3 hours ago
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It was when my second child was born in 2021 that I realised I needed a new system for parenting. We were coming out of lockdown, and I was tired and overwhelmed. During the pandemic, my husband and I had built our own mini unit in the UK, as our families lived in the US. I had decided to start my own literary agency as soon as my daughter was old enough to start nursery at six months. It wasn’t ideal timing, but I wanted to start as soon as possible.
I approached finding a parenting system the way I think many women of my generation do, with the same intensity that we would have approached a school dissertation. I decided to crowdsource my research: I watched videos of home-schooling mums in the US demonstrating their morning routines, I read every parenting book I could, I listened to podcasters interviewing mothers who seemingly “had it all”, and listened to others who argued that “having it all” was impossible.
My husband is a research professor and a scientist, and his approach to parenting had always been practical. When I started working after the birth of my second child, he designed a colour-coded spreadsheet setting out our tasks.
It initially seemed like a success, but as time went on, I noticed that more and more tasks and things to remember were ending up on my side. There was a great deal of resentment, on both sides, and it was heightened by the stress of night feeds, pumping breast milk and the financial pressure of making the business sustainable. I saw the viral French comic by Emma about the “mental load”, and how so many details of daily life are managed by mums in what is often invisible labour. I shared it with my husband, with what felt like a scream and an accusatory finger, pointing: “Look!”
Even with all my research, I couldn’t figure out how best to manage our family. Finally, my husband, ever a problem solver, asked that we sit down to work it out. He asked me to write down everything I was responsible for. We tried to divide them again, more equally, but realised that often one task connects to another.
We decided instead to look at the day in shifts and split the hours into a morning shift and an afternoon-evening shift. He would be fully in charge of the morning and everything it entailed – breakfast (which included making sure there were groceries for breakfast), getting dressed, packing school bags, and drop-off. I would do pickup onwards. So: dinner, bath time, bedtime. It is a schedule we still follow years later – my son is now eight and my daughter is five.
It’s not a perfect system, but it works for us. There is no “double parenting”, so my husband is fully in charge of the morning. I let him run things his own way and facilitate this by leaving the house so I don’t interfere. I have noticed that he’s more relaxed if something is forgotten: if there are no breakfast supplies, they pick up something on the way to school. Sometimes the uniforms are wrong, sometimes homework is forgotten, but he tends to let the small things go.
My afternoons and evenings aren’t much smoother, but I suppose I care more about the details. I call my shift “the dinner rush” as it reminds me of the days when I worked as a waitress. I pick up the kids from after-school club and then it’s a bit of a blur – I cook dinner, they eat, practise piano, have a bath, enjoy reading time, then it’s bedtime. Many of my clients are based in the US, so after they go to bed, I go back to work.
I know that having this rota for daily life doesn’t sound particularly idyllic, and our families have commented that it sounds overly regimented. But I have learned that structure can offer freedom. Because I know that I’m only responsible for the afternoon and night, I can switch off my parenting brain in the morning, and I’m able to have mental space without feeling as if everything has to be overseen by me. Perhaps there’ll be a time where I won’t want to be an afternoon-evening parent, but, for now, I’m happy to be on the dinner rush.
The Devoted by Catherine Cho is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
