How is the mental load split in your house, and how do you work out if it's "fair"?? Can it ever be fair, and does it really matter as long as it's fairly close?
I work full time from home, and my husband teaches part time and looks after our two kids (under 3) the rest of the time. Because he spends pretty much 100% of business hours around children, I do all the life admin that requires the phone or the internet. Bills, banking, appointments, bookings for things, etc etc etc.
Because he's in the house more (don't really count my home office as the house, as if I step foot out of the door I'm accosted by tiny terrors!) he does all of what he calls the "physical mental load". He does the meal planning, the keeping on top of whether we need loo roll or toilet paper or rice or coffee, it's him who keeps track of what size feet the kids have and whether they need to go up a size of clothing, and he does most of the planning of fun days out.
Housework and childcare, outside my 9-5 it's a relatively even split. I do more night wakes because I'm breastfeeding, he does more cooking because he loves it, but we tend to end up pretty level if you look at it over a week.
Generally speaking this works really well, but every now and then I'm on the phone with British Gas or I'm working out how much we have spare in the bank and I feel lightly resentful that all the stressful stuff is on me. And I know sometimes he gets irritated that he's the one keeping track of toddler socks and laundry liquid and all the mundane endless relentless shit that comes with being an adult. It feels like each of us having our zones of responsibility is a really efficient way to run things, but at the same time it doesn't always feel fair.
How does everyone else split it? Mix the jobs up or divide them in half? I think maybe we're just exhausted and it's making us aggy. I don't know.