You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.
This week I am out on spring break. It’s been a while since we did a rerun, so for new listeners reruns come from Comfort Food, the sadly now retired podcast I made with my very best friend Amy Palanjian of Yummy Toddler Food.
This episode was called mealtime mental load struggles. It’s an interview that Amy and I did with Darcy Lockman, who is the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. We aired this episode on September 19, 2019, so you have to put yourself in the pre-pandemic world. It’s definitely a conversation that’s ahead of its time because we were still months away from the pandemic which really laid bare all the disproportionate ways that mothers, and really all non cis men people, carry families.
Darcy’s book is one of the texts that was just so foundational for me in starting to understand this issue more deeply. One thing I really like about Darcy’s work is that she does invite men into the conversation. It’s not just ranting—not that I don’t love ranting about straight men—but it’s not just ranting about how they’re failing. It’s also talking about how we can change the conversation and move forward.
One quick note I want to make before we dive in: Darcy’s book does focus on heterosexual partnerships, and therefore this conversation is very cis/het focused. If I were to do it today, I would definitely broaden that out a lot. I have since heard from plenty of queer couples who also struggle with this issue. Though it is also true that queer couples are often a lot more proactive about addressing and working through mental load divisions, just because they aren’t falling back on the hetero gender conditioning bullshit. So there’s obviously a lot more layers than we could get into here and I am aware that that piece is missing. It is one I would love to circle back on in the future.
Before we dive into the interview, a quick book update:
We are less than a month from Fat Talk’s pub day!
The first official stop on my book tour will be a conversation between myself and the great Julia Turshen. We’re going to do it on Saturday, April 22 at 3pm. This event is hosted by Split Rock books and we’re holding it at the Desmond-Fish library in Garrison, New York. I would love to see you there. You can pre order a signed copy of Fat Talk from Split Rock books. You can pick that up at the event and have me sign it for you there or have it shipped anywhere in the US. I will still sign it and personalize it however you want.
You can also pre order Fat Talk anywhere else you buy books, eBooks, and audiobooks. You can tell your local library to preorder it! And the UK edition is also available for preorder now.
If you’ve been like “I’ll get around to preordering that,” and you haven’t done it yet, I totally get it and I do that all the time myself. Now is the time we need the pre orders to come in because strong preorders truly make all the difference to the success of a book. The next few weeks are crucial. Thank you so much for your support and for everything you do to support the show.
Episode 88 Transcript
Virginia
Hello, and welcome to episode 43 of Comfort Food. This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.
Amy
So, we’ve talked about the challenges of sharing the mental load of meal times in past episodes, check out episode 15, 31, and 35. But this week, we brought in an expert who really knows what the research says about how and why this gender divide happens and we’re going to talk about what we think everyone should be doing about it.
Virginia
I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine and author of The Eating Instinct. I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about those things,
Amy
I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. I love helping parents stop freaking out about what their kids will and won’t eat and sharing doable recipes that fit into even the busiest family’s schedule.
Virginia
I am so excited to introduce our guests today, Darcy Lockman, who is the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. I am trying to remember where I first found out about Darcy’s book, but I mostly just remember rushing to buy it and reading it voraciously in about three days. I encourage you all to do the same. Darcy is a clinical psychologist practicing in New York City, also a journalist who’s written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other places. Darcy, welcome to the show!
Darcy
Thank you so much for having me, Amy and Virginia.
Virginia
Why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and your family, especially because I think everyone’s going to be interested to know what prompted you to write a book about all this equal partnership stuff at home.
Darcy
Well, when I tell you, I have two kids and I’m married to a man, I bet you can imagine. I live in Queens and I have two daughters. They actually started school today, second and fifth grade. I live with them, and my husband, and our dog. And I was really surprised when we had kids, starting with our first daughter, but kind of snowballing through our second, how much of the workload of all of it fell to me. It was hard to articulate and name.
My husband, despite the fact that we both work full time—we actually met in grad school, we’re both therapists—he seemed to be sailing through his life without much having changed. And that wasn’t the same for me. Which is not to say that he didn’t spend time with and adore our children because he certainly did and does. But his life was still going to work and then coming home and like hanging out with the kids. Whereas I suddenly had like 1000 new things to do every day.
