00:00:01 - Christine Michel Carter

Well, if you didn't know, we are here on The Work-Life Equation podcast. We started the conversation even before we started rolling. I think that that means it's going to be a good episode. What do you think?

 

00:00:22 - Priya Krishnan

I think it is.

 

00:00:23 - Christine Michel Carter

I think it's going to be great. Can I tell you, Eve, I mean, obviously, everybody, our previous guests were excited for you to come up to the podcast. It was crazy. We had Paul, we had Deborah, we had Indra, and we had mentioned, like, some of the guests we had, and folks were excited to hear you. Not even excited to be on the podcast, but also excited to hear you and be on the podcast.

 

00:00:48 - Eve Rodsky

Well, I felt the same way about you, Christine. You're, like, famous in my LinkedIn.

 

00:00:52 - Christine Michel Carter

Oh, my gosh. I don't have a Wheaties box.

 

00:00:55 - Eve Rodsky

Yes, we're going to get you a Wheaties box. And Priya, thank you so much also for using your agency and your voice to have these amazing conversations. I got to listen to some yesterday, and I think you're doing something special, the two of you.

 

00:01:11 - Priya Krishnan

Thank you so much. Yeah, I have this old thing of life doesn't give you a handbook for when you're entering the workforce, when you're getting married, and when you have children. But with fair play, I found too.

 

00:01:24 - Eve Rodsky

Yay. Thank you.

 

00:01:25 - Priya Krishnan

So I was so excited to have the conversation because I had this whole thing of, like, I use this and I'm meeting the person who created it.

 

00:01:32 - Eve Rodsky

Thank you. Thank you.

 

00:01:34 - Christine Michel Carter

So housekeeping. Housekeeping. Because in the event that we have new podcast listeners, I do want to make sure that they know they're listening to The Work-Life Equation Podcast, a Bright Horizons podcast, the only podcast featuring candid, conversations, stories and strategies from corporate leaders, public figures, everyday heroes, and she-roes like Eve, who are putting the pieces together to make life work. I am one of your hosts, Christine Michel Carter.

 

00:02:01 - Priya Krishnan

And I'm Priya Krishnan.

 

00:02:03 - Christine Michel Carter

Priya, how have you been with this first trip to LA. Folks don't know this, but this is the first time we've taped together.

 

00:02:12 - Priya Krishnan

And I was telling Christine and Nolan earlier today that I live in Boston, and last night it was raining, and then here today, it was a beautiful, sunny day, and I was like, “why am living on the east coast?” So thank you for having us here. And it's lovely because we both are meeting for the first time, even though we've taped several times.

 

00:02:32 - Christine Michel Carter

And our guest today is Eve. Eve Rodsky, multiple author. I was saying that the quote from me that turned me into a stand, I'm going to read it. “A lot of the mom brain is just toxic stress because of how much we're carrying”. I think that it was because you curse. And I have with my book Mom AF – I love it. I love it. But the rest of the quote goes, “because of how much we are carrying and because of how much cognitive labor we're doing.” So I think that we were more than thrilled, more than honored to come to your office to see your Wheaties box, to see this incredible wallpaper. Tell us about the wallpaper.

 

00:03:09 - Eve Rodsky

So I'm going to have you sign it on the way out. You'll be my first inaugural signers. So my dream was to have a wallpaper of unicorns. It was actually harder to find unicorn wallpaper that didn't look like it just belonged in Adam, my daughter's bedroom. So I wanted to have a little bit of a classy unicorn vibe. So I found this really beautiful wallpaper that has white horses that I think we could turn into unicorn. So my dream was you being my inaugural signers for anybody who comes to the office. Powerful women that I love. You can leave your mark by taking a gold sharpie. So hopefully we will definitely do this. Hopefully we can film it. And then you make your own unicorn and then you sign it so that Everybody becomes their own unicorn in the office. So that's why the wallpaper is what it is.

 

00:03:57 - Christine Michel Carter

Oh, I love it. I want to make sure Rashma, if you're listening and watching, because she's a friend, too, make sure that you do it.

 

00:04:04 - Eve Rodsky

You come down here and, yes, please come to LA. And you can sign the unicorn. You can add a horn to the lion, whatever you want to do.

 

00:04:16 - Christine Michel Carter

Good. Because someone told me my headshot looks like a lion, and I take that because I want to be the mother of lion. I want to be a lion.

 

00:04:23 - Eve Rodsky

I love it.

 

00:04:23 - Christine Michel Carter

I love it. We usually have a “Here We Go” moment on our podcast, which is supposed to be the conversation that you have with your children over the dinner table. But when's the last time you even had dinner, right, exactly. At the dinner table with the kids. So the here we go is the moment. It's like, oh, here we go. I'm going to have to explain this to my kid. How do I do that as a parent? How do I have this adult conversation with a child? For me, the moment was about chores and the importance of chores, right. Which I thought you could just relate to so beautifully. With my daughter, she wants me to pay her through the green light, her allowance, but literally does nothing around the house. And now she wants to work for me. And I'm like, how much are you really going to work for me when you can't Even handle the household responsibilities outside of the job? So that's the struggle that I'm having is not taking on the load in my house Even as a single mom and having the kids understand that they're a part of it.

 

00:05:20 - Eve Rodsky

Yes.

 

00:05:21 - Priya Krishnan

I'm a forced single mom. Sanjay, my husband lives in India, and I have two teenage boys at home and we have the same conversation around chores, but you don't want a cranky mum in the morning. I don't want to see a kitchen sink that's full of dishes. So we're all better off if I get up sooner. So let's figure out a process by which we're signing up for things that make us all have the first 20 minutes of the day before we head off into our respective and it's been constructive because they sign up for things and they just sort of say, okay, got it. I'll solve the dishwasher. I will do the clothes, you do the folding and the sorting, because I have OCD around whites and colors. But we've got a process that's gone on and I think it's been a negotiation, but we've gotten there and feels good.

 

00:06:08 - Christine Michel Carter

Oh, we're going to have to talk about that. Yes, because I'm not where she is. So we need to talk about why I'm not where she is.

 

00:06:13 - Priya Krishnan

Yeah, maybe they're older.

 

00:06:15 - Eve Rodsky

Oh, gosh.

 

00:06:16 - Christine Michel Carter

My goodness. So for our listeners who may not know your story, can you tell us about how your marriage was changed because of Blueberries?

