The Wife, Otherwise Known As The Reminder Service – Part 1
This post is the first in a two-part series about the role of being the family’s reminder service.
I’m talking about being the person who always knows when the appointments are, what needs to be packed for school, whether a kid has an assignment due, what forms need to be filled in for a school excursion, and who needs the soccer uniform to be clean for a specific game. And so on.
I was at a physical therapy appointment, and while the therapist worked on me, she told me that her husband had had a dentist appointment that morning. She had reminded him of the appointment when he left for work that day. She had called him a couple of times that morning to remind him that he had the appointment. (That confused me. Was it to ensure he wouldn’t schedule something at the same time?). And she had called him when it was time for him to leave his office to go to the appointment. In order to do this, she had had to squeeze those calls in between patients as she worked on them.
I did not get any sense that the husband was worried about forgetting his appointment. Maybe he already had it in his calendar, had the presence of mind to check his calendar whenever anyone proposed scheduling a meeting, and the appointment had an appropriate reminder set so the calendar would trigger an alert around the time he needed to leave. Maybe he hadn’t done any of those things but wasn’t particularly concerned, knowing that if he missed the appointment, he might incur a no-show fee, but that he would live to tell the tale. Or maybe, just maybe, he was confident he would make the appointment, and make it on time, because his reminder service, otherwise known as his wife, would make sure of it.
Do you notice that in this incident, there was one person who had a responsibility to attend an appointment, and there was one person who was doing an awful lot of worrying and planning about the appointment, and that these two were not the same person?
How did this arrangement come about? Had she and her husband had a conference whereby both agreed she would be the designated rememberer of the family? Had the husband managed to persuade her that details such as when to turn up for a scheduled appointment were somehow beneath his notice? Or that his primitive male brain, so often touted as more precise than the female brain, was going to choke and halt on such a basic task? I don’t think so somehow. Like a lot of us women, I think she had just assumed it was her job. And perhaps her husband had assumed the same.
At least some of us women do not want this job, but for various reasons, don’t feel like it’s one that we can get out of. There’s quite a few factors that stop us, which is why this post has two parts. I wish to address these different factors, because without that, you may find yourself feeling stuck in the role.
I am happy to say that, for most things, I don’t act as a reminder service for my family members.
My kids aren’t fans of taking medication, so when that is a thing, either I or my husband end up nagging them. But I don’t remind my husband to take his pills.
I don’t remind my husband that he has a dentist appointment that day. Neither do I fret about whether he’s organized himself to get there on time.
I don’t remind my kids that it is pajama day at school – actually, I never even know when they are. I don’t remind my kids when they have an assignment due – I don’t know that either.
The kids’ school lunches are made by the kids, with a prompt from the parents. The snacks and water bottles are prepared by the kids – if they remember. We are fading out the prompting by allowing them to potentially forget those items.
How did I get to that state?
It starts with a couple of realizations.
The first thing is to realize that these tasks of remembering, knowing when another person’s appointments, events, and deadlines are, are actually that person’s task. Not yours.
You do know that already, don’t you? Because if you’re someone who is doing this job, you’re likely existing in one of two different states.
- You do actually like reminding people about things, and remembering things on their behalf. I am aware of having met one woman in this category. Maybe she’s the only one on the planet. Still, it seemed to give her an oxytocin hit, in which case, what can I say other than “carry on”?
- You have enough of your own things to remember. You don’t like reminding people about things, but feel you have to if it’s actually to get done.You aren’t in a high oxytocin state, you are tired and frustrated. The reason you’re tired and frustrated is because remembering your own stuff is enough work, but you’re doing double, triple, or some other multiple of that. On top of that, just knowing that the task is someone else’s but is being done by you, carries its own particular form of frustration and fatigue.
The key with all the tasks I don’t remind my family about is – they’re supposed to know. It’s my husband’s appointment. He should have it in his calendar with appropriate reminders set. It’s my kids’ school event or assignment – they’re not great at keeping calendars and task lists yet, but kids also do not have as many things to remember as adults do.
Why is this such a big realization when, in fact, we know it already? Because everything around us is conspiring to make us forget that fact. All the people around us who expect us to remember things for them. All of the friends we talk to who set an example by laboring diligently at this role.
All the opinions around us at how every woman bursts out of the womb, eagerly anticipating using her nurturing muscles in this fashion.
You see, the job of remembering everything is so universally and uncritically assumed to be a female thing, that to get up the determination to disentangle yourself, you may have to keep reminding yourself where those tasks belong in the first place. You need this realization implanted in your brain just to counteract all the other messages you’ll be getting to the contrary.
The second thing to realize is that the control over whether you perform reminder service duties lies with you.
We all sort of know this, right? We know, in theory, that it is possible to refrain from speaking to the person about that particular task? We could talk to them about something else, we could go do something else, we could sit in silence, we could do all kinds of things. It is actually possible to not remind somebody of something. It can be emotionally difficult to hold back, it could result in some truly bad consequences when something doesn’t get done, but… It. Is. Actually. Possible.
This doesn’t sound good yet, but it is good for a really good reason. It’s because the only actions we get to control are our own. So finding something that is within our scope, we might not yet know how to do anything differently, but it greatly increases the chances that there is actually something.
I’m pretty sure at this point you have several objections – along the lines of “But they’ll get completely lost with the task, and it won’t get done, and then I’ll have to fix it, and people will be mad at me”. There are several things going on there, and if we are to untangle ourselves from the habit of remembering other people’s stuff for them, it might take more than me just telling you to stop reminding people.
The non-reminding that I do these days did require me to step back from the reminding that I had been doing. I did have to go through a certain amount of emotional growth to make it happen. And I did engineer the process to make it easier. But in the process, I got something really important back – my own mental space!
I will continue to unpack how to resign from the reminder service role in the next post.