And it wasn’t anything that we planned that way. We would have certainly identified as progressive and egalitarian before we had kids. And if it had just been our problem, I would have thought, Okay, what am I doing wrong? But I noticed that all of the women around me with young kids spoke about what happened at home in the same way. So every day in the early years of parenthood, I just found myself asking this question: Why are we all still living this way? This wasn’t what we expected. What’s going on? And it became such a burning question that I ultimately decided to try to answer it by writing a book.
Virginia
You’re speaking to a lot of our souls right now.
Darcy
I’m sure.
Amy
We talk a lot about mental load issues in the kitchen in many of our episodes. And in your book, you have an anecdote about making chicken nuggets that I’m sure will speak to a lot of us. Can you talk a little bit about why you think family meals in particular remain such a gendered issue and also tell the chicken nugget story?
Darcy
I’ll start with the chicken nugget story because I think that everyone has this chicken nugget story. We had been at the beach all day, my husband and my kids. This was not this summer but the past one. We stayed all day. It was a gorgeous day, and we didn’t eat dinner. So we’re driving home in the car and I’m thinking, okay, what are the kids going to eat? They’re starving, they need to get to bed. So you know, I said to my husband, “oh, we have chicken nuggets in the freezer. Let’s give them those when we get home,” and he said, “Okay.”
So, we get home and the kids need to shower off because they’ve been at the beach. My little one was five at the time, so I was helping her shower. My older daughter went to shower herself, and my husband went into the kitchen. So I assumed he was making dinner for the kids, because we had discussed it in the car. So about five minutes later, after my younger daughter and I had showered, we came out together, I dried her off, she was getting dressed. And I walked into the kitchen and my husband was just standing there drinking a beer and there were no nuggets in the oven. They hadn’t even been gotten out of the freezer. I mean, clearly, nothing had happened. And it wasn’t even like an elaborate dinner. This kind of thing happens all the time, wherein I’m the only one thinking about what the family needs. And my husband’s not a bad guy. He’s not a selfish guy.
Virginia
He’s not thinking those steps ahead.
Amy
I mean, my husband is not a bad guy either. But it’s like you are telling the story of my house.
Virginia
I was just thinking about every day this summer we would—like not every day but a lot of weekends, we would take the girls to the pool. And I was always like, “let’s eat lunch at the pool.” You know, they have like hot dogs or chicken fingers or whatever. And I was always like, “let’s just eat lunch at the pool before we go home.” Because I’m picturing getting home in a wet swimsuit, figuring out lunch, and he was always like, “Ah, it’s so expensive. Let’s just go home for lunch.” And I was like, I don’t understand how you don’t understand why that’s so much worse.
Darcy
You do understand why he doesn’t understand. I mean, “Let’s go home and you make them lunch instead, while I go clean up.”
Virginia
Right, while I take a shower. And we’ve saved $40 on pool food, which I get is ridiculous, but it’s aggravating.
Darcy
Well he didn’t pay you $40 for your time, right?
Virginia
Exactly.
Darcy
This is the thing. There’s all this unpaid labor that women end up doing. And it really adds up over the life course. And it makes a big difference to people’s financial lives. I read recently—I keep coming across this stuff that I wish I could have put this in the book. Women over 65 are twice as likely as men over 65 to be living in poverty and a lot of that is attributable to how much more time they have spent in their lives to in free labor.
Virginia
That is staggering. That is really staggering.
Darcy
We laugh about it, understandably, because this is our experience and it’s hard not to laugh, because we are living it—laugh and be enraged.
Virginia
Laugh and cry a little bit.
Darcy
But there really are serious consequences to the fact that women are the ones who carry most of this stuff. So, the chicken nuggets story. Everyone has that story. And it happens so regularly. And I think women remain more responsible for the mental labor of meals because they’re more responsible for everything. So I think it’s of a piece, I don’t know, a special piece of it. It’s one part of it. It’s just consistent across the board.