 

00:06:26 - Eve Rodsky

My gosh, Seth, my husband, who I'm still married to by the way, I think that's important. He keeps saying, I wish I didn't write this Blueberries text ten years ago. But then again, my wife wrote a book about me that portrays me in a terrible light, and so it got us to fairness in the home. So he's pretty funny about it. But about a decade ago, I was probably at the lowest point in my life where I sort of realized that the lie that especially Gen X women were told was unraveling, this idea that we could be at anything we wanted to be. Because I think we forgot the second part of that sentence. You can be anything you want to be, but we're not going to prepare the men around you to accept the woman who you want to be as a partner or as a son or as a work colleague. And so we didn't finish the sentence for any women, and especially in my home, that sentence wasn't finished because Seth in 2011 sent me a text that said, I'm surprised you didn't get Blueberries. And we laughed because that blueberries breakdown sort of transformed my life. It was the first time where the mental load of being assumed to be my husband's smoothie needs fulfiller really broke me. He had been sending me texts like that probably for ten years. Christine and Pryia. But I just had my second son, Ben. So if you can help me picture the scene when I'm getting that I'm surprised you didn't get Blueberries text. I was the one responsible for racing to get my toddler son Zach at his transition program, which lasts like ten minutes in America, right, childcare? That's why thank God for bread horizons. But childcare, we have not figured out yet. There was a breast pump and a diaper bag in the passenger seat of my car. As I'm receiving this text, I have gifts for a newborn baby to return in the backseat of my car. I talk about how I just started my own firm because I was forced out of the corporate workforce. So I had this client contract in my lap, and Every time I was sort of hitting the stop signs, the pen would sort of back up and stab me in the vagina. I talk about that and this chaos that was surrounding me. And then on top of it, Seth has the audacity to send me this text that his blueberries weren't in my grocery shopping. And now that you know la a little bit, we don't take traffic lightly here. So the fact that I pulled over to the side of the road and started sobbing over this text meant that something was really wrong. Right. The presenting problem as mediators, we say, is not the real problem. And I think that day I was finally realizing that the assumption that I was going to be the she fault parent was a statistic. I didn't Even know at the time, but I was undeniable deniably living that women shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family. I sort of intuitively knew it because I grew up with a single mother who shouldered Everything. And my father would come in and out to take us to KFC once a month, and we were like, he's the best guy ever. I got biscuits and wings or whatever. Yeah. But I sort of intuitively knew that I was my mother's partner growing up, and so I knew what it felt like to see somebody sort of under the weight of having to carry Everything. But I was hoping that my marriage was going to be different, and I was setting it up to be different. And it was different. Christine it was different. PRIA until kids. And then Every single trope Everything that I thought about Seth, that we were equal partners, that he would step up to the plate, it was all collapsing around me. And that was the day, I think, that I finally started to be aware that maybe something was wrong in my marriage. Because up until that point, I really thought it was the weather. We had moved from New York to LA. And I was like, we're just fighting a lot because it's cold. Like, I had no idea that there was something called the second shift or emotional labor or invisible work or the mental load. Like, these terms that I'm now so familiar with were never in my vocabulary.

 

00:10:42 - Christine Michel Carter

But wait a minute. Even as you retell that story, you were postpartum, and everything that you brought up, none of it had to do with you as a woman?

 

00:10:51 - Eve Rodsky

Correct.

 

00:10:51 - Christine Michel Carter

Nothing biologically or physically associated. You were postpartum probably wearing a diaper.

 

00:10:57 - Eve Rodsky

Probably not in the shape right.

 

00:10:59 - Christine Michel Carter

You know, I know I have two kids. Not in the shape that you were. Pre-baby. You're going through postpartum, probably depression and anxiety. Many of us do. But even in bringing up that story. You didn't mention any of that. Everything was still about the external world around you. It's amazing that you didn't have a mental breakdown on the side of that road.

 

00:11:19 - Eve Rodsky

Well, that's the thing. I think we are. The fact that it's called postpartum anxiety and depression to me, is just another tool of the patriarchy because it should be called postpartum happiness. Happiness if you're weird, if somehow you're happy after you have kids. I mean, of course our bodies are changing, as you said. I mean, I was still pumping that day. Yeah. Our entire lives are changing. We know we have brain plasticity. There's all these things that I didn't know about in 2011. Nothing. The only book we had was ‘What to Expect When You're Expecting’ Right.

 

00:11:48 - Priya Krishnan

I know.

 

00:11:49 - Eve Rodsky

All I knew was my child was a jellybean. Right. How is that going to help me? What it should have said was like, hold up. Seth is going to do, on average, five to 15 hours a week less after every kid comes. Even if I had known that one stat, I think my orientation to how we dealt with each other would have been different. Not that I would have taken it on and been okay with it, but there would have been some understanding that saying, oh, wow, this isn't me. This wasn't my fault. And I think especially maybe now, thank God for you and this podcast and for TikTok and for Instagram. Social media has a lot of problems. But I do think it's helpful, because in 2011, the community I could get answers from as I started to build this fair play movement, had to be gotten through I don't know if that's Even good grammar. But had to be attained through what I call sort of the snowball effect of sociological research, where you call Proya, who then gets me to Christine. It was a lot harder to collect data back then. Right. But that was my dream, was to start understanding what was happening to me. And so after that blueberries day, I decided to watch other women, see what was happening to them and go to the library. And that's when I found out that this phenomenon of women shouldering Everything at home, regardless of whether we work outside the home, is not new. It's been same different decade since we've entered the workplace in the Industrial Revolution.

 

00:13:18 - Christine Michel Carter

Yeah, I'm a no shade. You're doing a great job with your grandmother's legacy, with what to expect, but.

 

00:13:22 - Eve Rodsky

We keep it real here.

 

00:13:25 - Priya Krishnan

I was just saying I lucked out because I had India's very conservative. It's very patriarchal. My father was a pilot. He would do exactly the same thing. He would turn up, and he would bring us these gifts from all over the world. And my mom had but she was a perfect mom. So I grew up just knowing that mom could handle Everything. And she stayed at home because my dad flew, and my husband had the reverse situation. His mom worked she retired when she was, like, 75, and she ran three hospitals, and we had the reverse issue. He would say, I want to help. And I'd be like, why do you want to help? And are you trying to say that I can't do what my mom did? So there's also this control, and I think a big part of what you wrote about was me letting go. Letting go and saying, he can get this, and he can make the same mistakes that I can make. So it was very interesting for me to read how I interpreted your book, but I was really curious about whether the blueberries moment Ever occurred again. You created the moment. You guys created a structure at home. But did that happen again?

 

00:14:35 - Eve Rodsky

Of course. It kept happening over and over again. I think the thing that was hardest for me and I write about this in the book, was watching it happen to other women.

 

00:14:45 - Priya Krishnan

Right.

