i added up what we spent on a random weekday a couple of weeks ago and it came to about $200, and then i added up a saturday where we genuinely didn’t go anywhere or do anything, and that one came to about $200 too.
in case you’re new here, i’m a working mom of two in austin with a full-time 9-5 that i’m not quitting. i’m 14 years into a corporate career and i say that up front because most working mom advice is some version of just stay home with the kids, and tbh that isn’t real life for most of us. we need the job, the money, the insurance, the 401k. maybe we are even gasp passionate about our careers. everything i build is for the version of this where you keep your job and still get your life back!
leaving the house costs you gas and coffee and lunch and whatever the place charges and a target run on the way home, and staying in costs you doordash for four people, which is not $60 by the way, plus the amazon order for whatever you ran out of, plus the four things that got added to the cart while you were already in there. same number either way, and i could not find one line on it i’d call a treat.
today it was the leotard my oldest needs for her gym camp performance on friday that i forgot to order, and grocery delivery for nut free lunches because i bought a whole thing of uncrustables over the weekend thinking i was set and then remembered everything has to be nut free, and a new lunchbox because the old one sat unused for a year and a half and apparently started growing things.
and then i looked at what each one of those actually was underneath. the groceries happened because nobody had decided what lunches were going to be that week, the leotard happened because i was the one who read the friday email, and every single line on that statement was me paying money to skip a decision that had never actually been assigned to anybody.
that’s the part that got me, because we had circled the money conversation probably four times in a year and it always went the same way, both of us looking at the same number and neither of us actually wrong. we were arguing about the total, and nothing underneath it had ever been divided.
so one sunday we sat down at the kitchen table with a script i didn’t have to invent on the spot, and we picked one thing, money. who tracks what, who gets a heads up before a big purchase, one place we both check. it took about twenty minutes and i haven’t been the one holding it since.
money, phones, intimacy, parenting, and time.
and here’s what made me feel less crazy about all of it. ana catalano weeks at the university of bath and leah ruppanner at melbourne surveyed 3,000 us parents for the journal of marriage and family, and mothers were carrying 71% of the mental load tasks while fathers carried 45%, and moms had 79% of the daily repeating things like cleaning and childcare.
then they ran a second study last october with 2,133 partnered parents, and that one is the one i keep thinking about. paid work and a higher income cut down how much physical housework a woman does, and they do not touch the thinking work at all. it stays exactly where it was. they call it gendered cognitive stickiness, which is a very academic way of saying it sticks to you regardless.
a usc team did a different version of this, 322 mothers and thirty common household tasks, and they split every single task into the planning and the doing. moms were doing 73% of the planning while the doing was much closer to even, so the gap in the thinking is bigger than the gap in the work, which is exactly the part nobody can see.
every single line on that statement was me paying money to skip a decision that had never actually been assigned to anybody.
and here’s the part that’s mine and not theirs, because i went looking for it and it isn’t in the research. all of these studies measure how bad it is. none of them tell you what actually moves it. the only thing that has ever moved it in my house is sitting down and saying out loud who owns what. not believing in an even split, not intending to get to one. saying it, to each other, on a specific sunday.
and chores sits underneath all five of these instead of beside them. we never actually argued about the dishes. we argued about who was holding the running list of everything, and that job never got handed to anybody, it just landed on whoever noticed first. that’s five structural problems in a personal costume, and you cannot script your way out of something you haven’t mapped yet.
when i built this out, the piece i kept coming back to was his side.
because every framework i found treats him as the obstacle. the guy who has to be convinced, managed, handled. and brad is not the obstacle, he never has been, he genuinely did not know what he could not see. so every one of the five in my system also names what your partner is carrying. the money pressure he doesn’t say out loud, the decompression at the end of the day he feels guilty about wanting, the fact that he misses you too and doesn’t know how to say it without it sounding like one more thing you have to fix.
that changes the whole temperature of it. he gets to see a system that has both of you inside it, and that’s the version where something actually moves instead of you having the same twenty minutes again in four months.
pick the one area you’re most sick of. just one. don’t do all five, that’s how this dies on a wednesday.
works in claude or chatgpt, free plan is fine, you don’t need a paid anything for this part.
act as a neutral mediator who specializes in the division of invisible household labor between two working parents. i’m going to give you one area of our life. your job is to surface everything that is actually running underneath it, not just the visible tasks.
the area: [money / phones / intimacy / parenting / time]
our setup: [both work full time, 2 kids ages X and Y, childcare situation, anything else relevant]
what usually happens when this comes up: [describe the actual recurring conversation in plain language, including what you each tend to say]give me back:
every ongoing job inside this area, split into the visible ones and the invisible ones (the tracking, remembering, anticipating and deciding that nobody sees)
who currently owns each one based on what i told you, and flag the ones where the owner was never actually decided by anybody
the three that are costing me the most mental energy for the least visible credit
what my partner is most likely carrying inside this same area that i may not be seeing, written generously, assuming good faith
one sentence i could open with that puts the system as the problem instead of either of us
be specific and concrete, no generic advice. if you need more detail from me to be accurate, ask me up to three questions first.
what it actually does: it separates the doing from the deciding, which is the whole ballgame. “packs the daycare bag” is a task. “knows the sunscreen has to go in the front pocket or it leaks on the crackers” is the job nobody sees, and that second one is the heavy one. the output puts both columns side by side, and the flag on the never-decided ones is where you’ll find most of your list.
hot tip 1: that last instruction is the one people skip and it’s the whole difference. it will ask you about your actual week, and what comes back after you answer is a completely different document than what you get if you let it guess.
hot tip 2: answer question 3 out loud before you read its version, write your own three down first. every time i’ve done this, mine and its list overlapped on two and it caught a third i’d stopped noticing years ago.
hot tip 3: don’t run this in the same conversation where you’ve been venting about him. it picks up the tone and hands you back a case file. start a fresh chat, plain and factual, and you get a division instead of an argument.
what you’ll have in twenty minutes is a real list of what’s running in that one area and who’s actually holding it, plus a read on his side you can bring to the table without it turning into a scoreboard. do that tonight and stop. seriously, the rest is for later this week.
p.s. three new things went live this morning. find yourself in one of these.
the dinner bundle, $34 for the 5:47 fridge stare. 20 prompts that decide dinner for you, my actual 4-week rotation, the pantry list i order off, and a sunday automation that emails you the whole week before you’re awake. plus 48 recipes with the grocery lists already built, 14 dinners, 14 breakfasts, 14 lunches and 6 snacks. you stop deciding. that’s the product.
the sunday starter, $47 for the sunday night where you already feel behind and it’s only 8pm. the map of everything you’re carrying in one picture, the division of what stays yours and what becomes his, and the 20-minute meeting with the words for when he says i do a lot too. four weeks of a 30-second check that it held, then you re-open the map on day 30 and watch a whole domain come off your column.
split the load, $77, everything in the sunday starter, plus the exact words for all five of the ones you keep circling. money, phones, intimacy, parenting, time. each one written out word for word, with a four-minute version for the nights you can’t wait until sunday, and printable cards for the fridge with the words on the front and the split on the back. and every single area also shows what HE’S carrying, which is the reason it lands instead of turning into a scoreboard.
the paid side of this newsletter is $7 a month until august 6, and $9 after. whatever you’re paying when you join is what you keep paying.
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