Virginia
And it’s such a big source of labor at home that if you’re doing everything, of course, you’re going to be doing this giant thing.
Darcy
Right. And kids eat three times a day. The lawn needs to be mowed, I don’t know how often because I don’t have a lawn.
Amy
Once a week.
Virginia
Yeah, like maybe every once every two weeks.
Amy
During the growing season.
Darcy
And if it doesn’t get done the consequences are not catastrophic. You can’t stop feeding your family.
Virginia
Right, the lawn is far more optional than the chicken nuggets.
Darcy
I got a lot of notes from men after the book came out saying, “I do all the yard work.”
Virginia
Yeah, I hear that a lot. Yeah, “I’m in charge of the outside.” Like the outside is not where the kids are most of the time. It’s just not where most of the work is.
Darcy
There was a great study that came out after my book came out that I wish I could have in my book, but urban men who don’t have outdoor work to do, such as in my family, we don’t really use a car, we don’t have a yard, there’s no gutter to clean. Urban men don’t make up for the difference in the labor they don’t have to do outside by doing more inside.
Virginia
Interesting. They’re just really living their best lives.
Darcy
Lying on their beds playing on their phones. That’s their best lives. I’m sorry, I do get really cynical.
Virginia
We’re not putting anybody’s husband, including yours, who has obviously been a good sport about this whole project, we’re not putting anyone on blast here. But I remember reading the chicken nuggets story and circling it in my copy of the book. When you’re talking about it in the book you wrote, “it was not laziness, it was something I had no name for and nothing I could hope to understand.” And that really struck me because it does feel like this opaque thing, where if you’re the person, the woman, who’s thinking the six steps ahead and used to figuring out like, “Okay, what do they need to eat? And when are we doing this?” and juggling all of that, it feels so hard to understand why the other person can’t see the same needs. But what did the research show you about why that’s happening? Why are men failing to see and let alone act on these really basic needs of kids needing dinner?
Darcy
Sociologists have really good language for this. They talk about how girls are really raised to be communal, to think about other people and their needs and concerns a lot of the time, and how boys are raised more to think about their own sense of agency, to be agentic, as they say, about their ambitions and their pleasures, and not think about others quite as much. So in that context, it makes sense that when in adulthood, you have a man and a woman living together, these two different ways of being are going to come together in a household in exactly this way.
Virginia
Wow, that’s fascinating. So it’s very much a socialized thing versus like, oh, women are just natural caregivers?
Darcy
Women are no more natural caregivers than men. We do make a lot of false assumptions about biology. Women can gestate babies, but beyond that, men and women are equally capable of thinking about others and doing all of this stuff. Even when they study the physiological responses of mothers and fathers to babies, they’re exactly the same. They don’t really find any differences. In the 70’s they started looking at dads, which hadn’t been done before that. And they did studies in nursery wards of men’s heart rate, skin conductance and blood pressure when interacting with their infants with their newborns, and they rose at the same rate as women. There were no physiological differences in responses. So the only thing that differs between men and women is that men take a step back in the presence of their wives.
But what happens is parenting skills are learned and not innate. So if men are always taking a step back, that way the learning curve is going to be much different for men and women. So women tend to spend more time with babies early on and then they learn more and then they know more. We make these assumptions about nature that are untrue. In fact, one of the things that I learned while working on this, and I almost can’t believe I didn’t know this before, is that men’s hormones change when they spend time in intimate contact with a pregnant woman. So there is a like neurobiological mechanism that primes men for fatherhood, just as it does for women. It doesn’t get a lot of play, right?
We have all these assumptions about how men are a nice addition to a family but really, children are about mommies. What what they have found, what neuroscience is finding, is that changes in the brain around parenthood have more to do with being a primary parent than with being either gender. So when they look at the brain activity of primary care fathers, it’s basically the same as that of primary care mothers. So again, it’s about time spent with the baby, as opposed to being either a man or a woman.
Virginia
That’s fascinating. So it really is a learning. There’s a learning curve and you have to be in there doing the work to learn this stuff.
