What If Balance Isn't 50/50?

I made an unpopular parenting decision that saved my sanity and my marriage. While many advocate for strict 50/50 parenting, I recognized my husband's limitations and chose to shoulder more responsibility rather than create additional stress.

• Back-to-school adjustments forced me to take a podcast break as we established new routines
• Live streams now happening on weekends, available on YouTube and LinkedIn 
• With three babies under two, restaurant outings became so stressful we avoided them for seven years
• Husbands and wives often remember their children's early years completely differently
• Women's minds work like interconnected webs while men often think more linearly
• Understanding your partner's limitations is more important than forcing equal division of tasks
• Doing what works for your specific family is more valuable than following others' expectations

Check out our guest episodes rolling out this week and visit our YouTube channel to see clips from previous episodes. Send any questions or topic ideas my way!

Chapters

• 0:00 Women's voices and podcast update
• 2:07 Back-to-school challenges and podcast schedule
• 4:20 Restaurant struggles with young children
• 7:15 The unpopular opinion on parenting roles
• 10:11 Understanding your partner's limitations
• 12:44 Doing what works for your family

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is still Rose's podcast. This podcast was created for women, by women, to elevate women's voices. Happy September everybody.

Speaker 1: 0:08

I had to take a little bit of a forced break last week from recording and doing anything extra, because it was my kids' first week at school and I don't know why. I didn't think it was going to be a big deal. I guess because they were in camp, I don't know. But in any case I felt kind of, I felt prepared and I felt like it wasn't really going to make a huge impact on like what I was doing. But getting back into the routine of like having to be like oh right, yes, you do have to get up early in the morning. No, you cannot stay up an extra 30 minutes, like all those little summertime things where you kind of just let everything go Killing, those habits have been tough. Kids don't readily, they don't very quickly understand like oh wait, no, you cannot watch TV until 10 o'clock at night. So there's that, you know, getting everyone back into the swing for that. So I had to take a little bit of a break because of that. And then we had family health issues. There was almost like a lot going on, and you guys know my motto give yourself grace. When you can, you just have to kind of roll with it. I tried really hard not to beat myself up, although I must say that's very difficult for me, because there was many moments where I was like, all right, you know, maybe I should just stay up late and record, or maybe I should do this, or you know, like you kind of go through the things and I always felt, to be perfectly honest with you, maybe guilt when I don't get to. I don't think guilt is the right word here, guys, but I do feel bad when I don't get to do solo episodes.

Speaker 1: 1:28

I've started to roll out the live guest streams, so they've been happening on Saturdays and Sundays for the most part. I have some gap weekends where there's no episodes scheduled at all, and then I had one weekend there was three episodes you pulled out at once. So I'm kind of just making it work and seeing where I net out. Streams are all featured on YouTube and LinkedIn. So if you follow either StillRosesWomen on YouTube or me on LinkedIn, jenny Benitez on LinkedIn you'll get notifications for the live streams and you'll be able to watch them. And the videos are also living there too, so you can actually just rewatch if you want to. So there's that, that's available to you, and I am excited about the live streams. It's kind of cool. I'm still nervous about it, but you know it is what it is.

Speaker 1: 2:07

So thought starter Now. My kids are older now and something really interesting that I'd like to ask all the wives out there when my husband and I reflect on when the kids were little, we both seem to be remembering it differently and I can almost sense some of you laughing along with me and chuckling on that one. Now I can't say for certainty that I'm the one who's 100% correct, but like wink, wink, nudge, nudge, I kind of feel like I'm the one who's correct here. So and I'm going to tell you, you know what? Let me start with the thought starter really. So you guys know how I feel about Pinterest. That's where I'm getting all my thought starters on Pinterest, and one of the posts that I just saw recently made me think about this, which is also what prompted me to say my husband and I are remembering the kids when they were babies differently.

