How I organise my life and household as a disorganised, lover-of-chaos artist-mum.

The family system that keeps me on tour instead of on the brink.

In honour of International Women’s Day/Month, I wanted to share something strategic and practical for those out there wondering how I do it all with such grace (that’s something a friend said to me, never would I ever think to say this about myself, out loud). Here’s a comic from Becky Barnicoat that’s a bit more close to real life:

But seriously, this seems to be the question I get most now from other musicians (ok yeah they’re all women).

Keeping connected to yourself, your work, your partner, and your children is messy when you become a parent, and I don’t pretend to have the one big answer for that. It’s a revolving clusterfuck, honestly. But I do feel like through mutual trial and error, Rupert and I have developed a pretty decent system for running our family life as a team.

Our method sparks a lot of interest in my mum-friends when I talk about it, which makes me suspect it’s not the norm. We do fall off the wagon of course, and when one of us travels and the other is solo parenting it gets harder. But this is all to be expected with kids and life. The point is we have a system to fall back on, and it works.

Our approach is based on a few key agreements:

1. Our household and family life, like a business or organisation, doesn’t just happen, it needs to be run. The running of it is a many-faceted and time-heavy workload, and cannot be shouldered by one person. We share the load as a team, and where we absolutely need and can afford to, we outsource help.

2. Every week, we have a Family Admin meeting, with an agenda (more about that later). If one of us is travelling, we meet on Zoom. In the beginning, these meetings started as ‘Admin dates’, on nights we could get a babysitter, but they’ve evolved to be daytime lunch meetings during the week now that we’re both working from home.

3. If we skip Family Admin meetings, balls get dropped, and we fight.

4. We go out for a date or some 1:1 time at minimum once a month.

5. 50-50 is an illusion. Aim to be equitable and consistent. And kind! And generous!

The relentlessness of domestic life is what I struggle with the most. There is no down time, no “I think I’ll just take a bath and watch Netflix tonight” and hardest of all, little impulsivity to ride the waves of inspiration when they come (thanks gosh for voice memos).

Becoming a parent has cost me that way of working. In its place it’s offered me structure, purpose and parameters, great for Isabella the person and mother, and enriching to the quality of my work, but like chalk screeching down the blackboard for the writer in me. My writer hates doing things for other people - unless they’re glamourous. She wants to slop around and take a bath for hours listening to Nina Simone, begin work at 4pm and write until 2 in the morning, sleep in, and have a lazy, late breakfast the next day, savouring each bite, unbothered and unhurried. My writer wants a den with a lockable door where no child or husband can enter, a desk covered in organised mess, my mess, sovereign and untouched. I’m basically a man from the 1800s on the inside. Don’t disturb daddy he’s above all this shit.

To achieve this level of aloofness as a mother though, you would need a wife and a patriarchal system to uphold your disconnection from community, duties, and guilt. Ha.

At the least, the need for artistic solitude requires a partner who is willing to go toe-to-toe on all the gritty details of what must be upheld while you enact a soft collapse into the arms of your work [The apology for ever having neglected the work in the first place can take sometimes a few hours for me just on its own.]

For that reason, time must now be carved. Which is kinda sexy in of itself. Me and my writer set clandestine dates away from my family. We meet in rooms, sometimes hotels, sometimes cafes, sometimes in other cities. But mostly I’m on the couch in my dressing gown, and that’s great.

I am fortunate that my husband is the number one protector and upholder of the solitude and space required for me to pursue an ongoing romance with my work. And in spirit he always has been, since the day we met. But in practice he needed a roadmap to explain where we were going, and frankly, so did I.

In the Before-Time.

In the last few months before I had my daughter in 2021, I had taken on a project scoring an American indie film called Plan B directed by the wonderful Natalie Morales. As a fan of my band The Preatures she’d asked for me to do it (or maybe she wanted the band and got me? I don’t remember.) It was significant in that I’d never composed and produced music for film before, and actually, I didn’t even know how to use Ableton or ProTools. But I loved the project, and propelled by the delusions of grandeur and invincibility induced by my first pregnancy, I took it on.

I remember spending those 15-hour work days in my home studio, bouncing away blissfully on my fit ball, totally immersed in my work. Every now and again a thought like How am I going to be able to work like this once the baby is actually outside of me? would cross my mind, and another part of me would answer, don’t think about it. I knew I was crossing a threshold but when the pressures of the work became too stressful or I hit a wall, I’d run myself a long, hot bath (I know I know, don’t come for me pregnancy warriors, I took scalding hot baths up until the end) and soak my worries away, ready to start fresh in the morning.

Words like fresh, ready and morning are like mini-grenades tossed into the sea of disappointment now that I’m a mum of an almost-four-year-old. But I’d like to admit that before I became a parent I loved writing things down in notebooks and giving myself shiny star stickers when I completed tasks.