Darcy
There’s so many things about the way we have parental leave structured in this country where men don’t get any, that the scale is really tipped in so many ways, toward the mother from day one.
Virginia
Right, there’s this whole framework.
Amy
I was going to say, and then the culture of mom guilt, if you are not doing all of the things.
Darcy
Interestingly, that culture intensified in the mid-90s, which is when mother’s labor force participation peaked. Just as mothers were achieving more at work, and more commonly in the workplace, the bar for what being an adequate mother was, was really raised. And Sharon Hayes, who is a sociologist, called this “intensive mothering.” She called these new standards intensive mothering. And we all know what they are, because we live them. I’m in my 40s, I was not raised in the same way, in the same environment, that my kids are being raised in, just in that parents were a lot less involved. We kind of did our own thing, which wasn’t bad.
But now what we see is this concerted cultivation, as it’s been called. All this attention being paid to kids, in every facet of their being. And while what parents are able to provide for their kids does vary by socioeconomic class or status, really that demand for intensive mothering does not change. It’s there, you see it in every stratosphere of socioeconomic status, the demands that mothers place on themselves and feel you have to live up to.
Virginia
Oh, this is really resonating as it is back to school time. My six year old is starting first grade and Amy and I were just texting this morning about trying to be more hands off about things like first grade homework and not being obsessive about all these things that I know it doesn’t even occur to Dan to be obsessive about. But I’m worried that I will look like I’m not on top of things if we don’t do XYZ.
Darcy
It feels very public for us, we have to be doing these things. Because it’s such a vulnerable thing, raising kids. We want approval, so this is how to get it. Be really intense about it all the time.
Amy
I think that that plays into how we’re feeding our families, too. I mean, we want our kids to love us through food. And I think there is an expectation—well, maybe this is just me because I’m a food blogger—that we’re going to make certain types of meals.
Virginia
I don’t think it’s just you. I think feeding kids is very performative these days.
Amy
There’s a lot of boxes that I feel like we need to check with every meal that the deck just seems so highly stacked against like reality.
Darcy
Yeah, I remember reading a lot of parenting articles and anytime there was a reference to food, the writer would be very careful to say like, “I was cutting my child’s organic carrots.” And I was so determined in writing this not to do that. I don’t write a lot about food, but I’m not going to say that I do anything organic or natural. I do eat that stuff as much as anybody, but…
Virginia
It’s a standard you don’t need to perpetuate.
Darcy
There is a performative piece of it.
Virginia
Well, and it’s this self fulfilling thing where as feeding kids gets more and more complicated and layered. If we go back to sharing the load with a partner, you’re increasing the learning curve for that partner who started at a disadvantage, not because not because men are disadvantaged in this, but because there was all this pressure for him to be less engaged. And now when they do step in to try to do things, it’s like, no, you’re doing it wrong. Like there’s that whole like piece of it, right? Where we’ve made it so complicated.
Darcy
Yeah, except, I like to stay away from—and I know you’re not meaning to do this—the mother blaming thing. You know, “we’ve made it so complicated, we tell them they’re not doing it right.” There is that concept, of course. I don’t mean to say It doesn’t exist. The name for it—again, sociologists have all these great words—is maternal gatekeeping. The idea that women keep men out by tell them telling them they’re not doing it good enough.
Virginia
Right. I was very interested in how you articulated this in the book, say more about this.
Darcy
There’s this term maternal gatekeeping and it’s about women criticizing their husbands and so their husbands take a step back, because they don’t want to be criticized, and then the mother ends up doing it all. When I’ve had casual conversations with people about this topic, and especially before the book came out, I definitely had people say to me, “Well, women are just too picky and so men just back off because the women are so critical,” right? Because it’s like, let’s just keep blaming women for everything.
