The Wife, Otherwise Known As The Reminder Service – Part 2
In my previous post, I talked about the exhausting and frustrating job of remembering things on behalf of other people. There is a limit to how much energy you will have for your own endeavors if you are remembering several other peoples’ worth of stuff.
When I talk to people about the possibility of not reminding their family members about things, the first reaction I generally get is completely blank looks. It’s like the people who are in the “reminder service” role cannot envision the world working any differently. Or, more to the point, they cannot imagine that, left to themselves, their remindees can function any differently to now, and they’ll be left with pieces to pick up.
So the typical responses to the idea that life could be different include the following:
- “But then it won’t get done!”
- “But then it will get done wrong and I’ll have to fix it afterwards, which will take even longer!”
- “If I leave them to deal with this on their own, they’ll keep bugging me with questions, which is way more exhausting than me doing things the way I do them now!”
- “But the teachers won’t call the dad if he doesn’t get the kids’ bags packed correctly, they’ll call me!” (And yes, that really is the case with schools, and it annoys me no end. But I do have workarounds for that too).
That’s a lot to unpack, which is why I think we all needed to take a deep breath and start with a new post this time, rather than trying to tack it onto what I said on the topic last time.
I’m going to start with a story, after which I’m going to draw out parallels to our other situations.
When my oldest kid was in daycare, age five months, the teachers, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, mentioned that they were teaching the babies to hold their own bottles and feed themselves. I was gobsmacked. Admittedly, my kid was the baby of the class; the oldest kids there were six months older than her, but I still didn’t think of them as being old enough to be taught such a task. Still, these teachers knew more about babies than I did, so that left me with nothing to do but observe.
There was a lot of laughter from the teachers as this progressed. Not only were the babies extremely clumsy and, let’s face it, incompetent, at this task, they were completely unprepared mentally for the mere idea of ever doing such a thing. Besides dropping bottles everywhere, the babies would stare at the teachers with their thoughts clearly written on their little baby faces, “What are you doing? This is your job!”.
The fumbling continued for several weeks. Until one day, I sat down in the car with my kid, me in the back, husband in the driver’s seat, baby next to me, all ready to do the feeding, while driving, so as to save time. My daughter had apparently had a revelation. With a quick, professional motion, she grabbed the bottle from me, put it in her mouth, and proceeded to feed herself. It was quite obvious from her manner that she was convinced she could do this better than I could. It was better. The adults in the family had suddenly gained twenty minutes of time, for five feedings a day. Not bad at all.
Using principles from this story, I was able to pull back from doing all of my family’s thinking and worrying. Here are the main ideas:
But women are just better at this sort of thing.
We probably are. If from the moment we’re born it’s expected of us, and not of men, we’ll generally step up and practice till we’re good at it. But not surprisingly, it makes us very tired. And it doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it.
So, do I announce to the family that I won’t be remembering things for them?
If they explicitly expect you to remember things for them, that could help clarify things. After all, up till now, it’s an arrangement you’ve bought into yourself. You don’t have to make a song and dance about it – indeed, I recommend you don’t. But if you want to let people down gently (overall a kind thing to do), then yes, giving people a heads-up can help.
On the other hand, if your family members insist on believing that you actually don’t remember things on their behalf, that you’re not really doing much there, and pat themselves on the back thinking they do all the remembering themselves, I wouldn’t bother.
The one thing not to do is to say “I want to stop remembering this for you, is that okay?”, and wait for their permission to stop remembering things.
This is not about permission, this is a plan that you’re executing regardless. If you really do feel you can’t execute this plan without permission from someone, I hereby give you permission; go right ahead.
Start the letting go process with low stakes tasks.
If you are just starting out on this process, by all means still remind your partner to be there to close on the house you’re buying, if he has previously been reliant on such reminders.
On the other hand, you absolutely do not have to remember that this is the day that your kid is permitted to take a stuffed toy and a blanket to the class Valentine’s Day party. I used to actually calendar these things. Not anymore. In fact, the other day my daughter somehow did miss the fact that she was permitted to take a stuffed toy and a blanket to the class Valentines Day party – strange, she usually remembers. And she cried. And I hugged her. And life went on. And she now knows that life will go on after mishaps like that.
