On the Division of Responsibilities: You Can't Eat the Cake While It Bakes

On the division of responsibilities: "You can't have your cake and eat it, too" is the lesson I am learning as we seek to engage the rules of Fair Play (2021). Yes, it's great if I delegate something to my husband, but then I have to wait for him to do it, and that takes my time. Take, for example, weekend meals. It is wonderful that he has such great cooking skills and can make his own meals. It is not so great that it now takes about double the time to get breakfast on the table Sunday mornings. Where we used to be able to get to breakfast right after I finished food prep, as I made both our breakfasts at the same time, now I have to clean up my mess, cede the kitchen to him, and wait. Yes, I could do my food prep at another time, but I have not figured that out yet, and there is simply not enough room for both of us to work at the same time. I can't eat the cake while making it. If the cake is for him to make his own meals, I have to give that time to bake.

There are other ways this applies, too. Where we divided tasks he did not regularly do in the past, I have to wait for him to find his own way of doing them. When they are tasks I have traditionally done, I either have to use kind words to ask for him to make adjustments to the way he would do them, or allow him to do them in whatever way he finds to do them, usually some of both. The process of finding new rhythms and routines is just that, a process.

I have a tendency to be critical, controlling, and persnickety. That is one of the many reasons why I have done so many of the household tasks for so long. If I did them, I could do them my way, on my time. But that was not getting us anywhere, so here we are, trying to form a new way, trying to bake a new cake, so to speak. And dang it, you can't eat the cake while it bakes (and if you try, your mouth will get burned). I guess I will just have to sit back and watch the process. Or maybe I will just step away from the heat of the oven and go do something else. The process will still happen.

Reference:

Rodsky, E. (2021). Fair play: A game-changing solution for when you have too much to do (and more life to live). Penguin Publishing Group.