 

00:14:46 - Eve Rodsky

I think that was hardest for me, because I talk about this day. That was another very it was a hard day for me because I was so aware I was so postpartum and so aware of the dynamics of my own marriage that I remember this Saturday morning where Seth it was one of the only Saturday mornings where Seth was going to have both kids by himself, right? A baby and a toddler. And God forbid I took a whole day for myself, but I thought, okay, I can go to this breast cancer march, and I write about it. It was downtown La. We just recently moved back from New York because I thought it was the weather, not paid labor, not the mental load. And we go to this march, and I have women that are you I have the Priya’s and the Bright Horizons. I have nine women with me that are so powerful in their regular lives. It was a stroke and trauma doctor with us, like an award-winning producer. And these women and I were there honoring a friend who had who had recently gotten had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but also a friend of mine had died. I love to march. My mother, as a single mother, didn't believe in any possessions, and so my birthday presents were marching, so I was able to pick a march in DC. We'd go through the papers together, and I'd take, like, a sack lunch, and we'd go down Greyhound bus. So every year we march for something. So I do love that camaraderie of what it feels like to have a cause. But what was so hard about this day and that I wrote about it was watching all these women at noon turn into pumpkins, like the opposite of Cinderella, where not everyone was married to a man, but the ones who were, including myself, started getting phone calls and texts from our partners. And I talk about this. Where's Hudson’s soccer bag? Did you leave me a gift? If you want me to take our kids to the birthday party. I'll never forget my friend Kate's husband in his text which said, do the kids need to eat lunch? That was my favorite one. And I think watching all those texts and phone calls come in, I vividly remember this day. Every single one of those women who are trained to use their voice in other realms said to me, it's going to be too late to go to dim sum and have lunch downtown. I'm just going to go bring the perfectly wrapped gift to the birthday party and to feed my kids my gift. And so that was really hard for me to watch because I thought, okay, well, these women can't use their voice, and I perceive them as more powerful than me. How can I use my voice? But I did make them stay with me for about 15 minutes to count up the phone calls and texts. And I talk about how it was 30 phone calls and 46 texts for ten women over 30 minutes.

 

00:17:37 - Christine Michel Carter

That's ridiculous. At an Event where they're literally supposed to use their voice. Yeah, they're voiceless. That happens to me. Next week will be my third city in three weeks of just doing work related events. And it's hard traveling away from the kids. But I do have those moments where I see another mother and she's on the phone and she's getting the text and the calls, and she's like, oh, but should I guess it's? The cynical single mom of me wants to say, I don't want to tell her what's coming next. Yes, I don't want to do it. I want her to learn fair play, but she could end up like me. And like, do I say something? Am I cynical in that moment? I get it.

 

00:18:15 - Eve Rodsky

And by the way, that was in my situation. My mom didn't want to get divorced. My father left. But the only women I could find with us at the breast cancer march and actually around that time that were in their full power were women who were not married. And I kept saying, well, what's your secret? I remember one woman said to me, well, it's just three words. Like, you don't need to go on this whole quest to find out what women do. It's just three words. It won't figure it out for sure. But the other three words were court ordered custody. That was it. She said for her entire career. Everything took off when she only had her kids half time because there was no guilt and shame. They were with their other parent, and it was forced. It was forced. The courts made her do it. So I kept saying, well, is that really the only solution? So that's sort of the mindset I was in back then, or E Pray Love, it out of my life. Which feels like a very privileged narrative. Right? Yeah, it was a big deal back then. I think you Pray Love was trending then, but I can't really do that. I had two young kids. Young kids, yeah.

 

00:19:24 - Christine Michel Carter

Right.

 

00:19:24 - Priya Krishnan

Yeah. Actually, when I was asking you about the question on the blueberries, I meant with you and Seth. And your process is amazing. It sort of deemotionalizes the conversation. You're sort of saying, here's what you do. Here's what I do. This is the invisible work that I take on. Even if I'm in Singapore in a conference, I'm sorting out the kids meals and I'm planning Everything, and I think Sanjay, my husband's, wonderful and is very, very supportive. But part of it was just me saying, look at all the work that I'm doing, and what parts of this can you take on? But old habits creep back in. They go back to, but this is what you used to do. So we would have agreed it works for six months, and then we sort of go back into status quo again. So we've had to revisit that discussion. That's why I was asking you.

 

00:20:15 - Eve Rodsky

So we revisit every day. We backslide if we don't revisit every day, every day, every single day, every night, we have a ten minute check in before we go to bed. And even if I'm up later now, because Zach, we sort of said, well, okay, he's a teenager, I'm a night person, so I'm sort of up with my teenager now. And so when are we going to do our check in? Because there's no time after our kids go to bed anymore, so we sort of sneak it in while Zack is still up in his room getting ready for bed. But, yes, we backslide. If we don't talk, at least we watch. It like, if there's like, three days where we don't communicate about Fair Play, we start backsliding, where my typical place to come from is what he calls the nails on the chalkboard, where I'm like, what? I come at him. And then his typical pattern is to avoid, to literally just I'm like, Where does that go? Hiding in our house somewhere. He's like, well, I'm hiding from you. And so those patterns come back. And that's sort of what's been really hard for me about the movement is that if I could tell you that Fair Play was just an organizational system for the home, we can bring those systems into the workplace like whether it's Trello or Asana or project management, because we have an expectation that when we come in, we're coming in with our whole self. We're coming in with to do our best. Like, I'm not going to come in to say, hey, Priya, what should I be doing today? I'll just wait here to tell me what to do. So we're used to trying to have executive function to complete a task from start to finish, but the home, because we have helpers and not partners. If you're married or Even with kids, if you're a single parent with kids, we have helpers and not partners. We're not used to having those conversations. So coming back to the table, communicating is a practice, and you have to do it Every day. Or like you said, Every six months or Every one month, depending on your orientation, because it's like exercise. I wish I could tell you, right, that I exercised once in 2005 and I'm fit forever. I wish, because I hate to exercise. But just like exercise is a practice, communicating about domestic life is a practice. And that's what some people don't always want to hear. They want to do the cards once and then never revisit it. But that's like me saying, go on your static bike, your bike one time and you'll be fit ten years later. It just doesn't work.

 

00:22:44 - Christine Michel Carter

That makes sense. But I feel like if Seth is listening, I want to be like, but you don't understand because I'm such a stand for you. The thing about it is, somebody told me this, and I don't like you saying the word backsliding. I'm definitely standing for you right now, and Everything you say, that's negative. I'm like, no, it's not true. But it's not backsliding. Because somebody told me that you don't know what it's like to be the mother of a 14 and a half year old. Now you know what it's like to be the mother of a 13 year old and a twelve year old. You've got that down packed. But you don't know what it's like when your son is going to turn 15, how that's going to impact your marriage or how it's going to impact your household. So it's not backsliding. It's adjusting to the new normal.

 

00:23:28 - Eve Rodsky

That's what I said.

 

00:23:29 - Christine Michel Carter

I'm standing for you. Like Seth, no, it's not backsliding. You guys don't backslide. You're adjusting.