Fuck, I really miss that old me. So many notebooks. So much clarity. Time for stickers (MY stickers). Everything I wrote down stayed in my mind more or less. But over the next few years, after lockdown with a newborn, moving house three times, moving country, and breastfeeding through all of it while trying to launch a solo career as a musician during a pandemic, I couldn't even locate a notebook, let alone write in it or keep up a habit of referring to it.

At this point my husband and I were unmarried, living together, and both freelance, ‘professional creatives’ (I hate the label for completely irrational reasons) and shit was not good. We regularly couldn't make rent, created plans and budgets we didn’t stick to because we were too tired and busy to communicate, and our mutual, volatile careers relied heavily on a wide support network of nannies, cleaners, family and friends to babysit and supplement care for our complex and every-changing schedules. $$$$$$$$.

The tipping point came in 2023 when Rupert’s behaviour became pronounced in ways that unnerved me. He would stand in front of the fridge holding the door open and ask where’s the milk? Where’s the tomato sauce? When he did bath time, he’d leave the dirty clothes, towels and diapers on the ground, and the bath undrained. If I was trying to grab a few moments alone to write, a barrage of questions would fly from the other room: Have you seen Mina’s bottle? Where are her pyjamas (in the drawers?!), on and on like this. He seemed to need me to explain and organise, from the top down, every single thing that needed to happen in our life. I had become a secretary.

I knew this was not a dynamic I could survive in. But also… wtf was going on and how could I talk to him about it??

Fair Play.

It was at this point I did some googling and found the Fair Play System, a method developed by Eve Rodsky to divvy up the myriad of responsibilities inherent in running a household and a family (although you don’t have to have kids to use it).

There is some criticism to be had for it having a somewhat matronising tone about it, and like much of what we’re talking about, is born of a system that intrinsically benefits men over women, the patriarchy, yada yada (see Marilyn talk about this below).

But I can’t talk about our system without owing a great deal to Fair Play. I listened to the audio book, and it gave me real tools that transformed the way I thought about my own time. Plus it provided me with a framework to have a conversation with Rups, a conversation in which the stakes for both of us were different.

For him, an honest conversation about our roles in the household may have opened up the possibility of him feeling criticised, of not being enough. This is a big deal for the masculine, where being able to provide and action things is paramount.

For me, it was about not succumbing to a dynamic that would initially wear me down, then subjugate me, and finally swallow me up: music, body, soul and all. For him, it was a matter of pride. For me it felt like the difference between marriage being a prison or a partnership, between living and dying. It sounds dramatic because fuck, it really is.

Much has been written about Fair Play so I won’t go into super detail, but basically tasks are divvied into a deck of cards that you ‘deal’ every week. Both partners’ time is equally valued, regardless of who is earning what. There are special cards for life events, and daily grind cards, reflecting the greater workloads inherent in certain tasks or stages of life. In that way, you begin to get an understanding and respect for what each other is actually doing, rather than focussing on ideas of transactional equality, as men tend to be obsessed with. Being responsible for breastfeeding, middle of the night comfort, the weekly meal plan, grocery shopping and cooking, for example, is not equivalent to say, taking the trash out and getting gas once a week, and taking the car for a service every few months.

Building on the same systems of accountability Rodsky observed in the corporate world, the same system is applied the (often invisible) work that goes into conceiving something needs to be done, planning to do something about it, then executing or delegating it.

While the system itself is not for everyone, we used it as the foundation to create our own, and it’s been a game-changer.

We stuck the cards up on the wall in the first few months because we’re visual people.

Family Admin Meetings.

So, we meet once a week, every week. These meetings are usually 1-2 hours long (I know!!!). The shortest we’ve managed is 45 minutes. But investing the time means everything runs smoother. My husband loves systems, so he drew up this Weekly Brief for us, and we make it through as much of it as we can.

Please note, it’s dense because we run two households in two countries, and have been upping our capacity for admin over the last few years. We started off a lot simpler.

Please excuse the pink line - the printer was running out of ink.

We always start with an emotional check in. Either a version of the week’s wins and losses, something we’re grateful for, something we appreciate about ourselves, whatever.

Doing this opens the floor to talk bout how the week before actually was, raise any issues, and connect with each other before we get down to business. The intimacy this creates helps immensely with decision making too.

Rups writes up our agenda for the next week as we chat through the agenda. An example for the week looks like:

This was a finance-heavy week because it’s coming up to tax time here in the US.

Rups makes 3 copies of this, one for me, one for him, and one for the fridge.

And then we go over roles, which are always changing:

It’s A LOT.

But I look forward to our weekly time together, meeting like colleagues for an important project we’re working on.

At the moment it’s lunchtimes so I cook us lunch and we have a chat, followed by dreary stuff like the budget, which Rups brings to the meeting.

We’ve sometimes had these meetings in the car while our daughter naps.

From these meetings, we’ve been able to prepare for things like me doing a national tour in Australia, writing trips to LA, Rupert’s business trips, actual FUN and LEISURE. Plus, we know it’s within our means.

I’m sure it’ll continue to evolve as neither of us can stay in one mode for very long, but it’s working for now!

Interested to hear if any of you have your own systems?

Iz x