You may or may not decide to provide training materials.
I have a set of written instructions pinned up in the laundry. The washer and dryer settings to use for kids’ clothes. The settings to use for towels. And so on.
Why is this? Because I don’t want to repeat myself every time someone feels helpless while they do the laundry, let alone use the excuse of not knowing how to avoid doing it altogether. So I don’t feel the need to hover to ensure they know how to do things. And if they ask me anything, instead of thinking about how I can teach this material for the hundredth time, I can say “What does the instruction list say? Is there anything missing we could update?”. Believe me, pulling out that one phrase is so much less emotionally exhausting than repeating a full tutorial to someone. Software engineers refer to this as adding a layer of indirection. In this case, what it means is – Instead of directly taking a person through the steps, what you are doing is pointing them to a thing that will take them through the steps. Another example of this is a family Google calendar (or whatever tool you choose to use), where events get put in as soon as we know about them. It’s shared with all family members, and I don’t recite its contents to anyone.
Be aware that your former remindees will probably be confused.
The people you live with may very well have got their boundaries blurred. Just like the babies who honestly didn’t realize that feeding themselves was a normal thing, your family members may have no idea how much thinking you are doing for them.
I recall a friend of mine – a fully functional, gainfully employed adult – who works in a helping profession. I had emailed her, inviting her to an event. The next time she saw me, she said, “Can you remind me about the event when it gets closer?”. I didn’t have the guts to say “You mean you don’t know how to put it in your calendar?”. I hedged and said something like “Well, if it doesn’t fall out of my head, things usually do.” Nowadays, I might say a little more confidently, “My brain doesn’t have the space for that.”.
So there you go, reasonable people do weird things like that. Your family might too.
And comparing again to the daycare scenario – the teachers didn’t freak out when the babies got confused. They didn’t decide they would wait until the babies understood before they made another attempt to hand the task off. They just kept handing the task off.
In other words ….
You don’t have to wait until your remindees accept the task.
You’re probably thinking – but the babies didn’t really feed themselves initially, and the teachers didn’t let them go hungry, so until the babies had actually accepted the task, the teachers weren’t really handing it off, they were just attempting to train.
A couple of things here.
One, you can start with training, whether your family members accept it or not. At this point, you’re probably thinking – yeah, they won’t pay attention, they’ll keep flubbing at the task, they won’t really try, and so they won’t really learn, so I’m going to have to keep doing it. Not quite. Not quite. Let me get to the other thing…
You can hand off a task fully even if your family members don’t appear to be competent at it.
Fortunately, your family members either aren’t babies, or will one day grow to a point where they are not babies. Short of serious disabilities that require lifetime care, what is at stake here is not whether someone starves. If you don’t prepare a ready-to-heat dinner for when you’re away and remind your partner that such items live in the fridge, he and the kids will not die. They may eat crackers and chips instead, but they won’t die.
If your kid doesn’t hand in their assignment on time, it won’t ruin their life. If your kid forgets to take their lunch to school, it won’t ruin their life. If your partner misses a dentist checkup, he will still, in the long run, survive. If your kids don’t make their team practice that week because everyone else but you forgot, everyone will still be alive by the end of that week.
Which brings me to my next point.
Hovering and monitoring the task is not equivalent to handing it off.
Until you’ve removed yourself from the equation, your family members will not get a chance to try out their remembering muscles.
If you’re there in the background, making sure it’s all going to go okay, then, um, you’re still the one making sure it’s all going to go okay.
But they’ll bombard me with questions.
I have occasionally gone so far as to leave the house or be too busy to answer messages. I have literally had times when my husband has persisted in asking me the same question I’ve already answered, and I just say “I’ll let you think about it”. You see, if the help is easily available, most people will make use of it. They need to be in a situation where they don’t easily have the answer, and then they will start thinking. Clumsily and badly at first, but that’s ok.
But you’re thinking, they are certain to forget stuff. And then bad things will happen.
Which brings me to my next point.
Without a certain amount of Bad Things Happening, most people don’t develop the feedback loop needed to remember things.
