Well, here we are again. By “we” I mean my family; and by “here” I mean with one of us out of a job.
Several years ago, my husband left a job that was literally sucking the life out of him (thanks to a bullying boss and a badly-run organization, he lost: 15 lbs. and his natural, glass-half-full outlook. What he did not lose, thank heaven, was his remarkable, resilient, family-forged work ethic). Anyway, though he made the correct decision to leave that job, he had no way of knowing that smack on the heels of it would come the first rumblings of the great recession, or Great Recession, or whatever we’re calling the most recent economic downturn. He was out of work for a year and a half.
Now he’s once again out of work — I’ll spare you the details because every time I try to explain his odyssey of the last few years it starts to sound like I’m defending something indefensible, or worse, whining on his behalf. I whine all the time, sure, but he doesn’t. Suffice to say, and notwithstanding the fact that I’m his wife and have that love-and-fidelity bias, he was making the very best of a bad situation, and ended up being forced out for not-good reasons.
I’m of course nervous and heavy-hearted at the prospect of going through what we went through before. It wasn’t pretty. The fun included going to the bank to close the boys’ meager bank accounts to squeak us through another month. I’m not sure if I was crying because of what I was doing, or because the teller didn’t even blink as she cut the check. Another bright spot? Dropping our health insurance when the choice became that or the mortgage; thank goodness we’re knock-wood-healthy. But despite knowing what might be ahead this go-around, I’m not upset. In fact, weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly as I’ll explain), I’m feeling both upbeat and optimistic right now.
My optimism stems from a couple different places. One, put simply, we did this before and we can do it again. Two, my husband is now closer to figuring out what he really, truly wants to do with his life, his passions and his talents. It’s his time — and it’s my job as his partner to help him figure that out. It’s what we do. That feeling — that it’ll be hard but ultimately rewarding; that we are in this together — is, to my mind, the very best part of having a good marriage. Go team, and all that.
But another reason has to do with how we work here in our humble suburban home, in our nearly 10-year marriage, in our thus far eight-year-long foray into parenting.
A month or so ago, I was listening to a segment of the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC.org (yeah, that’s me; NPR radio streaming on my computer is the soundtrack of my working life), in which Lopate was interviewing Joan Williams, author of the book Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. Here’s the interview, if you care to listen. Many of the points Williams makes were riveting (I love this stuff), and also puzzling (because it just doesn’t work this way in my home.)
Williams brought up stats we’ve probably all heard before, about how even as mothers have entered the full-time workforce over the last several decades, they still do the vast majority of housework and childcare. She also mentioned something that really made me take notice, about how much time fathers spend with their kids as a function of socioeconomic class. Here’s essentially what she notes:
White-collar fathers are more likely than their blue-collar counterparts to “talk the talk” about being around for their kids day-to-day, but end up not walking the walk (whether that’s because when push comes to shove they don’t want to play “SpongeBob Operation” or coach the soccer team; or — Williams’ main point — because they are under enormous pressure at work to perform like serious, career-minded men are supposed to, which does not involve skipping out at 5 or, heaven forbid, actually taking paternity leave. More on that later). Meanwhile, blue collar men may not be talking the talk about equal care for and time spent with their kids (possibly they don’t even know the lingo — this is me editorializing — not having been schooled in the gender-wars zeitgeist). But, they do, in practical terms, end up being more apt to walk the walk. To change a shift so they can be there for the recital, for example, or to show up at the elementary school for career day.
The issue seems to be, to my mind: Who do you feel more sorry for — the corporate lawyer chained to expectations that “real men” don’t skip out after a mere 80 hour week to get LuLu to her ice-skating competition? Or the union truck driver who’ll never make it in the circles of power (but can coach Little League)?
I tell ya, I feel sorry for all of us modern moms and dads in these scenarios. Another thing Williams points out, and is also nicely discussed in this recent Newsweek article entitled “Men’s Lib,” by Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil, is that overall workforce expectations and set-ups are woefully inadequate to the ways today’s families, or many of them, strive to make a living and raise their children. As Williams pointed out in the radio interview, the typical corporate entity/company still sees the ideal worker as someone who gets a job, works full time, full tilt for 40 or so years, and then retires. The only people who are able to do that without losing all their marbles are men with stay-at-home wives. For everyone else, it just works better when it’s fluid. And the American economy and workplace norms (all the nods to paternity leave and so-called family friendliness and the precious few places with subsidized or on-site daycare and — in rarer cases — nice, pleasant places for working/nursing mothers to pump breastmilk to one side) are not fluid. In most cases, moms suffer for taking time from their careers, dads suffer when they try to be more family-friendly, and kids just…suffer.
