Trading Places
To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of my death as a blogger have been greatly exaggerated. I know it has been nearly a year since I last wrote, which isn’t an uncommon occurrence for me; however, the circumstances under which I put my blogging on hiatus—actually, in this economy, that circumstance isn’t so uncommon either. Due to my husband’s job loss in March 2011, we have traded places. Thankfully, this trade didn’t involve any kind of Freaky Friday body swap. (I don’t think Matt could handle the PMS and I prefer to have two eye brows.) This trade involved a move halfway across the country, which resulted in me becoming the sole earner and in him becoming a stay-at-home dad, for the time being. While this trade has been stressful, and at times, not ideal, we have learned quite a bit about ourselves, each other, and our marriage.
For the past seventeen years, I have stayed at home or worked part-time while Matt carried the burden of being the primary and sometime sole earner. With that burden came stress and worry. Stress over meeting deadlines and expectations both at work and at home and bowing to the whims of people (and I’m sorry to say that my name is on this list) who were often unfair, politically motivated, and self-serving. He worried over losing his job and putting our family in jeopardy. This burden was making him sick. In my own defense, for the last seven years, I had been working two jobs, teaching and tutoring part-time at a local community college. Between my two jobs, I was pretty much working full-time; I just wasn’t getting any of the full-time “perks,” such as a livable wage or health benefits. I felt stress as well, but nothing to the magnitude that Matt did. While his lay-off was horrible, in the long run, it will probably prove to be a blessing; it may have even saved his life.
Knowing his lay-off was pending, we both started sending out resumes and looking for full-time employment. While we wanted to remain in the Philadelphia area where we had developed deep roots over the past eleven years, we were open to moving back to the Midwest so that we could be closer to our aging parents. We had moved to Philadelphia from Chicago in 2000 so that Matt could take the job that he was now getting laid off from, so moving and starting over again, wasn’t something new to us. Therefore, while we were concentrating on staying in the East, we were casting a wide net when applying for positions. Then, after several months of looking, I was offered a full-time teaching position, which had been a goal of mine even before Matt’s lay-off, at a university in Southern Ohio. So we up-rooted our three daughters and our lives and moved to a small town in the rust belt of Appalachia—a completely foreign area to us. But the East was once an unknown, so we knew we could adapt.
Now, I’m the one working late and calling home with a guilty sound in my voice, knowing (and hoping) my presence is needed at home. Before, I was the one who knew all the parents at the girls’ school and all the families at church because I was the one who volunteered at our school and church. Now, after Mass, Matt’s the one talking and saying hi to our fellow parishioners while I don’t know a soul. School events are lonely, solitary events that I attend with a pang of longing for the familiar faces of dear friends. Matt is the one attending field trips with our youngest and spending all those precious moments with her that I used to get to enjoy. During a recent doctor’s appointment for our three daughters, when the doctor questioned me, the mother and the person who should know, about one of our daughter’s migraines, I looked to Matt because I didn’t know the answers. He was the one who had been there for all of her care; I was at work.
It isn’t just these big things where we’ve traded places, but the small ones too. In the past, especially when our oldest was small and Matt didn’t know better, he would often come home to find the house a mess, dishes in the sink, and the laundry undone. Many an argument was started with “What did you do all day?” However, that quickly changed because Matt is such an involved parent that he soon realized the time and energy it takes to care for a small child (and an older child for that matter). Now that he’s home all day, he understands that the window between the time the girls go off to school and when they come home is actually relatively small in relationship to the things that need to get done during that time, especially when the majority of his time is spent researching jobs, tweaking resumes, and spending hours navigating poor employer sites and answering questions that he knows he’ll only be re-asked during any potential interview (but that’s another blog). Therefore, there are many days that the dishes are still in the sink when I get home and the laundry is piling up and the floor needs vacuumed, but I know better than to say anything because I’ve been there; I’ve done that.
Now I know the stress of something going wrong at work and worrying that it might have dire consequences. I know the sensation of biting my tongue and swallowing my pride when office politics gets the best of me (honestly, I’m still working on this one). I’m the one who’s snapping at the kids when I come home because I’ve had a difficult or overwhelming day (okay, that happened before too). But now I have a clear understanding of what it means to be the sole provider, and I also realize how unrealistic it was of me to suggest that he “just quit” every time he raged about work.
As the old Native American saying goes, “You can’t know a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.” While I don’t recommend losing your job, I do recommend trading places with your spouse from time to time. So many times when we quarrel with our spouses because of stress and worry at work or undone dishes at home, it’s only human nature to feel affronted, to take the other’s comments as a personal attack. Next time, maybe you can’t physically trade with your spouse as Matt and I have, but you can take a step back from your own feelings and mentally and emotionally try to be more understanding and empathetic when your spouse voices his or her concerns and fears; you can think about where he or she is coming from and try to find out the motives and feelings behind his or her words. Most importantly, no matter how much you like your nice house, cable TV with HBO, health club or country club memberships, designer clothes, and weeklong vacations at a beach house on the coast, is it really worth your spouse’s mental and physical health and possibly your marriage to maintain all of those things? I say no.
Trading places has made us, to an extent as we aren’t perfect after all, more compassionate of one another and the “position” we hold in the family, and it has made our marriage stronger because we’ve taken the time to try to learn the lessons that life is handing us. We are learning to let the piddlely-crap, like the dishes, go. Or at least, now we make the girls do them.
Tags: job loss, laid-off, marriage, spouse, trading places
January 24, 2012 10:26 am 3 Comments
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By Monica, January 24, 2012 @ 10:39 am
Great blog, Glenna! Very insightful and heartfelt. Though my situation is not quite the same as yours, I understand the difficulties of major life changes, especially surrounding jobs and income, as well as the strain it can put on a marriage. But, as you say, you also learn a lot about yourself and your partner from these experiences, and it’s important to keep those lessons in perspective because sometimes they’re the only silver linings to an oftentimes very dark cloud.
By Ruth, January 25, 2012 @ 4:20 pm
Your new blog contains a great deat of wisdom, Glenna! Many couples never learn these lessons and their marriages suffer for it. As you know, Dad and I switched the major wage owner positions in our marriage years ago and that took a lot of adjustment. However, we survived and our relationship is richer. It has also helped us be more understanding of the dilemmas other families face.
By Matt Todt, January 26, 2012 @ 1:23 pm
Te Amo!
I look forward to getting back to work and I thank you Babe (Glenna) for the room to explore a wider variety of positions than I would have before all this occurred. Great Blog to my budding Erma Bombeck (or am I dating ourselves?!)