I interviewed women for the book, who would say to me, “That makes me so mad because my husband, when I’m out, will let our our toddler stay up till 10 o’clock. And when when I say to him, ‘What were you thinking?’ He says to me, "‘Well, he said he wasn’t tired.’” And obviously, that’s not the way that you can interact with a four year old. You tell them when it’s bedtime, you don’t wait until they say they’re tired because it’s going to be midnight. But she said to me, “If I am critical of that with him, am I being a shrew? Or am I being a reasonable parent?” And the answer, of course, is always that I’m a shrew, because women are not allowed to comment without getting put in this kind of bucket of maternal gatekeeping, I suppose.
One of the men who I interviewed for the book, a sociologist, would say that a man would say to him, “Well, my wife says, I don’t vacuum good enough so I just don’t do it anymore.” And I was nodding along during this interview. And then Michael Kimmel, the academic, says to me, “I say to him, ‘if you were working on a report at work, and your colleagues said, this isn’t up to par, would you say to them, Well, I’m just never going to do it any more then?’ That’s not the way you work on a team.”
If you and your wife have different ideas about what what is acceptable, you have to come to an agreement about what the standards are. So men sometimes back out of work by saying, “Well, I don’t do it well enough for you so you’re just going to have to do it.” And that’s actually one of the strategies that’s been identified that men use as a way to get themselves out of having to do labor in the home.
Virginia
And make women feel guilty in the process.
Darcy
Like, “you’re such a nag for asking me to take out the garbage,” is really a story about a man shirking responsibility. Like, why is the nag the bad guy in that story?
Virginia
Why is she even having to ask?
Darcy
Why isn’t the person who isn’t behaving like an adult in their own home the one who’s taken to task? And misogyny has always answered that question.
Amy
So how do you think about these things that we have to do every day to take care of our families, when one of the parents actively enjoys something more than the other? This isn’t really true in my house, but say, I really, really love cooking, and my husband really, really doesn’t. How do you divide that and feel like, you’re not just doing everything?
Virginia
Because you aren’t going to really, really love it when you’ve done it seven nights in a row.
Darcy
I think that’s such an individual decision. It’s a good question. If you’re going to think about how many hours everyone is spending on labor, you might say, “well, I’m the cook of our family. Why don’t you be the launderer of our family?” or something. My husband and I actually tried that because he’s a horrible cook, for lack of experience more than anything else, but for him to catch up to where I am is taking much too long and I don’t like jarred spaghetti sauce. So he started doing the laundry instead and that seemed fair to both of us.
Though I do have a friend, a male friend, who said to me, “I know this isn’t the right thing to say but I’m going to say it to you anyway,” because he does all the laundry, too, because his wife loves to cook. He’s like, “Jenny loves to cook and I don’t love to do laundry, so it’s still kind of not fair to me.” So, both people’s feelings of fairness, I suppose, need to be addressed. But I think whatever works for people is fine.
There’s a couple of sociologists wrote a book in which they say, “equality is not so much an endpoint as a process.” And I think that really sums it up nicely because it’s a process of discussing how do we each feel about what our responsibilities are. And if either of us is unhappy, we really need to find something that works a little bit better. So whatever people want to negotiate is certainly fine. I mean, some people want the wife to do everything and the man to do nothing. There are traditional couples who live that way and if everyone’s satisfied, great.
Virginia
I don’t think there’s a human out there who loves cleaning toilets, but someone has to clean the toilets. So, there’s always going to be that balance of like, maybe he does the laundry, but doesn’t love it, but she is probably doing other tasks that she doesn’t love, even if she does love the cooking. Like, there’s that trade. It’s nice that we can take pleasure in some of the domestic work. Nobody’ is going to love it all.
Darcy
There’s a lot of negotiation and just paying attention. The couples I found who had achieved the most success in terms of both feeling comfortable with what each was doing were really on top of the idea that sexism was going to seep into their relationship if they weren’t careful to really talk a lot about how they were feeling about this stuff. Because it is a big issue in marriage. It’s actually the third cited reason for divorce after infidelity and growing apart.
Virginia
Wow, yeah, that’s staggering.
This is building on what you’re saying about not blaming women for maternal gatekeeping, but at the same time, it does feel like there’s this real push/pull here. Most of what we need to happen is for men to step up and do more and engage with this issue, for sure, but there is also a degree to which women could be stepping down in some ways and letting go or at least prioritizing their own needs above this need to serve everyone else in the household.