Which brings me back to our little family. When we first had Daniel, my husband had just finished graduate school. I had a well-paying editor’s job, and downshifted my position and salary to a three-day week. He taught a couple of college classes, had a couple of personal-training clients, and a part-time job in a hospital weight-management clinic. We had a babysitter for the three days I worked. Most of the time, my husband was long gone by the time Daniel and I woke up, and I handed off the baby to the very capable and loving Maggie. And much of the time, though Maggie was able to be there until I got home at 6pm, I’d arrive home to find Robert starting dinner while our happy, fat son bounced in his babyseat or munched on a Zweiback in his high chair.
By the time we moved from the city to the suburbs, my husband had taken a different job, ditching the multiple-part-time schedule that had seen him through graduate school for a full-time, but at home position. Again, the juggling resumed: I welcomed the nanny, he drove me to the train station, then returned to his home office. Later, when I switched to freelance life after James was born, we were both in home offices (Daniel would say, “Mommy works upstairs, and Daddy works downstairs,” which I think is a pretty cool thing for a kid to say, not because my son’s particularly clever, but because it was actually quite cool that he had no experience or memory of it being any other way.) We did wonder what the neighbors thought, when we’d return from dropping them both off at daycare. (“So, the kids are gone, but they’re home…”)
I wish that weren’t so odd a situation.
Eventually, my husband left that job for the one with the evil boss, who very nearly robbed him of his enthusiasm. One thing about this woman — and she was a woman, a mother of a teenager — that he found incomprehensible was how dismissive she was of men in the office, like my husband, who would routinely leave before, say, 7pm. She was not just dismissive, in fact; she was derisive and scornful toward men who had such inconsequential jobs that they were home to make dinner. She was speaking not of my husband in this instance, who in those days never got home in time to make dinner, much less eat it with us, but of her own husband. (I’d tell you about the time she kept my husband late to fruitlessly and humiliatingly harangue him for a mistake he’d already corrected, while her own daughter was waiting for her to pick her up from an after-school job — “eh, she can wait. Or call her father” — but I’d just get depressed).
That’s just wrong.
As I write, my husband is on his way to a job interview. I hope it gets it, of course; I hope this or whatever other plans and schemes he’s working out for his next career step make him feel good about himself, as a man and a husband as well as a father. But am I wrong to admit that, absent thorny realities of paychecks, retirement savings, and health insurance, I wish he could stay home, too? Because when we’re both working productively, but also both parenting equally (or equally-ish; he still isn’t quite sure of the pediatrician’s phone number or what goes in the lunchboxes) we’re all happier.
The subtitle of the Newsweek article I linked to above reads, in part, “Why it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home.”
Couldn’t agree more. Because that, my friends, would really constitute some honest-to-goodness family values.
I’d love to hear what you think about men and women, work and family, class and (in the case of certain ex-bosses), the lack thereof.
Fingers crossed that all goes well for both you and your husband! It’s so important to love what you do because the average American puts in way too much time at the office. Although my husband is a wonderful Renaissance man (he gets up first and makes breakfast for all AND my lunch; the first thing he says when he gets home from work is, “how can I help?”), he still finds it hard to leave the office before 7 pm. He struggles with work/family issues all the time. He loves to be with his family but he feels the pressure to “perform” at work. And for his company, that means “200%.” Yes, the boss has said that.
The solution? I haven’t a clue. Winning the lottery would be nice!
Nicely written, as usual, Denise. And so poignant, especially here in the middle of the Great Recession.
Personally, I think that Face Time is vastly overrated (which is why I work from home, for myself), and that so much can be done by air cards, laptops, cell phones and Skype that you’d think corporations had learned to embrace fluidity by now. But it appears that’s not always the case.
