, clergy, and sociologists immersed in the subject of invisible work, I’ve put the Fair Play system to the test. Although this book is written from the perspective of majority social identities and where the wife is doing more at home because that’s the most common dynamic, my interviews and conversations with working and stay-at-home men and women, co-parents, blended families, and both hetero and same-sex couples have shown that the Fair Play system works well in any unbalanced situation and can be rebalanced one partnership at a time. I’ve heard feedback like:

“My wife and I are both super competent at work yet we were a mess at home—now almost nothing falls through the cracks and if it does it’s not a volcanic blowup.”

—Mark from Toledo, Ohio

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“Before the system, it was easier for me when my husband was ‘away.’ I would rather do it all myself. There were less mistakes and no need to constantly remind him. And less disappointment when he didn’t ‘help.’ Now when he is gone I feel the loss of him as a partner in a way that I never imagined. He’s integral to the Fair Play system.”

—Melissa from Phoenix, Arizona

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“I truly thought we were 50/50 until we played and I understood all my partner does for our family.”

—Ron from Portland, Maine

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“Finally, I got the kick in the butt I needed to realize my potential beyond being a wife and mom.”

—Maria from Hartford, Connecticut

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“The system is eye-opening and life changing. We are a different couple now. Even my mother doesn’t recognize me!”

—Tom from Portland, Oregon

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“Your OBGYN need only recommend two things: folic acid and Fair Play.”

—Jamie from Los Angeles, California

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Now, if you’re thinking, I can barely get my husband to reply to my text messages. You want me to get him to discuss every detail of our home life? To you I say:

Absolutely.

In the pages ahead, I’ll provide you with language to thoughtfully invite your partner to the table and begin “playing” for fairness. Until then, rest assured that I’ve seen the Fair Play system work for couples of all variations—even those teetering on the brink of divorce. Besides, getting your partner on board with the system (not a list) is the only way Fair Play can work. And don’t you deserve a partner who values you and the relationship enough to play with you?

FAIR PLAY WILL HELP YOU LOSE

The mountain of inefficiencies at home

Scorekeeping with your partner and engaging in daily tit for tat

Serving as the default—or she-fault—parent

Feeling like an unbearable nag

Feeling disappointed and resentful when your partner lets you down

Burning out from doing it all

FAIR PLAY WILL HELP YOU WIN

A new vocabulary that will change the way you think and talk about your domestic life

A system that sets you and your partner up for success in your relationship and your parenting

A sense of feeling valued—by yourself and your partner

A sense of feeling empowered and capable—by yourself and your partner

More time for self-care, friendships, and life passions that go beyond parenting and work

Recapturing some of who you were before you had kids

More humor and levity

The gift of serving as healthy role models for your children