We talked about this a few months ago, because after I read your book and came to you at a party and was like, “Okay, I have questions.” There was this thing that happened between me and my husband, who I should say, is really, really,very much a shared parent and in this with me 50/50 and in a big way. But there was a day where we both recognized the societal sexism seeping into our lives. Which was, I was really horrified when he chose to take a nap on an afternoon when we had childcare. I felt like this was so self indulgent, that he would nap when our children were being cared for by another person. And he was like, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I had paid a responsible person to watch my children, I had a free afternoon, I took a nap.”
You really helped me realize that wasn’t a situation where he needed to be more like me and feel like if he’s not with the kids, he has to be doing 97 productive things at all times. In fact, I should feel more permission to take self care for myself. I could also take the nap. In the book you called this like male entitlement versus female unentitlement. I would love for you to explain that distinction and talk a little more about why moms can be a little more entitled sometimes.
Darcy
Yeah. Women today, working mothers today, spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms of the 70’s.
Virginia
We’re doing too much.
Darcy
And clearly there are still only 24 hours a day. So what the research has found is that women accomplish this by cutting back on leisure time, self care and sleep. Your husband isn’t cutting back on his sleep.
Virginia
No, or his leisure time.
Darcy
And I know, like, on a Saturday, the kids will be playing or whatever and my husband would be lying in our bed, which is his favorite place in the world. And he’ll be like, “come snuggle with me.” And I’ll be like, “are you kidding me? I have like 300 things I have to get done while the kids are napping.” And then I’m annoyed with him because he’s so happy to just lie on the bed and do nothing.
So it’s really hard to strike a balance because there are 25 things that need to be done. But I think women do need to be more self indulgent in that way. I could. But it’s hard for me to relax when there are 25 things that need to be done because there isn’t infinite time to get them done.
I don’t want to, as you say, rag on my husband in particular, but if he were more on top of those things, I would have less things on my list. And then maybe I would feel more comfortable lying down for a little bit with him on a Saturday afternoon. So I think maybe the same thing is true. I remember when we had that discussion, and maybe I didn’t give enough credence to the fact that him doing more might allow you to feel more comfortable to nap. A family is a unit and a system, right? So there’s that.
But yes, women do feel less entitled to pursuit of their own pleasure when their children’s needs are in the air.
Virginia
That was a situation where the children’s needs were being fully met, like in that hour.
Darcy
But I assume there were lots of other things around the house that that needed to be done.
Virginia
There could have been a load of laundry moved along but nothing was at a crisis point that particular day. I think that’s exactly the difference we’re talking about where, for women, it’s much harder to feel like you can relax even when things are basically done. There’s an endless list that we could be working through.
Darcy
Also, there’s this invisible sense—this just happened in our house—this invisible sense about who’s in charge of what. We got a puppy in October. It was after I finished writing the book. My kids were so eager for me to finish so we could finally get this puppy. So we got the puppy. And I said to my husband, “you’re in charge of veterinary care. That’s on you.” Because, you know, we’re trying to divide things and it’s easy for me now to feel entitled to give him stuff because I still do more. So I was like, “yes, you’re on vet.” So we ran out of heartworm medication a few months ago, and I didn’t tell him and I knew he didn’t know. But he said to me last night, “has she not been on our heartworm medication?” And I was thinking, but you’re on vet. But there was this assumption that I was going to tell him when it ran out.
Virginia
But then that’s not him being on the vet.
Darcy
And we had this discussion about it last night, and we both felt in this discussion like I had dropped a ball. This is the mental load stuff, right? It’s so assumed that women are going to bear it. Like “I’m vet” might be him showing up to the vet once I’ve figured out that she needs the medicine and made the appointment.
But there’s a lot of interesting mental load research about men and women’s assumptions about who is ultimately responsible. And I’ll tell you what the research has found, which is that men and women both hold women responsible for the mental load. When men are carrying the mental load, it’s usually around reminding women of things they have said they will do for the man. Like “you said you were going to buy me a new jacket.”