 

00:23:35 - Eve Rodsky

Adjusting for sure, it is really an adjustment. And I think what's been so interesting about this decade long journey, I think, is just how many people don't Even acknowledge that communicating about domestic life is part of our humanity. Because even women who, again, I trust, who have wonderful voices that they use elsewhere, would say things to me like, well, I could never try fair play. Because five years ago we had a conversation about domestic life and it didn't work. In fact, there was a wonderful Facebook group during the pandemic that somebody sent to me because Everybody sends me all this stuff about domestic life. It was called the Reasons I Hate My Husband and Children During COVID Oh, dear. And so it's out of the UK. And so one woman posted in this group, it was like, 28,000 members, and one woman posted, if my husband dies during the pandemic, it definitely is not from the disease. It'll be because of me. So I reached out to her and I said, I'm a researcher around domestic life. I want to know, how do you normally communicate about domestic life? I saw your funny post, and she wrote she DM me back saying, oh, this is my safe space. I don't communicate with my partner about domestic life anymore. It eEver worked. And so I remember thinking, okay, so this woman, so publicly threatening to murder her partner in front of 28,000 strangers, feel safer to her than approaching her partner, saying, can you help me with school lunches? Could you own extracurricular sports? Would you want to be the two fairy this month? And so I think that that's how triggering this topic can be, because Everybody sees it through their own lens. And so, again, I wish this could just be an organizational system that sits on the shelves with all the other Marie Kondo or the amazing things about how to organize your life. But it's much deeper because there's so much cultural assumptions, there's religious assumptions, there's gendered assumptions, and so they all come into why we're starting from, where we're starting from. And as you said, it's not backsliding. It just is what it is. Right?

 

00:25:46 - Christine Michel Carter

Who, by the way, said that she can't even organize her own life. Right, which I love. She said you can't organize your life with kids. That's who's causing the crap around my house. Thank you, Marie.

 

00:26:01 - Eve Rodsky

Right. We're finally acknowledging what we were all thinking. Exactly. So it's very unsustainable. But I do think, again, the life changing magic of this work of fair play is not, again, about the short term of organizing the junk drawer. We said it's really the long term of what it looks like to have the life changing magic of long term thinking. And I think that's the problem. We're so in cortisol mode all the time, so we're going from one problem to the next to solve the next, to solve the next. And so women don't often look up and say, hey, what's going to happen to me in 20 years if I continue these dynamics? Will my resentment mean that I'm not in a relationship? Hey, what's going to happen to me in 20 years? Is the fact that I took a backseat to my career going to hurt me in terms of my Social Security? And so I do think I love being able to connect what you do. You both do so well. And, Christine, you're my favorite personality online, especially on LinkedIn, about helping. I think women see the bigger picture. And so thank you for doing that.

 

00:27:01 - Christine Michel Carter

No, thank you. I mean, definitely inspired by you.

 

00:27:03 - Priya Krishnan

So thank you, all of us. Have. The reality is each one of us talking about this and sort of normalizing this conversation. I keep saying this. The thing about COVID was three things that give me I'm a half glass full sort of person in general. One was the fact that we could look into each other's lives, right? So even as employers and employees, you talk about people not being able to have that domestic conversation. But Even at work, life and work is so separated, and you're not able to say, here are my caregiving needs, and this is what I need to do. The second was that people actually sort of, I think, understood what it took. So there was free time, and you're watching a football game. I would kick my husband and say, what the heck are you doing? And it's like, I have time. I'm watching a football.

 

00:27:52 - Eve Rodsky

He was, I’m up and you're down.

 

00:27:57 - Priya Krishnan

What is wrong with you? And how do we get things moving along? But the fact that it normalizes and there's a degree of solidarity in similar experiences and the 28,000 women sharing these experiences is incredible. So how do you actually create and fortify a movement like yours and say, okay, if you're able to have this public narrative and conversation, how do you take it back into the house? And I think you're doing such an incredible job getting people to think about that on a daily basis, the communication. I will go and tell Sanjay I love him because I need to do this once in six months and not every single day. I think what you put out I meant it when I said that it was a guide to my marriage, Even pre-children, but also post-children, just sort of saying, here, how do I become a sane mom? Which brings me to find your Unicorn Space, because how do you create space for yourself? Because I think if you're sane, your family is sane.

 

00:29:00 - Christine Michel Carter

Totally.

 

00:29:01 - Priya Krishnan

Yeah.

 

00:29:02 - Eve Rodsky

And I think that what was so interesting for me was and highly alarming were a couple of things happening, why I felt like Unicorn Space had to be its own book. And people say, well, how is a book about creativity and women's identity the sequel? Because a lot of people thought Fair Play would then Fair Work would follow after that, because women obviously are doing all the non promotable tasks as work as well. And that will hoping will be the third book. I actually just got a call from a woman who was like, I just needed to tell you that I'm a rocket scientist, and I'm being asked to pick out the Linoleum tile for our headquarters because I have good style. Right. So we have a lot of non-promotion tasks to handle in the workplace for women. So we need fair play there as well. And fair work. But Unicorn Space became a natural sequel because I started to ask again, the powerful women that sort of mirrored the women who helped me in the breast cancer march and mirrored the women who helped me create I do spreadsheet for Seth, which ultimately became the fair play card. And fair play is a metaphor, but it's actual physical hundred cards that represent all you have to do in the home. And when you hold a card, you have to do it with full ownership. It's not about 50 50. So why did a book about creativity have to follow was because women were whispering to me and saying, well, if I get time back and you're saying like for you, Eve, you started with extracurricular sports after garbage. I started with garbage first. But when Seth finally realized not coming to the Little League field was fair play, it was being on the 85 person text chain, coordinating two kids practices and getting their stuff from Amazon or from wherever and returning the equipment and then getting the birth certificates for them because they have to log onto some portal for registration for what they want to play. Right? And then figuring out if they're going to get training and what other coaches outside if you want them. And so it just became this whole thing. I realized, wow, from him just taking this one task out of the hundred I'm still holding 89 out of the hundred cards. Luckily, we weren't playing with a full deck. But out of the 89 cards that fair play represented, Seth took one. And even that one was 6 hours of my week back. I got 6 hours of my week back once my kids were both in extracurricular sports. And he took on Everything, the whole ownership of it. Then what women were saying to me was they were getting time back because their partners were coming into ownership, but that they didn't know what to do with the time. And that was highly alarming. What do you mean you don't know what to do with the time? Well, do I just have another kid? Do I work longer hours. And I kept saying and it was real alarm around fourth grade. So I saw it a lot with women who had kids in fourth grade. So that was about ten years of parenthood where if women weren't reminded that they could be unavailable from their roles as a parent, a partner and or a professional, then they had forgotten that there was anything outside those roles. And then the correlation of them forgetting that was they were telling me they were burned out. And then the correlation to that was those women who were holding and shouldering all this unpaid labor, even as they were trying to give some of it up, they were telling me that they were starting to feel sick, that the ten years of accumulation before Fair Play were leading to stress outcomes. That really scared me. And so all of a sudden, we had 200 women in our original cohort from 2011 and 2012 that I had interviewed, that I started to follow up with last year. And in nine years, ten years, almost Every single one of them was being treated by a doctor for a stress related illness, PTSD. It was it was insomnia, SSRI use, thyroid issues, autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto's disease, which I had, God forbid, not Even heard of cancer diagnosis. And then there were a couple women stragglers who weren't being treated by a doctor, but then admitted to me that they started to take edibles on the weekend to numb themselves through parenting, or they're drinking two glasses of wine a night. Plus mommy juice, right? Mommy juice culture. So Unicorn Space became very important to me to say, what is mental health for women? Is it getting my hair dyed? Is it the walk around the block? Is it the bubble bath, as my friend Pooja Lockshman talks about? No burnout for women is this idea that we deserve a permission to be unavailable from our roles? And so many women said to me they couldn't do that, Christine. I would have women close their eyes and say, picture your kids school calling. Don't pick up the phone. And women were telling me they were getting stress related responses just right when.

