The Great Accounting
How to Reduce Resentment Towards Your Partner After Baby
As I prepared to return to work after my maternity leave, my resentment towards my husband was at an all-time high.
After five months of staying home with our daughter, I was tired of being the primary caretaker. I missed my stressful day job - it was easier than watching a baby all day.
Four years earlier, when we first got married, my husband and I committed to being in a 50/50 partnership. At the time, we had the same exact job (and income) as product managers at large tech companies. We worked similar hours, so it was easy to justify an equal division of labor.
I was grateful to have a partner committed to supporting equality in our relationship. Naively, I thought we would have an even distribution of labor for the rest of our marriage.
Our situation changed when our daughter Maya was born.
I was lucky to take advantage of paid maternity leave through my employer. However, my husband was self-employed, so he went back to work full-time after taking three weeks of unofficial time off. For five months months, I fed, changed and entertained our daughter while he worked on starting a company.
During my limited free time each week, I also completed dozens of hours of invisible baby duties. These mundane but necessary tasks included pumping breastmilk, buying diapers, and researching sleep training methods.
After several months of taking care of our daughter, I felt exasperated about the uneven distribution of “work” in our home.
After Baby, The Dynamic Shifted
In the US, an unequal division of labor is all too common among working couples.
The implicit reliance on mom starts during pregnancy. When I learned I was pregnant, I immediately signed up for newsletters that tracked the size of my baby in fruit metaphors. Eager to prepare for baby’s arrival, I devoured gear recommendations to build our registry while my husband was blissfully uninvolved.
When kids come into the picture, there is more work to be done in the same amount of time (and with less sleep).
After Maya was born, I was breastfeeding around the clock. I also instinctively took over all the new baby tasks that emerged:
Managing baby’s health (pediatrician appointments, Vitamin D drops, etc)
Buying and stocking the baby’s gear (clothes, diapers, toys)
Researching baby development (sleep training, introducing solids, etc)
This situation was exacerbated because my husband didn’t take much parental leave.
For the first few months of Maya’s life, he never spent more than a few hours alone with her. As a result, he didn’t appreciate all the work and planning that is required to care for an infant. He didn’t understand what I meant when I told him I was deeply exhausted at the end of each day, though I had nothing to share about what I’d actually gotten done.
Having a baby created more work in our household and shifted the dynamic in our marriage.
Sadly, I’m not alone. Most working mothers take on the majority of unpaid housework and caregiving on nights and weekends (known as The Second Shift), in addition to working full-time. It’s therefore not surprising that one fifth of couples break up during the 12 months after baby is born.
The She-fault Parent Does It All
As I prepared to returned to work, I was worried that my husband would continue to rely on me to fulfill most baby duties. I was eager to get back to my job and manage my team of employees. I didn’t want to be the manager of our baby’s life.
Things felt especially uneven for the first time in our marriage.
I wanted to redistribute the tasks, but wasn’t sure how to facilitate the change. I sought out solutions from other working women and stumbled upon Eve Rodsky’s book, Fair Play. She promised to help me “Share the Mental Load, Rebalance Your Relationship and Transform Your Life”. I was hooked.
Eve suggests that after baby, especially if mothers are the only ones who take parental leave, they often become the she-fault parent. This creates an uneven split of responsibilities that makes it harder to advance professionally.
She outlines a system for creating a more even distribution of tasks and gaining time back to spend on yourself.
This system involves distributing “cards” which represent tasks that are required to make a household function. These range from mundane daily and weekly household tasks like taking out the garbage or doing the laundry, to more ad hoc activities like planning trips or taking baby to the doctor.
Her system has a few principles:
Only one person can be the owner of a card at a time
“Owning” the card includes, conception, planning and execution
Cards can be dealt back and forth but this change must be explicit
Eve then offers multiple ways to approach the conversation with one’s partner by catering to their personality. Eager to jump in, I completely ignored this advice and instead, incessantly nagged my husband for days until he finally agreed to jointly review our new master “to do” list.
The Great Accounting: Getting Back to Neutral
One Saturday while Maya was sleeping, I used the “cards” in the Fair Play book to create one long list of tasks that are required for running our household. Then my husband and I reviewed the list together, estimated how long each task takes, and redistributed things to make the time investment more even on both sides.
Side note: he still chuckles because after this adjustment, he came out with slightly more time and tasks on his plate! We now affectionately refer to this exercise as the “Great Accounting”.
Here are a few tips for what has worked for us after going through this exercise:
Calendar Blocks: Our days are now scheduled to the minute to account for who is doing what and when, such as the morning or evening baby routine, daycare dropoff/pickup, and other chores. We have blocks on our calendars to remind us of these tasks. It might feel transactional, but having a clear division of responsibility minimizes nagging since there’s one clear owner for each task.
Alternate Baby Duty: We explicitly take turns watching Maya for most of the time when she’s home. During weekdays, my husband takes her for an hour in the morning so I can exercise and get ready for the day (then I do daycare dropoff while he goes for a run). We also alternate taking 4 hour shifts on the weekends. Yes, this is more time spent away from baby, but I need it to recharge and enjoy the time I do spend with her.
Unicorn Space: Eve also talks about the importance of finding “unicorn space” - time for you to do things that energize you (outside of work and baby). She recommends working with your partner to explicitly prioritize this space for both of you as part of your weekly schedule. My unicorn space is working on my newsletter every Saturday morning.
This exercise of dividing and conquering our chores helped redistribute some things that I was automatically doing on leave. As a result, my husband learned about all the invisible work I had been doing.
I finally felt validated and seen.
The system also freed up some of my time on nights and weekends to focus on other things, like spending time with friends, catching up on the Handmaid’s Tale, and writing this post.
Better, But Still A Work In Progress
Since I’ve been back at work for a few months, our new system has helped reduce my resentment and increase my happiness.
Looking back, I recognize a few things were going on that were contributing to my initial frustrations:
I was experiencing postpartum depression. For me, being at home with my daughter was really tiring, both physically and emotionally. Taking leave alone for many months exacerbated my feelings of resentment towards my husband. I felt much more energized once I went back to work.
I was doing too many baby chores. During my leave, I picked up all the baby tasks, and it was clear that my plate was overflowing. After redistributing the tasks as part of the Great Accounting, things feel more in equilibrium.
I will need to keep evolving the system. Though we have a system that works for now, we must continue to iterate and adapt the system. As Maya gets older or more kids come into the picture, we will need to keep revisiting and redistributing our to-do list. We also need a good way to communicate (without resentment) when the balance feels off.
Have you experienced any of these challenges as the she-fault parent? Do you have any tips for how to maintain equilibrium in your marriage after one (or two!) babies enter the picture? I’d love to hear from you!
Namaste,
Tamara
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