So now I'm part of the garbage
Early days of parenting, Scotty and I are standing in the kitchen doing that thing where you're both just wandering around not really talking, and he goes, "Oh, we're out of this." And then a minute later, "Oh, we're out of that." And one day something in me just snapped, and I turned around and said, "Stop. I can't remember all this."
I don't think I was actually mad at him.
I think it was more that I realized, in that moment, what was happening every single time he said something like that out loud to me — he was taking it out of his brain and putting it straight into mine. And we didn't even have a system for where any of it was supposed to go after that.
So now I was the one holding the paper towels and the garbage bags and the thing we ran out of on a random Tuesday, on top of everything else I was already carrying.
And I said it to him, half-joking, also not really joking: "So now I'm part of the garbage." Which is a very funny sentence to say out loud in your own kitchen. Also, for the record, I don't want to be part of the garbage.
The trash isn't just the trash
Taking out the trash is not just taking out the trash. It's also buying the garbage bags. When I heard that line, I mean, the lights in this studio genuinely came on for me. Because Scotty is our garbage guy, no complaints, takes it out every single time without being asked. But if we're out of bags, he either goes and buys them himself, or he has to tell me we need them — which quietly makes it my job to remember. The task was never just "take out the trash." It always had this second, invisible half attached to it, and that half landed on me by default.
Some jobs are loud and some are quiet
In most houses, some jobs are loud — you can watch them happen. Someone mows the lawn, you see the lawn get mowed. Someone cooks dinner, there's a plate in front of you. But there's a whole other category of jobs that just live quietly in one person's head, and nobody clocks that they're even happening until that person gets tired, or forgets something, or snaps a little in the kitchen on a Tuesday. The remembering. The noticing we're low on something before we're actually out of it. Nobody claps for that one.
We took it to a whiteboard
So a while back, Scotty and I did something about it, and it was a little funny because I basically ran my own client process on my own marriage. I booked a boardroom at my co-working space, we got a whiteboard, and we mapped out the next eighteen months, just the two of us. It wasn't really about the day-to-day — our day-to-day rhythm is honestly pretty solid. It was the stuff that doesn't happen every week but does happen: kindergarten starting, travel, his parents wanting to see a show at Theater Under the Stars this summer. We put it all up on the board, and almost everything on it, when we actually looked, was already mine. Not because Scotty had said no to any of it. Just because nobody had ever looked at it and asked out loud whose job it actually was.
Give the invisible stuff a name
Once it was up there in writing, in front of both of us, something shifted. Scotty looked at the board and said, "Whoa, okay — give that one to me. I'll take this one." Just like that. Which he never would have thought to say if it had stayed in my head, because from where he was standing, nothing looked wrong. Nobody was struggling. I was just quietly doing it, the way I'd quietly been doing most of it for years. So I don't actually think the goal is a perfect 50/50 split — some weeks that math is never going to be even, and I've made my peace with that. I think the goal is just making the invisible stuff visible enough that someone else can see it, and choose it, instead of you carrying it forever just because you happened to notice it first.
Want more of this?
This week I sat down with my friend Georgina, who's been on the podcast twice before for infant sleep and toddler sleep, and this time we just let the conversation go wherever it wanted. Which ended up being: the calculated risk that let her build her sleep-consulting business instead of going back to her old job, why she thinks you should never apply morality to a fact about your kid's sleep, her daughter's recent autism diagnosis, and a line she said that I have not stopped thinking about since we recorded it: you do not get a medal at the end of life for doing things by yourself. Turns out that's basically the same lesson as the garbage bags. Ask for the help. Make the invisible stuff visible. Let someone else take the card off the table.