 

00:33:59 - Eve Rodsky

And I was like, Wait, you're just picturing this, right? So this idea that availability is part of our identity felt like we needed to unpack that for women's health. And so Unicorn Space is really a book about women's health and how we get to a place of real mental and physical health.

 

00:34:15 - Christine Michel Carter

It's funny. You said the court ordered custody was the three words that so many women said when my son turned eight and then shout out to the state of Maryland. I was able to leave both kids in the house by themselves. I didn't know what to do with myself. I discovered frolicking and skipping. Like, I would go on walk and be like, what is this feeling that I just want to jump around out of joy? It was crazy. I didn't know what to do with myself either. So I can completely understand where they're coming from. How do you turn it off? Or do you turn it off? Because we know that community is so important for women. So obviously you have a network of girlfriends, right, who might be married, might not, might be going through the same thing that you've seen so many women in the cohort go through. Do you ever turn it off? Do you just say, I'm not going to deal with that because these are my friends?

 

00:34:58 - Eve Rodsky

Or, It's interesting you ask that question, I think. I'm sure you both feel this way, right? When you're steeped in gender work, it's so hard to see when women are complicit in their own oppression, right? And that is really still very hard for me. So a lot of times at this point where this work has evolved, which has been really fun, has been into the health space. So, like, my dream is we're working with some really big health care providers right now to create a fair play health plan, to bring these ideas earlier so you can get your patterns right before the child comes, including Doula and all the maternal mental health stuff we have to do, especially for women of color. That's where I really want to go with the work. And so what we've done to sort of handle the complicit in your own oppression is that I've sort of taken a backseat set as like, stop being Dr. Eve. Like, you can't solve Everybody's problems, like, one on one. But we've now started to train therapists because that's really where we think this work should live, in people who have cognitive behavioral therapy tools, therapists, mental health providers, life coaches. And it's really important to me because so many women came to me saying that they brought ideas of fair play, like Priya was thinking about even before the book came up. But this idea that I want my partner to own something, I want them to be a partner, not a helper. And they were getting shut down by many mental health providers saying, this is not really what we do here. Let's talk about your childhood. Let's talk about connecting using I statements. And my therapist ten years ago when I was desperate and just had my Should I do spreadsheet? And said, can Seth do something? When I thought list would work before I realized it had to be a system. There's this woman that I love, who her name is Clara Bell talks. She's on Instagram and TikTok, but she does this beautiful job of sort of making fun of what the gender binary is and how ridiculous it is. And she does one with therapists that reminded me a lot of my therapists, where she makes fun of therapists who, when you come into their office and ask for help around these issues, says things like, wait, so you want Jaquan to take out the trash and put his clothes in the hamper? That feels very triggering to Jaquan, because that would be a lot of work that he's never done before. Right. That was sort of the dynamic of my therapy as well, which was, Why are you bringing all this to death? He works hard. He makes more money than you. This is your realm. So that's where we're evolving with the Unicorn space, which is really exciting, this idea that women get a permission to be unavailable from their roles. And the beauty when we get to reclaim who we are and how beautiful. It is to take that currency of time, like Christine, you did when you collect and what it does to us when we get time back, because it's so necessary and it's really the only.

 

00:38:05 - Priya Krishnan

Cure to burnout and use it positively, because your 100 card system, one of the things that we did was we took the 100 cards, talked about it. I think we're also at about an 80 911 split, but it's still 80 911, and it feels good. One of the cards that Sanjay took was the holidays card. And it wasn't just for us, it wasn't about gifting, but it was us planning our holidays, because that is the time that the four of us really get quality time together. And that's my unicorn space. So if I don't have to do the scheduling, I don't have to plan the holiday, I don't have to figure out where we're staying. And he's exceptional at it, right? So it's also the fact that he is really good at it. But the fact that we took that away from you when we go on holidays, just spending that time without having the scheduling nonsense and figuring out when we're going to the next hotel, the cars between cities, et cetera. That allows me to think and using the time and sort of finding that space, whatever your mind is, reading and listening to music and going on long walks, but Even those momentary sort of spaces to find yourself, I think, goes a long way in anchoring you at home.

 

00:39:20 - Eve Rodsky

And this is Unicorn Space. What I'm trying to explain to women is that you can up level your self-care, right? You can eat a pie, which was my self-care during the pandemic, which is why I don't fit into anything and I wear sweatpants all the time now. But baking the pie is sort of what gives you that mental health burst. You can listen to podcasts, but the fact that you're doing this together, this is what I call unicorn space. You were curious about what would it look like to sort of have a gender focused podcast that's also speaking to the next generation. You reached out, you connected to each other and to your guests, and then you did the hard part, which is completing, because I think a lot of women actually, I thought that curiosity was going to be the hardest part for women in the unicorn space journey, which it was. After ten years, I said there was a passion gap. Like, I don't Even know what I would do anymore when I frolic. But actually, just as hard for women were them telling me, well, I've excelled at work, so I don't want a unicorn space because if I have an activity like skiing, and I've never done it before, I'm going to fall. I have to go to the bunny slopes. I want to be in the Bright Horizons. Or if I do a podcast, what if it's not one of the top ten podcasts on Apple? And then I'm going to feel bad about myself or whatever. And so the idea of completing something which you're doing here and you're uploading it, whether or not you like it or not, or you don't like how you looked or what you said or how it sounded, you're still doing that brave completion. And so that cycle of being able to be curious, to be connected with others, and to complete something over and over again is really what a unicorn space is. And that's what I'm trying to encourage women to do, to up level their self-care and to say, yes, it's great to get a haircut, it's great to be able to take a walk on the beach. But what happens if you do something active that you've never tried before? Because that I can't believe I just did that moment is what's showing to have real mental health benefits.