Speaker 1: 2:57

So in this little post here the original poster was trying to, I guess, make it funny that you know her husband had said it would be okay if they all went out to eat together, her and her husband and their three small kids. And then in the video they show the mother two of the kids are on her lap and one is standing next to her and she's basically like kind of spoon feeding the one and you know, the kids are grabbing for everything. If you have small children, like you know, you don't even have to see the post, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And then they kind of pan. The camera pans from the mother, who's like taking care of all the kids at once, to the husband who's just eating his food, basically by himself, because, you know, no one's bothering him. But that's the original post. In the post that I saw, this guy kind of comes in over overlays, over the video which you've seen on, you know, socials before, and he starts speaking to this and he says like a lot of women feel like or, yeah, a lot of women end up in situations where it's like being a single parent in the house and they're basically responsible for everything, they do everything, the kids always go to them for everything and the dad's just there and he's just present. Now I saw this video and, to be perfectly honest, it makes me sad. It really does that image one.

Speaker 1: 4:12

It was like giving me PTSD vibes from when my kids were little and we tried to go out to eat. We only went out to eat. My kids are born my son in 2016, my twins in 2017. So I had three infants essentially at the same time. Mind-numbing is the word that I can use Like really, I don't know how else to describe this. We tried once to go out to eat when they were really little and I didn't sit the whole time. I just walked around like trying to keep the kids in order, making sure that my husband, kitty, and like everyone else at the table had some kind of peace, and, of course, me as the mom felt like all the eyes were on me, all the pressure was on me Control your kids, get your kids under control, and that stress ball of a situation immediately like severed any kind of going out for about seven years and I'm not exaggerating Like I legitimately had to give it up completely because it just wasn't enjoyable for me.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Now I know some couples that made it a point to continue to go out because that was something that was important to them and they want to make sure that their kids just got it and eventually just behaved at restaurants and understood Like when you're at a restaurant you act a certain way. I've never been out to eat with them, these folks, but from what I understand they're making it work. I just didn't want to deal with it and there was no part of me that there's still to like Applebee's or like places that listeners for across the globe. Applebee's is kind of like a very casual, low key restaurant that has just like little snack I can get little snacks for the kids and it's not like a fancy, formal kind of environment. So if the kids misbehave or if anything goes awry, I can just get up and get out of there and it's not a big deal. If they spill something I'm not going to have a heart attack. It's not, you know, the end of the world. So I had started practicing with them when they were about four or five years old and every once in a while I would take them out just to practice and I would tell them this is practice, guys, we're practicing.

Speaker 1: 6:17

I'm saying a lot here as to like what my journey was with this situation, but I also want to. My husband and I remember things differently Now. The point of the post that I saw was to basically shine a light on the fact that there's so many women out here with children that feel like they're being they're a single parent because the husband is not engaged, the husband is not involved with the kids in the same way that the mother is. I want to say probably about nine times out of 10, that's accurate, and I don't usually like make blanket statements like that. I try not to, because I do want this to be a fair playing field here on this podcast. But to be perfectly honest with you, I haven't actually seen it any other way, I just haven't. I haven't observed that, not consistently Now. My husband has always been disciplinarian. He only steps in at the discipline stage for a very long time. That's where he was stepping in. Any other thing that was happening, it was mom.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Now, some of you might be like hearing this and being like God, jenny, like you should have said something. You should have done something. This is my position here on this. This is an unpopular opinion. I understand that a lot of people in my family and everyone said you should make him help you, tell him you need help, force him to do it. Say something. You need to open your, you need to complain, you need to say something.

Speaker 1: 7:34

That is not what I did, for many reasons and I'm going to explain it a little bit here. So, number one well, number one, I'm pigheaded and I very much was like I can do this myself, I don't need your ass Like excuse my language, guys, but that's kind of the pigheadedness was like really rearing its ugly head after I had kids and I was like I don't need anybody, I can do it myself. So there was that I was dealing with in my own internal turmoil. Beyond that, outside of me being pigheaded and stubborn, outside of that, there was a part of me that recognized the limitation. Now some of you are sighing at this point. What are you talking about? Like, he can help. He has arms, he has legs, he can absolutely help out with, you know, bath time and he can help out with getting the kids dressed, getting the kids down for bed, getting them out the door in the morning, he can help with feeding them. He did do things in certain moments, but it was predominantly me. Again, I'm going to circle back to the limitation factor.