Virginia
That’s helpful.
Darcy
There’s so much research on all this stuff. It was really a fascinating field to dig into. If depressing, also.
Amy
Maybe we can try to give our listeners some tips that you’ve found from talking to couples who are happy with their balance. This doesn’t even have to be specific to food or feeding a family, but just are there common denominators among couples who feel happy with the way that the load is being shared?
Darcy
It’s a very good question and the answer is yes. There is one absolute common denominator. Both members of the couple understand that without close attention, things are going to fall in a certain way and both members of the couple have articulated to each other very explicitly, that they are invested in living in an egalitarian relationship. It really does take exactly that much attention.
I was on Twitter last year and a woman posted an article by Jessica Valenti and the headline was “Kids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers — Men Do”. And the article said the reason that women are aren’t getting ahead as they might is that their responsibilities at home are outsized because men’s are undersized.
Anyway, this woman posted this article and she wrote, “this is true, but it doesn’t have to be this way.” So I messaged her, I said, “Why is it not this way for you?” And she wrote back and said, “Because I married a Swede,” which was kind of funny, but then I said, “can I interview you?”
And it turned out she was a she was getting her doctorate in sociology and in family studies. She knew what all the research showed and when she met her boyfriend, who then became her husband, she said to him, “Look, I’m not going to live this way. This is what all the research shows is going to happen. And I want us to jointly commit to staying on top of this,” and he agreed. So whenever things started to get off balance, they would reconvene and reconfigure. And before they had their kid, they sat down and thought about everything that was going to need to happen. I don’t know how they did this because it’s hard to anticipate that stuff. They talked about who was going to do what, who was going to do pickup—this was before they had a child. So it seems to be like this joint commitment to living equally is a thing that is required of couples in order to actually pull it off. A joint and explicit agreement. Because then when you come back to it, if things get off balance, it doesn’t have to be in anger, which is how so often how it goes, at least in my house. They could just say to each other, “hey, we’re not meeting this goal we set. Let’s recalibrate.” So that’s what all these couples do and that’s how they’re able to pull it off. It’s really startling, to me at least, how much attention it takes in order to make it work this way.
Virginia
It sounds like, too, though, one more optimistic takeaway from that is, yes, it requires just a huge amount of attention. But it’s also both members of the couple recognizing that this happens because of a larger force. This is cultural pressures. It’s less about blaming this one guy for not seeing the tray of chicken nuggets or whatever. It’s more about like, oh, wait, we’re both vulnerable to these larger pressures. It’s taking over again. How do we as a team fight back against that?
Darcy
That’s a great point. And people have said that to me my husband and I read this together and it alleviated a lot of the pressure on both of us because we realize just what you said, Virginia. It’s the societal forces. It’s not that he’s a jerk. It’s not that I’m a martyr. It’s the water that we swim in. And we can fix it and not be mad or upset.
Virginia
Right, not make it so personal. I’ve read a lot of books on this topic and All the Rage is the one that I have found that is the most accessible for both women and men to read. It’s not husband blaming and shaming because it is focused on this larger cultural problem. It’s a great book to read as a couple because it’s not as antagonizing as some of the other ones. Not to diss any other writers, because I think rightfully there is a lot of anger around this issue and women need to express that anger. But when you’re looking for okay, how do I actually move forward on this.
Darcy
I’ve gotten the best emails from men which have totally floored me, who were like, “this is totally me and I want to do better,” or, “I thought I was a feminist but this really opened my eyes to some things going on in my home.” I did not expect that kind of feedback from men when the book came out.
Virginia
That’s amazing.
Darcy
That has made me quite optimistic that there are men who are seeing themselves here and wanting to do something better.
Amy
So, Darcy, can you tell our listeners where they can find you?
Darcy
Yes. My book has a website.
Virginia
Thank you so much for being here, Darcy. I feel like I could talk to you for easily another hour because this research you’ve done is so fascinating, and there’s so much ground we can cover but really appreciate you being here with us.
Darcy
I really appreciate you having me. Thank you for your interest.