 

00:41:18 - Christine Michel Carter

And I think that leads me to probably the last question I'll ask you, because we're both a part of the purely no grants program. We've given over $200,000 to women so that they could say no at work and have the opportunity to live in their unicorn space. Why is that so important to you? Why is being a part of the no grants program?

 

00:41:40 - Eve Rodsky

Oh my gosh. I think no is so important because, as we were saying earlier about fair play, that it became a cycle of a practice around boundaries, systems and communication. As we said, the system maybe that's easier to understand because ownership, we do it. Even my Bright Horizons Maja group has clearly defined expectations. You don't bring snack twice, you're out. Right? We can have our expectations laid out for us in a system. But the reason why people don't often adopt fair play is because boundaries and communication is what's hard. And so no is something we need to be able to communicate. But we can only do that as much as we understand our boundaries. And so the core through line of fair play and unicorn space was this horrific realization. I call it like my Keyser Soze moment. Like Unusual Suspects. I don't know if you remember that when I first take off the organ, I think I know who did this. It was this realization that nothing is going to change for us until we start to have a true boundary around our women's time choice. And boundaries around time choice are a lot harder because it's saying no. There's a context for it. The reason why we haven't been able to say no and why we both like this program, I think, is because we get to educate women about the power of reclaiming their own time. And when we have a society where women's time is consistently treated as sand, as infinite, and men's time is guarded as diamonds, and we've been conditioned since birth to believe that. And if you don't believe me, right, you just watch women enter male professions, salaries automatically come down. You could check out the health systems that still tell women that breastfeeding is free when it's 1800 hours a year of our time. It's a full time job. So when we've been conditioned that our time is worthless or like sand, then giving away sand to somebody else doesn't matter, right? Because you can find more time. So I think that's why I love it so much, because we can't find time. We're not here to mess with the space-time continuum. We're not Albert Einstein. But there's just a different expectation over how women are supposed to use our time. And God forbid we ask to be unavailable from our roles, society will start to smash us in there, right? You tell the school you want them to call your partner first. Guess what's going to happen?

 

00:44:08 - Christine Michel Carter

We're going to call, you're going to.

 

00:44:10 - Eve Rodsky

Be called anyway, right? So that pushing back, not just with your partner, but against Everything in society that keeps telling you who's watching your kids. I had a nametag at my son's school. It just said Zack's mom. So we don't Even have an identity. So the idea that we get a race and a race in our roles is why I think pushing back and saying, no, I deserve space for myself. I deserve time choice over how I use my time. And you asked me about Seth. That was when we had our first breakthrough. Not over him saying, okay, I'll buy the blueberries. It was when I was able to say, wow, this is not a relationship that's not working for me anymore. Because I see how you use your time. You have a lot more agency over how you use your time. And you're allowing me to use my time in service of others until 3 hours after you go to bed. And that's fundamentally unfair and I'm not going to live like this anymore. That was the conversation that sort of blew the lid off things and we had to start over.

 

00:45:18 - Priya Krishnan

Well, in some ways glad that it happened because you're helping so many families find that balance. When is fair work coming along?

 

00:45:27 - Eve Rodsky

Well, it's interesting we're collecting data now for Fair Work because I'm really worried about those women, the ones I was telling you about who work full time and who are experiencing these stress related responses. And so we're getting to work with USC, which is really exciting on some cortisol studies of stress for these women, which is very exciting. And so once we collect that data, it will come out. But the beauty of Fair Work is that we're coming up with another 100 cards for all of the unpaid labor, the non-promotable tasks that women are doing in the workplace. And we're hoping that those cards will help people move from assumption about who does it to structured decision making. And we now know that one of the best tools to end bias all around in Every area is when you can move from assumption to structured decision making tools. And so again, what fair play is, is not telling you how to live your life, as you both know, it's not telling you what family structure to choose. It's saying that assumptions should not guide your decision making in any area of your life. And we can tell our kids that. My son last night, Ben, God bless him, my middle son, he kept interrupting me as I was talking to him in his bed. I said, you're a white man interrupting a woman. What is going on? Ben, you know you can't do that. Stop interrupting me. Well, you didn't let me ben, you asked me a question. You asked me what interest is, because he's doing it for a bank, a bank project. I'm an economics major. Do you want to hear my answer for what interest is or do you want to keep interrupting me like all white men have done my whole life? You are triggering me. Then let me finish. And so we have to keep having these conversations with the next generation.

 

00:47:06 - Christine Michel Carter

Obviously, you are a poster on my bedroom wall next to NKOTB and my unicorn. So obviously I know Everything that you have going on, but you have created so many resources for parents and for just professionals alike. Can you tell us, though, for those who may not be so familiar with everything that you've created, exactly what's involved?

 

00:47:27 - Eve Rodsky

Well, thank you for asking that. You may hear us mention cards. So fair play is an actual system. And what do I mean by a system? Well, what it is there's 100 cards, they show up in a book, but there's a playing card deck, if you're interested. They're also on our website. And what they do is they're representative of Every single thing that it would take to run a home and a family. So just like a regular card deck, there are four suits. There's home, there's out, there's caregiving, and there's magic, and then there's, sadly, a wild card suit. And hopefully no one is holding too many wild cards. That's like job loss or financial problems or bankruptcy or a death, God forbid. But what you do with the cards is you assess them first to see are they in your deck or not. Do you want holiday cards to be in your deck? Do you need to send thank you notes? So as a couple, whether it's a roommate or your kids or if you're married to somebody, whether it's a man or a same sex couple, really, Every family structure can benefit from having these conversations, one, about what you value and what you want to build and put in your deck. And then step two of the fair Play system is you allocate who's holding what card for what period of time, and you do it with full ownership. So if I'm holding the extracurricular sports card, then I am going to be not just bringing my kids to the Little League field. I'll be on that 85 person text chain for coordinating practices along with serving my kids friends for what they want to play, along with logging them onto a portal to get their birth certificate up and running. The whole kitten caboodle, which I call the conception of the card, the planning of the card, and the execution of the card. And that really is representative of fair play. It's not 50 50. The goal is ownership, and the goal is perceived fairness. If you are a single parent, you're going to be holding all the cards. And so then the goal of the game is to take as many cards off your plate by building your own support system. So you play based on your family structure, but the goal is to first decide what you value when you run your family. And then step two is to figure out who's going to own that particular task, whether it's a kid, a neighbor, you, and then you own that task with full ownership. Sounds good.

 

00:49:53 - Christine Michel Carter

So you have two books. You have Find Your Unicorn Space, which.

 

00:49:58 - Priya Krishnan

Is your second book after Fair Play.

