Badly dressed kids

At first, my partner Marie-Noëlle thought I dressed them very badly. Well, an independent observer would conclude she wasn't entirely wrong. I admit it, my taste in clothes is questionable. (For a long time I thought flowered Bermuda shorts with a striped polo was one heck of a good fit. You get the picture.)

Anyway, to fix the situation, Marie-Noëlle first suggested dressing the kids herself every morning. A false good idea that quickly proved unworkable because of our respective schedules. Instead, Marie proposed laying out every night the clothes the kids would wear the next day. All I'd have to do was put their clothes on in the morning, no questions asked. What a great compromise!

We did that for a week. And we both agreed that this way of doing things was stupid and went against our idea of fairly sharing family chores. There was no way that, for the rest of our lives, she would be the only parent choosing our children's clothes.

Since then, if I'm the one getting the kids ready in the morning, I'm the one who picks their clothes. I'm not a fashion stylist yet, but my eye has become more refined! And my other half has accepted that the kids won't always be dressed exactly the way she'd like. Because that's what a real compromise is.

Teamwork, not trench warfare

I like to tell this story because it illustrates well the dynamics still at work in many couples that generate a lot of tension and conflict around one theme: the mental load.

Online, the debates on the subject always fascinate me. They quickly take on the look of a boxing match. In the left corner, mothers at the end of their rope – sometimes with good reason, let's be honest – who paint their partners as blissfully clueless, incapable of going to the convenience store for bread and milk without someone writing them a list on a scrap of paper. In the right corner, fathers in denial who retort that they carry a mental load too. “Who's the one looking after the lawn mower and the pool, huh?”

These exchanges do a lot of people good, no doubt. They serve as an outlet and let people vent. I'm afraid they don't settle much, though.

Sharing the mental load and family responsibilities fairly in a couple should be seen as teamwork, not trench warfare. Deconstructing the old reflexes inherited from the past that lead all of us to reproduce the roles tied to our gender stereotypes is something you do together.

It takes, first and foremost, fathers who are engaged, clear-eyed and who recognize the issue, obviously, but also mothers who learn to let go and trust. It takes parents who talk to each other, listen to each other and know how to recognize the other's good moves and good ideas.

It's the shared challenge of all parents of our generation. No couple escapes it. And every child who shows up dressed a little crooked in the morning, at a school or daycare somewhere in Québec, is one more small victory in our collective battle.

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