Virginia
Coming up next we are going to do some listener updates.
Unrelated
Virginia
So for this week’s unrelated we are going to do a smorgasbord, if you will, of many updates based on some of the great emails you guys have been sending us. So Amy, what do we have up first?
Amy
Okay, so Sara, after we did our unrelated about exercise programs that we like, sent us a recommendation for a program called Mommastrong. It started by a woman named Courtney Wyckoff. She’s a mom of three years, nearly postpartum with her third, and the program focuses on core strength and functional fitness. I love that there’s a daily 15 minute workout posted so that you can squeeze that in whenever you have 15 minutes and then there are five minute hacks. It just sounds like it’s so appropriate for this phase of life that we’re that we’re in. She also has a ‘fix me’ section for common aches and pains which I’m going to go check out.
Virginia
Yeah, upper back hunching, sciatica. I can relate to some of these pains. She also talks about that she has an almost 100% safe space as far as body diversity and body positivity, very little weight talk. And when there is weight talk, like in the Facebook Group, the moderators are on it so you can avoid that kind of stuff, which is pretty awesome. This looks great. I’m really excited to check this out.
Amy
She had suggested that we interview Courtney for our episode on moms and fitness, but we did it too fast so we did not have a chance to consider that.
Virginia
Right, that is Episode 41, where we got more into mom workout stuff, so definitely check that one out. But if this is a topic you guys are interested in, we can maybe do another episode and try to get Courtney to come on because she sounds awesome.
So then the next update, in Episode 39 where we talked about snacking, Amy and I railed against the idea of children eating raw cauliflower, even if it’s purple or green or some fancy cauliflower. You see this a lot on Instagram, in the like Instagram rainbow bento box type snacking stuff. And we were talking about how that’s not realistic but Ruth emailed and says:
Hi Virginia and Amy. Here in the UK, raw cauliflower is a standard crudites component. Definitely not an insta-invention for us. It’s my dad’s, a university professor in his 60’s, favorite and he is not cool or on Instagram. It is delicious with hummus and my kids, ages one and two, like it, too, when they go through a blessed phase of eating anything outside their staple diet of raisins, apples, cornflakes, and oatcakes.
So, I have to say, I am half British—my mom is British—and I did not know raw cauliflower was a thing. So blame to all my British relatives for not enlightening me faster. But yeah, I guess it’s not just an Instagram trend.
Amy
I do like that she specifies that it is offered with a dip because that is often lacking in the rainbow displays. It is often plain. If it’s like a vehicle for eating ranch or hummus, I could see Tula using it as a spoon to get more hummus in her face.
Virginia
Would she eat the cauliflower underneath the hummus, though? because my kids have been known to lick pretty aggressively.
Amy
I don’t know. I can try it out and see but she likes dips a lot.
Virginia
Alright, next update. This was a really sweet note. This is from Jessica, who emailed in response to Episode 40 about growth charts that we did. She says:
Thank you, Virginia, this week for mentioning that Beatrix is in high growth curve percentiles for height and weight. Despite being pretty in tune to hidden diet culture-y messages, listening today I realized that I still had an assumption that your kids were fed the “right way” and therefore must have bodies that were beyond critique. My 19-month-old daughter is in the 90/90 club. She’s tall and sturdy. And hearing that one of my feeding role models children has the same body type gave me so much peace.
Oh, I really love that. First of all, 90/90 toddler body is absolutely beyond critique in my mind. They’re adorable. But yeah, I mean, the whole point of this is that healthy bodies come in a range of shapes and sizes. Some kids are going to be big and some kids are going to be small.
Amy
Some kids are going to be like 90/10 on that curve.
Virginia
Right or 10/90. There’s a lot of combinations. This is the big argument for getting away from fixating on weight. You can really embrace Health at Every Size and understand that human diversity is a pretty great thing, but I can definitely understand that anxiety, especially if you’ve had a pediatrician saying the wrong things about your toddler’s body. So, I’m glad I could help. Beatrix is glad she can help too. I mean, she doesn’t help but she will be glad.
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