 

00:50:00 - Eve Rodsky

Yes. So the book number one was Fair Play. Book number two is Find Your Unicorn Space. There are different entry points. My suggestion is, if you have a Sanjay, somebody who wants to help in your life and you're married to that person, start with Fair Play because you'll get time back easily, because that person's already a receptive person and open to having the Fair Play conversations. If you feel you're in a partnership with somebody or you don't have a partner and Fair Play would be too triggering for those reasons, find Your Unicorn Space is a perfect entry point because it comes at the whole world of how women's roles have hit up against our mental health crisis of burnout for women. So I think it's an easier entry point, Unicorn Space, because it'll inspire you as opposed to make you angry.

 

00:50:59 - Christine Michel Carter

It could go vice either way, right. It could empower you to have those conversations.

 

00:51:03 - Eve Rodsky

Exactly. It does. Once you have a Unicorn Space, if you're out there and you say, I am committed to this podcast, then guess what? When you have to leave, there's less guilt and shame. You feel like your mind is made up. That was one of my favorite Rosa Parks quotes. People asked her, how did you get to your activism? She said, well, when you make up your mind, it's a lot easier to diminish fear. And I feel that way, too. Right. When you have made up your mind to be that Olympic swimmer or to be an activist, or to do this beautiful podcast to change things in the lives of women, it becomes a lot easier to diminish that fear of what people are going to think about you or what guilt and shame your community will have, how they will look at you. And so there's a lot of beauty in coming at these conversations through the things that make you alive and make you you.

 

00:51:51 - Christine Michel Carter

So I'm going to use this book to read it and then tell Maya, damn it, clean the kitchen table.

 

00:51:56 - Eve Rodsky

Exactly.

 

00:51:56 - Christine Michel Carter

Because that's the fair play.

 

00:51:57 - Eve Rodsky

Exactly. The next dinner table comes exactly right click with Maya. What I'll say to you is, it's fun. Go on the website Fair Play Life, and just ask her instead of saying, you have to do this, ask her what she thinks is involved in any of the cards. So ask her, what do you think is involved in dishes? And then you will see her switch over dishes, and she's like, wait, I have to replace a sponge once in a while. I have to figure out how to put in something in the dishwasher. I have to figure out what a garbage disposal is. Do we compost? There's so many things around dishes that we don't think about.

 

00:52:32 - Christine Michel Carter

Very true. Very true.

 

00:52:33 - Priya Krishnan

One of the questions I have for you is, are you addressing this with younger people? Adolescence? I feel like my 18 year old and 15 year old could benefit from this conversation before they contemplate marriage or having children.

 

00:52:46 - Eve Rodsky

Oh, absolutely. It's so interesting. That executive function, I feel like, has been a buzzword the past couple of years. But here's a spoiler alert. Executive function just means you're doing something from start to finish. And that, you know, all the steps to get things one after the other after the other. And that's why Fair Play is so interesting. And we partner with Procter and Gamble. Don and Swiffer are trying to close the tour gap, and we decided that together we're more powerful and we're bringing this to schools. We love home teachers out there. Shout out to the home economics teachers out there.

 

00:53:19 - Christine Michel Carter

Don't cancel that program.

 

00:53:20 - Eve Rodsky

No. We're now bringing into their classrooms home equity. And so we're starting to think about what would it look like if we not only taught girls to code, but we're also teaching boys to care. And in fact, that the tasks of the home, whether it's childcare or housework, are not gendered, that they're just tasks. They're called adulting. And you can do things with start to finish. So that's been something that's been really exciting to me, to watch these conversations happen in the next generation. We have curricula for young kids in elementary school, but we also have high school and up to college. So it's never too late for our kids. No, it is never too late.

 

00:54:01 - Priya Krishnan

Love it when Tanya and I have these conversations minor once in six months. You guys are clearly much better at it. I think three quarters of the time you're scratching the chalkboard moment. He sort of covers away and he's going back and he's like, she's having that moment, and I'm not sure how to address it. So is he that good at communicating? And how do you get him to open up? And how does this not become you're having. This crazy moment, and it become EQ at one level. But having him open up how does Seth get to the topic when you guys are together?

 

00:54:39 - Eve Rodsky

Well, again, I think with anything, it requires rules. It requires understanding of how you typically communicate. So there are, in fair play rules for how to have these conversations. The top three, I'll tell you, that I think are really important, is to recognize that most conversations around domestic life are happening when emotion is high and cognition is low. Most conversations and this is now, after ten years in 17 countries, people report to me that they have feedback in the moment conversations. You left your distance. Who's keeping this up?

 

00:55:10 - Christine Michel Carter

I’m up.

 

00:55:11 - Eve Rodsky

You’re down. Where did everybody go? Right? It's all these very hostile conversations that happen in the moment. And typically the most typical conversation pattern I saw in couples where women were partnered with men were that women would get loud and say things like, all or nothing, or you're never doing this, or you're the worst person. And then men would in turn, avoid. So as I said earlier, all of a sudden, Seth was gone. He'd be disappearing into a closet. So that getting big. And avoidance pattern is often what happens when there's feedback in the moment. So then rule number two is you have to wait for it. I'm not just training women. This is not about saying, this is on you. This is a partnership. Fair play is written to women because we are the ones being oppressed by these issues. But it takes two to tangle.

 

00:56:02 - Priya Krishnan

Tangle, right?

 

00:56:03 - Eve Rodsky

And so when you're in a conversation, whether it's with your kids or your partner, try to avoid feedback in the moment. You can even write it down. I start to write it down, especially for my kids because I'm very hostile to them. So I'd write down, okay, tell this to Zach later. So step two is you have to wait for it. And you can only wait for it as much as you know that you will have a time to talk. So that's why those check ins are so important. So it's really this idea of recognize that most conversations are happening when emotion is high, cognition is low. Number two, wait for it. So schedule a check in so that you can come to that conversation when emotion is low and your cognition is high. And the third thing is similar to what you were saying earlier, actually Priya about what do you do when you're sitting there? So instead of saying, oh, my God, Zack my son, you never put your damn dishes in the sink. What is happening? Instead, you can start to have conversations about your storytelling. So you say, Zach, I don't know if I've Ever told you what it was like for me growing up when I lived alone, basically with my younger brother, because my mom worked nights. I was always in charge of dishes and oftentimes we wouldn't get to them because we had homework where I had to put my disabled brother to bed. So there were cockroaches and water bugs all over my house. And I feel triggered when I see dishes in the sink because it reminds me of what it felt like to be a child in a single parent household. I know that's not your experience, but that's why I think I'm always on you about dishes. And if we start to tell our stories, our why, then all of a sudden the chores and housework become our humanity. Because okay, I'll do it just quickly with you, Christine. Let's just pick any of the Fair Play cards. Let's do groceries. Okay. Do you remember grocery shopping growing up?

 

00:57:52 - Christine Michel Carter

I do. I remember it being a chore. And actually I now Even going through this exercise with you. It's funny, it's making me think about how scarce groceries were for my mother and why she took the experience so seriously when I was like, oh, I have to go to the grocery store with you.