Speaker 1: 8:29

I'm not putting men down because I think men are very smart. My husband is one of my favorite people in this entire world. I tell him all the time he's one of the best people that I know. But he's limited. He cannot do the web of things that I do. He just can't do it. I've noticed this with men in general. They're very linear. It's a point A, point A1, point A2. Now we're at point B, point B1, point B. That's the trajectory. The woman's mind is either to a spider web or a net, and there are so many things balanced and interlocked and intertwined that we, for some reason and I think it might be that biological function that happens after you have a child your brain changes and everything we can handle it. We just can. A lot of us can, and I took a beat during this scenario and had this kind of epiphany moment of am I going to argue with my husband and am I going to poke the bear, basically, and make this into a situation that's miserable because we're going to start fighting because of the kids, or am I going to take this on and I'm going to ask him for help or get help as needed when I have to, but for the most part it's going to be me.

Speaker 1: 9:46

That was the decision I made. Also, I didn't plan to talk about any of this today. It's just kind of coming out. So whoever is hearing this, that needs to hear it. I'm trying to be as honest as I can here. I had just made the decision it was going to be me. I can handle it. Now, my own personal history would speak volumes, because the amount of times my parents heard me say I can handle it, I got it. I mean, they'd be millionaires at this point because I am a pain in the butt. But that's what I looked at. You know, I took a step back and I was like I know my husband. I know who he is as a person. I know what he can handle and what kind of stress he can handle and what can't he handle. He cannot handle sleep deprivation not even a little bit, not even close. But I could. There was things like that where the multitasking can't do it, can't do it to save his life. I can do it to save my life and many others. I could do it. You know, there's certain things that I'm like. I know I can do this. I'm going to save my sanity and my marriage and I'm going to save us a lot of arguments if I just go ahead and do it Now.

Speaker 1: 10:45

Again, unpopular opinion. I think that there's a lot of people out there that are listening to this podcast right now and go no, it has to be fair. You need to split it equally. It needs to be 50-50. Okay, that's fine if that works for you, but that was not going to work for me at all and I basically told everybody around me, like this is what it is and if I ask for help, I'll ask for help. And to this day, when I do ask for help now, which is actually a lot more often now, I'm learning, I'm growing as a person. Everybody when I ask for help now, he 100% just gets up and does what I need to do because he knows I'm only going to ask for help when I really really need it and not actually peppering him all the time. Again, I was everywhere probably just really irritated with what I'm saying.

Speaker 1: 11:27

My whole point here is you need to know your partner, know what they can handle and then act accordingly. I'm not saying don't ask for help. I'm saying know who you married, know who is your life partner, know who the other person is, understand what their strengths and weaknesses are and then work accordingly with that. Don't try to force the situation, because the more you try to force the situation, the more harder it's going to get, and that's what's going to trigger those fights and that's what's really going to trigger the problems. So, if you recognize, you know what he's never been great at this, or he or she's never. They've never been great at. You know multitasking, okay. Well, what makes you think they're going to be great at it now? Now, with this extra pressure of a child screaming bloody murder, like, really, really think about that. And I'm not saying like you don't deserve grace, you don't deserve a break. I'm not saying you don't deserve help, I didn't say any of those things. But you have to strike a balance for yourself and your partner. That's not going to make the situation more stressful than it already is.

Speaker 1: 12:27

I'm scared but interested to hear from everybody on this one, because I know that this is a bit of a hot button. Not everyone's going to agree with me and I've had to explain my piece to many, many people. This is just an unpopular opinion that I happen to lean into because it works for me and you guys know how I feel about that. You got to do what's best for your family. You cannot compare yourself to anybody else. So, on that note, I'm going to let all of you go, have to put my kids to bed. I really appreciate all of you being with me, being with me on this journey for the podcast.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Thank you for the listeners across the globe, in the UK, oh, in Canada, like I mean I just Japan. I'm like super, super excited about all you folks like listen to the podcast and just really being here with me in this space and understanding this is the space. It's safe, this is a space that's not judgmental and this is a space where we need to be ourselves and we show up authentically. We have another guest episode rolling out on Wednesday of this week. There was another one that rolled out on Monday. I believe it was Really, really interesting ladies coming onto this podcast. So just take a look through, see what you like. Check out the YouTube channel. There's some clips there. You can kind of click around through and see what episodes you might be interested in. If you have any questions or topic ideas, please send them my way and take care.