Ep. 135: Back to School Systems Your Marriage Needs

So I remember my spouse [laughs] and I had this conversation at the beginning of August.

And we basically were like, "We just have to make it three more weeks of summer." Two of those weeks that we were staring down we had, you know, no summer camps.

There was nothing, right? And so we just were like, "We just have to get through three weeks," and then things would go back to normal But I think we both forgot that, quote-unquote, "normal" comes with a lot of its own challenges.

And so while this routine is nice and familiar, it also can feel suffocating at times.

And if we aren't on the same page with it, it can create a lot of issues between the two of us if we aren't careful, which is why he and I really focused on these three different systems this time of year to ensure we are staying a solid team and we just feel good together.

So what are the systems? The first one that I'm gonna talk about is our back to school system with the mental load.

Whenever there is a new time period or transition, it is easy to set precedents without even thinking about it, and then it sticks.

It gets solidified.

It just becomes the way it is.

So for example, maybe I handle the getting her folder, taking it out, checking the backpacks, you know, checking the forms that first week that she's back at school.

We never talk about it.

I just do it.

And then it sort of gets labeled as my task without us consciously thinking about it, talking about it, and it isn't on his radar or brain because I've been doing it.

And so now I'm just doing it without even thinking like, "Is this best for me long term or for us long term?" And we do this with thousands of things all at the same time.

So part of my spouse's and I's back to school system includes figuring out what kind of load we have now that we are in this back to school routine, and we make sure that we divvy it in a way that feels good and fair and supported.

Things like, you know, who do the school emails go to? If it goes to both of us, who's gonna respond, and how do we manage that? Who deals with the lunchboxes? Who takes her to dance class, right? Like, we literally do every single thing.

We write a big list of all that we can think about, not based on who is doing them or who has done them in the past, but just what are all the things for this year.

Some of them are new because each school year is different.

Some of them, again, we've been doing every single year, but we still write them down, and we're especially focusing on the things that are new or that we hadn't been dealing with over the summer.

But even then, even the things that we've done for years, the reason I still write them down is because maybe things have changed and, like, it makes more sense for him to do one that I was doing or vice versa.

So I really think just create the list.

So we get this big old list, and then we say, "All right.

What makes sense for us? What feels good? What do you want to do? What do I wanna do?" And it's not like a are we each even, are we...

You know, we just really say like, "I don't mind doing this, this, this, this, and this." And he goes through, "I don't mind doing this, this, and this, and this." And then we see what do we have left over that, like, neither of us want to do but have to get done, and how are we going to divvy that in a way that feels fair? I usually wait a few weeks into the back to school to do this because the goal is to really try to put everything on the list and get it all worked out as early as possible.

You can't do it week one because you don't know everything yet, but usually I find by week three, and especially by week four, you got a good enough idea that we can get mostly everything.