 

00:58:13 - Eve Rodsky

It was your mom who took it. Was your dad in the picture?

 

00:58:16 - Christine Michel Carter

No, my mother was a single mom.

 

00:58:17 - Eve Rodsky

Single mom. And so do you remember what grocery store that you went to? Giant.

 

00:58:22 - Christine Michel Carter

Absolutely.

 

00:58:22 - Eve Rodsky

Where did you remember?

 

00:58:23 - Christine Michel Carter

Very well, I grew up in Baltimore.

 

00:58:25 - Eve Rodsky

Baltimore. We went to Pathmark. And I actually feel very connected to you in that story because same thing. I grew up with a single mother. And what I remember was that there were all the shiny laundry detergents that were colors like red and yellow and blue and they were like big bold things. And then we had to go to something called no Frills. It was always white and black, like these very small packaging. And I guess, why can't I go to this beautiful packaging? And then my mom started to show me what a unit price was that if you look at the unit price of something, that's how you can tell if you can get more bang for your buck for it. Because we were also on a very, very tight budget. And so what Christine and I just did was it took us that was probably a 25 2nd conversation, but I already feel like I understand your humanity just by asking about your grocery shopping growing up. These Fair play cards are more than just chores. They're our humanity and we were able to have a connection around our humanity. You grew up with a single mother. I did too. We both have experiences going to the store with them together and having it feel more serious than we thought it should. Not the fun thing that frivolous ways. You see it in all these beautiful Disney films of people like frolicking through the aisles.

 

00:59:33 - Christine Michel Carter

Right. The commercials. Exactly. Wow.

 

00:59:35 - Eve Rodsky

Yeah.

 

00:59:36 - Priya Krishnan

And the why seems so important, right? It is. The why is really important.

 

00:59:41 - Eve Rodsky

And that is it. And so what I found is that for men again, and we're sort of centering the gender binary here, because that's where all of our problems are coming from. But for men, what was so interesting to me was that women were reporting the number one thing they hated about home life was that they felt too overwhelmed and erased their identity. But men were reporting not that they feel that they hate being with their kids or doing housework and childcare, but that they didn't know their role, because anytime they try to step in to do anything, they were told that it wasn't right. And so then men were saying to me, I have an ego. I like to be right about things. And so Every time when I'm told I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong over and over again. And that's the communication I'm hearing, then why would I want to come back? You're telling me to come to the table for this conversation. You've already had me at the table for conversations. And what you've said at that table is, I never do anything right. I'm never around. I'm the worst father. I can't bring home the right type of mustard. How could I trust you with my living will? You bring home a spicy Dijon Every time when I told you yellow mustard? And then men don't want to come to the table. So I do think that we can interrupt this dynamic again, regardless of family structure, but especially in the gender binary, we have to realize that we are agents. As you've always said to Christine, I see that your agency conversations are beautiful. We are agents in our own life, and we can be the one bringing these changes. It doesn't mean we're not feminists if we bring this up. Yes, I would love for if settler brought it up, but he didn't. So instead, we can be agents of our own life and start to change things small, small, small bits at a time or lead to giant progress over time. Absolutely.

 

01:01:27 - Christine Michel Carter

I agree. I 100% agree. I think my takeaways for this episode have been, Seth, we love you. We all love you, because if you hadn't been so strong of a man to be able to be an example for a book, so many other marriages could have failed. So thank you. Seth, we love you. What did you take away from this?

 

01:01:48 - Priya Krishnan

I took away the fact that I probably shouldn't feel guilty about finding my unicorn space. This is truly our unicorn space, and I thank you for saying seeing it through to completion was an important part of it. I haven't read the book, so the first thing I'm going to do, fair play, was my go to. And now I think I'm going to read the book on the way back home. So thank you. Thank you for your work, and thank you for making all of this happen. I will hold up.

 

01:02:13 - Christine Michel Carter

Yes, let's hold it up. So aside from on a bookstore shelf, where can listeners find out more about you?

 

01:02:23 - Eve Rodsky

Well, the best place to go is Fair Play Life, our website, because we have a lot of free resources. So if somebody can't afford the cards or if they don't want to read the book, they can go on and see all the cards. They can click on the card, they can play with their kids. They could say, what do you think it means to plan your birthday party showing up? Okay, well, here, click on this card. It's going to have the 20 things that it takes to plan your birthday party. So it's a nice way to have conversations. We have a lot of conversation tools on the website. And then the other thing I want to just end with is metaphorically and physically, I hope we all put our own initials back on because back to that boy Ben, my middle son, he now knows. He asked me once, why do you wear your own initial, not me, on your neck? You used to have a B.

 

01:03:09 - Christine Michel Carter

These are my kids.

 

01:03:10 - Eve Rodsky

Yes. You could have used to have a Z, right? Yes. They're Even tattooed on their arms.

 

01:03:14 - Priya Krishnan

Oh, my goodness.

 

01:03:15 - Eve Rodsky

What happened to the necklace that said our names? And I said to Ben, you know what? Everyone, every single day reminds me that I'm your mother. Society reminds me that that's where my place is in this world. And so I think I decided for a little while not to throw out that necklace, to retire it, and to buy my own initial because I need to remind myself that I am somebody outside of your mother. And now my kids, every time they see anybody with a mom necklace on, they're like, take that off your neck. Put your own initial.

 

01:03:48 - Christine Michel Carter

I am. Yes, absolutely. I love it. It has been such a pleasure having you on The Work-Life Equation podcast with us.

 

01:03:56 - Priya Krishnan

Thank you.

 

01:03:57 - Eve Rodsky

I'll give you both big hugs.

 

01:03:59 - Christine Michel Carter

Yes, absolutely.

 

01:04:00 - Eve Rodsky

It was such a pleasure to meet you in person. Thank you.

 

01:04:04 - Priya Krishnan

So lovely to meet you.

 

01:04:10 - Christine Michel Carter

So with the conversation that we've had today about Fair Play and finding your unicorn space, what resources does Bright Horizons have?

 

01:04:18 - Priya Krishnan

So Bright Horizons has a lot of resources on the website. You can go to Bright Horizons.com. But the two that I would call out specifically are ‘The Surprise Origin of Women’s Mental Load’. We think about the cognitive load as much as you do, and part of what we do is to try and alleviate that and becoming a resilient parent. There's a whole webinar series and there's a recording which talks about how you can be a resilient parent. Be present for yourself so you can be present for others.

 

01:04:47 - Christine Michel Carter

Love it. Love it. You've just listened to an episode and watched an episode of The Work-Life Equation podcast. I am one of your cohosts, Christine Michel Carter.

 

01:04:58 - Priya Krishnan

And I'm Priya Krishnan/ And I'm so glad we met in person.

 

01:05:02 - Christine Michel Carter

Absolutely. Until next time, guys. Take care.

 

01:05:05 - Priya Krishnan

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