Land of the Free, Home of the Diaper Change

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re here for the first time, I’m glad you’re joining me. I hope you decide to stick around. To my returning listeners, welcome back.

What’s an area of your life where you need to cooperate with others? Would you describe yourself as a team player?

Marriage and raising a family is a team effort. Good communication and a spirit of cooperation toward your shared goals are key to success. This is something I’m very much still learning as we deal with this new challenge called parenthood. This brings me to the phrase for today’s episode: pull your weight. Pull your weight.

Here’s something interesting about that phrase: it can land very differently depending on who it’s aimed at. Said to someone else, it comes across as sharp, even a little critical, like you’re calling them out. Said to yourself, it feels more like quiet self-reflection, a private commitment to do better.

There’s a reason for that intensity: the phrase comes from rowing. The earliest known printed use shows up in a British newspaper in 1869, describing a rower who “pulls his weight many times over.” In a rowing boat, every person contributes force in proportion to their place in the crew. If one person isn’t pulling their weight, the boat is literally slower, and everyone else has to work harder to make up for it. That’s a pretty vivid origin for a phrase we now use about chores and responsibility.

To pull your weight simply means to do your fair share of the work in a group. No more, no less.

Lately, that’s been on my mind because Emma and I are figuring out, day by day, how to split the work of raising Eliana while both of us are still working our own jobs. Some days I feel like I’m pulling my weight. Other days, I’m pretty sure Emma’s doing the rowing for both of us.

Keep that phrase in mind as it’s related to what I’ll be talking about today.

America is often referred to as the land of the free and the home of the brave, the closing line of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I sang it once with my high school a cappella group, meaning a singing group with no instruments, in front of a stadium of 17,000 people.

I don’t know that I’d call myself brave. I’m still mildly afraid to change some of Eliana’s stinkiest diapers, after all. But I’d call myself free. One of the ways freedom shows up in modern America is the freedom to choose your own family dynamics: husband works, wife works, both work, homeschool or public school. One of my friends from Utah comes from a family with 12 siblings, but I know many people who prefer one kid or even none. There’s far less social pressure for your family to look one specific way than you’d find elsewhere in the world. I’m grateful for that, but it comes with its own complications.

My wife and I both work. I teach English online in private one-on-one classes. She teaches theatrical design at a university to dozens of students at a time. We’ve decided not to put Eliana in daycare, which means we have to plan ahead so one of us can be with her throughout the day. It might mean we keep some strange-looking working hours, but it’s been working well for us so far.

In her role as a lighting and scenic design professor, Emma designs for some of the university’s shows: plays, musicals, operas, ballets, and a few more niche kinds of performances. She’s also worked for a variety of theater and performing groups as a freelance designer, meaning she’s hired project by project instead of working for one company full-time. This week, she’s needed extra focused time to work on a project for an upcoming musical at Texas State University. To get that focus, we’ve coordinated time for her to leave the house and work in our apartment complex’s clubhouse. Our daughter is not yet on board with letting my wife work undisturbed, if she has anything to say about it.

One of the things I keep relearning during these precious hours with Eliana is that, while I love her very much, she’s still on the fence about me.

Today started out wonderfully. We read the same three board books four times each because she loves books more than almost any toy. She practiced standing up by herself, her legs wobbling like a tiny sailor on rough water, falling, laughing, and trying again. We had a long, slow snack of applesauce and cheese puffs. We were having a pretty great time. I felt like I had this whole fatherhood thing down, for about three hours.

Then, almost like a switch was flipped, everything changed. No warning, no obvious trigger. One moment she was babbling happily and crawling around the house; the next, she was red-faced and furious, arching her back away from me the second I tried to pick her up.

I tried the usual playbook: a different toy, a song, a walk around the apartment, carrying her up on my shoulder so she could see her little world from a new perspective. Nothing worked. She didn’t want food. She didn’t want her pacifier. She mostly seemed to want her mother, and her mother was very deliberately far away trying to finish her scene drafts.

I won’t pretend I handled that hour gracefully. Times like these really push me outside of my comfort zone, bouncing her on my hip, singing the same four words of a song I’d invented, while she screamed directly into my ear at a volume matching a jet engine. At one point, I caught my own reflection in the dark TV screen, looking thoroughly defeated. Two minutes ago, I felt like Father of the Year. Now the reviews were coming in, and they were not good.

We got by that hour, mostly by sheer endurance rather than skill. When Emma finally walked back through the door, Eliana completely changed before she even reached her, arms out, crying turning into happy babble. With the return of her favorite parent, all was right in the world, and I once again got to see my daughter’s smiling face.

On days like this, when Eliana’s upset and there’s not much I can do about it, it helps to remember that Emma and I are in this together. There are things Emma’s better at with our daughter than I am, and there’s help I can give that she’d struggle to manage alone. Neither of us wants to raise Eliana on our own, and we don’t have to. We’re doing our best to build a loving family, and even on the days it leaves us both feeling a little sore, doing it together makes all the difference.

Let’s take a closer look at two phrases that also fit this situation: “in the same boat” and “rowing in the same direction.” Both borrow the same image, a boat, but they come from very different places.

“In the same boat” is the older of the two by a long way. The earliest written use anyone’s found is from 1584, in an English translation of a French poem, where the writer compares shared suffering to two people stuck in one boat together. You’ll also see it claimed that the phrase comes from Greek sailors in the 1800s. I want to be honest with you here: nobody can fully confirm which story is the real origin. The trail is too old and tangled for that. What’s clear is that the idea itself is centuries old. Once you’re in a boat with someone, you share whatever happens to it, good weather or bad.

“Rowing in the same direction” is a much younger phrase. It really took off in the early 2000s, popularized by business and leadership writers describing teams that all understand the goal and pull toward it together. It doesn’t have centuries of history behind it. It caught on simply because the image works: a boat only moves efficiently if everyone’s oar is pulling the same way.

Put them together and you get a nice pair. In the same boat means you can’t escape sharing the outcome, whether you like it or not. Rowing in the same direction means you’ve chosen to aim at the same outcome on purpose. Emma and I chose to get in this boat together, but we don’t have control over what the wind and the sea throw at us. We do, however, have to choose whether we’re rowing the same way. Some days that’s easier than others.

Here’s a non-parenting example: two roommates splitting a lease are in the same boat the moment they sign it, like it or not. But they’re only rowing in the same direction once they actually agree on how to split chores and bills.

So here’s something to sit with: the next time you’re working toward something with someone else, a partner, a coworker, a roommate, see if you can name which boat you’re in, and notice whether you’re both actually rowing the same way.

New parenthood has felt a lot like learning to row for the first time, with someone else, in a boat neither of us has steered before. We’re going to be a little uneven sometimes, but we’re each trying our best to pull our weight. I think that’s all that matters.

So here’s a question for you: who’s in your boat right now? And is there one part of pulling your weight that’s turned out harder than you expected?

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.