You’re pretty convinced that the assignments won’t get handed in, is that right? Here’s the thing. If your kid forgets and doesn’t hand in an assignment, and gets zero for it, they will learn that if they don’t hand in an assignment, they will get zero for it. You’d think they’d know these things, but looking at human behavior in general, I think people don’t.
On the other hand, if you hover and keep checking in on the assignment, and make sure that it gets handed in, your kid won’t learn that a non-submitted assignment gets a grade of zero. Non-submitted assignments aren’t even on their radar as something to be learned about. Why would they be? Mom’s existence has to this point ensured that non-submitted assignments aren’t a happening thing.
That’s what they are learning at the moment, that they never have to remember things, because other people do that for them.
Remember those babies? While they were learning and dropping bottles everywhere, the bottle contents got spilled, and the babies needed to wait a bit longer before they actually got any food. In their case, only a few minutes. In the case of an older kid, until their next opportunity to submit an assignment and get a non-zero grade. Both of those sound better to me than the twenty-something year old whose parents are still hovering and reminding them to get to work on time each day (yes, I’ve actually seen this happen).
So allow chaos to reign for a while. It can take time for family members to get their rusty thinking muscles actually functioning again.
Commit to not yelling at your family members when they mess up. And commit again the next time you mess up and yell.
Honestly, I have a hard time not yelling at my family when they stare at a drying rack with dishes on it as though they’re wondering what on earth is supposed to happen to those dishes. That’s another reason why if I hand something off, I prefer to not be around seeing what happens.
But I say all this because part of the dynamic is – fear that they’ll get things wrong. Your fear? No, we know about that already; I mean theirs. The more your family members fear doing a task wrong, the less courage they’ll have to actually attempt it.
But I’m still going to get people calling me when things go wrong.
When a kid doesn’t get something done for school, everyone blames the mom. They always call my number first, they only call my husband’s number if I don’t answer.
I was once in a meeting, while my husband was at home (and not in a meeting). The school called me. I ignored it. I was, after all, in the middle of something, and knew that my husband wasn’t. They called my husband. He panicked and messaged me for instructions. I messaged him to please handle it, that I trusted his judgment. If my meeting had been a particularly intense one, I probably would have had my phone turned off anyway.
For things like this, let me make an important general point. Do you answer the phone no matter what? Do you answer the phone while in line at a checkout? While driving? During your own counseling appointments? While you lie on the table having a PT work on you? In the middle of a meeting with your boss?
Stop right now. Please be assured that before the days when everyone carried a phone, things still worked out okay. Your kids’ school staff have authorization from you to provide medical treatment and they know how to call 911 (whom they should be calling before they call you if it’s that level of emergency). Anything other than that, is it crisis level? Not so much. Adopt this attitude in general and your partner will have some opportunities to answer calls from people.
But my mother-in-law will guilt trip me if my husband doesn’t send her a birthday card.
Yeah, women do things like that to other women. Be really dumb about any hints about having to do anything about it. As far as you’re concerned, it is purely a bid for sympathy; you sympathize heavily, but don’t try to fix anything. If he forgot your birthday too, you’re permitted to mention this fact. But soon after that, launch into a flowery recollection of how, despite his flaws, your partner is a good person who loves you both. Because every psychologist will tell you to do that often, and that moment seems as good a one to me as any.
Is there anything this method doesn’t work for?
This doesn’t work for things your remindees don’t care about. This method will not work if your partner is okay with going to jail rather than getting the taxes done. When your kids are sufficiently young, this doesn’t work to get them to do their physical therapy exercises that they don’t immediately feel the benefits of. It doesn’t work for family members remembering to take part in cleaning up after meals (unless you impose a consequence such as not preparing the next meal if you’re the family chef. But more on the ins and outs of such things in another article).
Having said that, how about we start by giving our families the benefit of the doubt. People who are learning how to remember things may fumble at it a lot, but in general, when a woman pulls back from doing other people’s thinking, the most common reaction, after an initial bout of confusion, is that family members do start thinking for themselves.
And that, my friends, is how my kids are now responsible for packing snacks and water bottles for school without us telling them it needs to be done. They pack their bags in the morning with no more questions from me or my husband other than “Do you have everything you need?”. And even asking that question is getting forgotten by me half the time already.
