Parenting! A nightmare which I never wanted to be there. But life throws you at the exact same place where you don’t want to be!
We hardly get time for ourselves as an individual. You get busy with chaotic lifestyle running house, managing bills, responsibilities etc. And the society has put so much pressure pre-defined how your life should look like. Get married, make babies, grow them up and tell, “Beta I’m struggling hard to make your life better” and the cycle continues.
But my perspectives are changing day by day. I didn’t want to just keep pushing days and hustle without a purpose.
At one point, I was very clear. That the roles of my life as a Mother/Wife is nothing to do with the purpose of my life. I do not want to make my role as mother as my entire life responsibility. I also got other things to do. It is a phase of cycle and that should not drain me out.
We keep speaking about these a lot, and Prem (my husband) at one point also was feeling exactly the same. As we are an equal parenting, he takes a major role handling business (we run business together), as a father and even doing household chores.
Why did I feel guilty?
When I see every single couple around me giving me a judgmental look, I used to feel guilty at times that I am making Prem work around baby really lot along with managing financials too.
But then there were other days I used to think that he is not just “helping me” but it’s his responsibility as a father too!
It’s only that I am on a maternity leave, however when I resume back I’d share the financials equally.
We then started to draw an equation between us. What’s equality, what’s doing more, what’s doing less or contributing at home really is.
Like we measure liquids in liters, solids in kilos, distance in meters, people say love cannot be measured. But if something that’s not measured, how’d someone even know the intensity of what’s giving love and receiving love is?
They say, “I love you soooo much.” How much is really soooo much?
Equal division of labour, money and time
How do, we as a couple with a young child, share and divide our household chores, finance and time?
We then started to figure out some measurable actions at home.
- We divided how many meals to be cooked in a day, how many times to feed Prithvi, how much of cloths goes into washing, if bathroom to be cleaned 4 times a week 2 times I clean and the other 2 times he does it.
- Likewise, we literally took everything equally. Like, I feed Prithvi Breakfast and dinner while he does it for lunch and snacks. We take alternate turns to take care of him in the night when he wakes up.
- We sorted how much money do we need to run the house, office, bills, salaries, investments, loans etc. and instead of taking responsibilities like “I pay EMI you pay groceries”, we changed to let put all the money together, then pay everything and each of us gets a fixed amount for ourselves as personal spending and rest goes to the profit kitty.
- Not only that, but we even plan to take weekend offs such that we get alternate weeks for “ME time” one week for WE time and another week to just lazily Netflix and chill.
- We plan a timetable for what to be cooked so that our cooking maid also knows one month ahead of what she needs to help us with.
- We have a spreadsheet with 1-hour breakup on what we need to be working for an entire month. So if I have a meeting/travel/training/seminar, Prem makes sure he is available at home for Prithvi. And I plan to stay at home when he has important schedules.
With all these practices, even his parents have come to an understanding that they are adjusting to our schedules and planning their priorities accordingly. That way, I must say, we are really lucky to have each other as a supporting system.
In fact, all 4 of us have become an excellent team making Prithvi as a centre focus, and we are drawing our circles around him.
This way, most of our fights have come to an end.
We even made our fights simpler. Watch out for my next blog on how we fight.
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