Hello, you sentient balls of star dust. Welcome to Struggle Care, the podcast about self-care,
and other things. I don't have a tagline yet, Eve, so I just wing it, and I didn't even think of one
today. Um, you'll have to excuse my frog voice. I'm under the House of Perpetual Black, so,
but I didn't want to miss this recording at all. I'm here today with Eve Rodzki. So,
Eve Rodzki 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 childcare for their homes and families. Eve Rodzki, it's a pleasure.
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, uh, communing in person. Yes. I feel that way too. I love that we have matching
glasses. Yes, we're matching glasses. Our hair is, we're, I don't know, we have the same vibe
going on today. And I love that 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, oh, 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, you've 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. A hundred percent. 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,
Casey, 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. 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 wear schedule and you don't do this. Yeah. Yeah. It's where the BBC
dad. Yeah. We're literally a toddler is like coming into the frame and you're like taking a
stick or 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 the pandemic I
do think has been helpful for women. And I think, you know, we don't give a fuck anymore.
Or these, 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. A hundred percent 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. 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 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. 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 philosophy of grace. And really,
you know, just for your listeners, you 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 gendered division of labor,
just how I know you weren't in your third grade. What do you want to be when you grow up board,
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 recently 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 fair play,
the most amazing humans are coaches and therapists. But I am, as 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 lot to tell them
the 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 gendered division of
labor. But what happened to me was my own life intervened. 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, 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 and my career.
And then the straw that broke the camel's back was the abandonment for 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 back seat 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 moody needs. The assumptions in our house
had gotten so bad. And I know as a kid, we learn that if you assume it makes an ass out of you and me,
but the assumptions based on my gender about the fact that I made less money than 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 for 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, Eve, 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, his
toddler transition program, breakfast. And I remember sitting there with all these other moms and
a couple of gay fathers doing patty cake 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 name tag, he said, it said, Zach's mom.
And that's when I realized, you know, these are the people that are going to 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 overwhelm and erasure at the same time.
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, 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 it 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 it 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, there's 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.
100%. Well, it is. And that is why fair play became a love letter to men because what I started to do
in my own marriage was try to unpack what was happening to us. And what I found out cases that
this has a name, right? It's been called a 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
in one study, right? So this is not about an individual man. 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 in 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
Zack's mom name tag. 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 TikTok. There was
just sort of word of mouth, you know, it was I had Zack in 2008 when like how do you expect
when you're expecting or whatever that book is. It 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 because I'm always the
one of us to do that. That takes an hour. But you don't have elf on the shelf and on here Eve.
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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 fair play the first half,
it became a deck of cards. Yes, it became a metaphor, but it started as a list.
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 stockings? And those are always the TikToks 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.
I love that so much. It reminded me of the, can I 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 this small story
because it's just reminding 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 I 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 this small story because it 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 it reminds you a lot of your TikTok videos.
It's 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 fair play
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 a system handed to you in a plate. It's also a lot of communication tips. So this couple
was 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 presence for the school. I'm the one who puts notes,
you know, in my kids lunch box, 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 told 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 fair play is 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 Marion's Majon 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 of
his 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 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 a dollar under the pillow. Richard told me that he would have blamed Amy
for not reminding him to put the dollar under the freaking pillow. That's their dynamic.
Post-fair play, this is what happens. Richard tells me he owns his mistake because he said,
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 at 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 was 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.
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 faults.
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. 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 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 really powerful about fair play 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. 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 resentometer 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 a thousand 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 that 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 it was so fascinating is that so many of these men,
especially the ones who ended it 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
casey, upload this for me. And they don't know why it makes people feel a control 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 going to want to live there. And that was the random assignment of a
task. And it's 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 get 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 isn't 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 spicy Dijon every fucking time. And so Eve, 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 the home the right type of mustard. Once I realized that that was the
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 are 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 breakdown was happening. So fair plays
all about rectifying that. 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 grocery store task, the conversation and what you learn 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? 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 this mental labor. She becomes more and more
frustrated at her husband and anytime he tries to insert himself, he doesn't see enough of the
picture to actually be helpful. So at best he does nothing at worst, he makes it harder and then
she gets frustrated and sort of nags him down and talks him down and now she's saying,
you didn't do this and you didn't 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 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 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 at actually it's about a
more fundamental message of worthiness which is that you deserve to reclaim the right to be
interesting wow can I take you on the road with me like here yes please do whatever you just said
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 fair play 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 the 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 state
home parents who you know the court premise of fair play as Casey said earlier is that an hour
holding a child's hand of 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 a society people were saying to me I
can't even get to the fair play 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 walker on 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 keep outside 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
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well I have to tell you one of my best friends is a 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
counter-cultural to a lot a lot of family and sex therapy do now as she was telling me you know
the common thing for marriage and sex therapists to do now when a couple comes in and they're saying
oh we want you know he wants it more you know we want more passion in the marriage is they try
to push them more together and say oh make date nights oh schedule your sex oh you know you need
to do this this isn't the other oh no exactly no and she and her partner had 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 at a 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 in awe 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 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 child care and home stuff and my career and child care and home stuff and 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 hat and it doesn't have to be some world-changing pursuit but I love this
stories in your book about you know one of them was it's like 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
man just to see her create these things and then she connected with other women about it and then
she started going to these little fairs and 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 schedule date nights
we want to talk about how can we get this woman the time and energy to go be a 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 them when 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
oh my god I love them I love them please tell them that they're literally they're the best that's
exactly right 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 pan 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 see 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 of the house I said you have the kids
I walked to the house I'm sitting in the drive-through line and as I'm waiting in the drive-through
line all the 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-through line and just walk into the night I had no where 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 had told her about this
little TikTok channel that I had and I how 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 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
and being like I think you really have something here and that was the process that I was in what I
read fair play 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 make it about equal division of labor I'm grateful that you took it 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 my god then I'm crying I'm just like such a beautiful story and like I said I
feel so 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 in TikTok 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 is 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 fair play 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 how to hold on to yourself in the face of those emotions
you and I had the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time you weren't 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 just went through a 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 on I wonder what Eve's
going to say maybe it's good maybe it's not you connect you had the we have the abilities 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 in 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 I love it well thank you so much Eve and
and if you're listening check out fair play you have an audio book as well 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 as we said that logo was expensive so that 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 awesome and if people want to follow you or learn
more about you where can they do that 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 Eve Rodzky
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 these 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 Eve thank you for being
here love you Casey I want to do this again absolutely
hey there I'm Debbie Reber the founder of tilt parenting and the author of the book differently
wired the mission of tilt is to change the way neural divergence whether that's having a learning
disability having ADHD being gifted autistic or some combination of all of the above is perceived
and experienced so differently wired kids and the parents like us raising them can truly thrive
on the tilt parenting podcast I get to talk with authors therapists educators and parenting experts
who are committed to this mission I asked the questions my listeners are most curious about when
it comes to supporting our kids and in turn my guests share strategies for challenges out of the box
ideas for navigating school best practices for therapies tips for advocating and so many thoughtful
insights on what it really takes to help our kids grow up feeling seen and respected so they can
create awesome lives for themselves I know that raising a differently wired kid can feel overwhelming
and isolating but I promise you you are not alone and it can feel so much better if you're on this
parenting journey come listen to tilt parenting together we can shift this paradigm and show up for
our exceptional kids with hope possibility enjoy