I highly doubt that this is the year for workers to ask their companies to walk the walk, not when everyone’s so fearful of losing their jobs. But I do think that attitudes have changed in the past decade and will change for the better again — perhaps when our sons have jobs.
Great blog post. And oh so true. My husband worked crazy hours including all day Saturdays (no chance to ever be a coach then) and was never home for dinner when we lived in NY. One of the reasons we left was so I could get a full time job and give him that one in a lifetime chance to pursue his art career dreams (petergeigerart.com) and spend more time with our kids. Now I work 8:30-5 and have some flexibility, while he works from home at his full-time job and pursuing his career. He may not know how to manage the carpool schedule, but he will drive the kids wherever he has to whenever I tell him he has to go. And he’ll do whatever needs to be done in the house since I’m not there. Yet, interestingly, my teenage daughter still thinks I do most of the housework (even though I really don’t – I just cook most, not all the dinners). I miss being a freelancer, working from home, and being there for my kids. But I push away my guilt knowing my husband is there for them when I can’t be. Good luck with your situation. I am sure all work will out for you and your family.
As usual, D, you are spot on. At the end of Judith Warner’s book, Perfect Madness, she talks about the changes that have to made nationally to support families in the way you describe-so that individual families can choose what works for them the best. In our house, as you know, we have a pretty traditional situation that came about because I had the luxury to make the choice to be home and work part-time. It has its benefits and downsides, but I do appreciate that most people don’t get to choose. There are some household responsibilities that are shared, and some that simply aren’t, because right now it’s my job to do them. (And sometimes I complain, ‘cuz that’s what I do) But we do parent together and make all the major decisions affecting the kids together. And my husband, even with his crazy hours, finds the time to be a significant presence in his kids’ lives. So we make it work.
Great post, Denise. Every single family I know struggles with these issues. And while it wasn’t ideal, what with the high infant mortality rates and all, I sometimes think nostalgically of the pioneer days, or at least the days before the Industrial Revolution. I’m all for machines and the Internet, but back then, families worked together. They did what they needed to do to survive. Yes, Dad worked, and so did Mom. But they were both home, around, in view of each other and the children.
I don’t truly want to go back in time, but a moden-day equivalent — kind of like what you described, with one parent upstairs and one downstairs — sounds pretty darn appealing.
A great post.. as always. My best wishes are with you both always….
This post really resonated with me. I have three daughters and as a former ‘career woman’, would not have chosen to do so unless I knew my husband was going to be an equal partner in ‘getting his hands dirty’. Two of the girls are now in school, one in part-time daycare. During the past seven years my husband and i have put together a variety of different combinations of work and child duty. These included my husband working four days a week and/or flexible hours depending upon my work situation at the time. (I have increased from one day to three, with no plans to do more.)
For example, today he left for work early, and will work 6am-2pm then pick up the girls, do dinner and the bedtime routine. I did the morning routine and drop off and will work 9.30-5.30ish, getting home at 6pm to say goodnight.
Of course this only works because we have flexible employers. But we have both had several job interviews during the past seven years and each time we made flexibility a prerequisite. If the employer couldn’t guarantee flexibility, that wasn’t the right job for us.
Of course, we have had to make sacrifices and accept a lower income. But that is our choice, because we choose to spend this precious, too-short time while our girls are young, being with them as much as possible.
I think we’ve got a pretty much perfect arrangement, and I’d like to let your readers know that it CAN be done. But no-one said it’s the easy way, it has to be a genuine priority, with all the sacrificing and negotiating that entails.
Cathy,
thanks for your response! The juggling can be maddening and confusing, but I take that over one person being all-the-time-home, and the other being all-the-time-out. When that happens, you have the two spheres that never cross each other – so you know nothing about the work world’s pressures and interests, and the other person is ultimately an alien visitor in the home. As hard as it is for us financially and in other ways, I prefer our colliding, crossing spheres.
keep reading,
Denise
Thanks for writing this, Denise. As brand new parents (our son is 7 weeks old) my husband and I are just starting to figure out how to juggle work and family. We are more fortunate than most in that I work for a small non-profit that is happy to have me work three days a week when I go back in January, a mother-in-law who will keep our son on two of those days, and a husband whose office is a mile from our home, enabling him to come home every day for lunch and be home before 5:00 most evenings.
That being said, my husband feels incredible pressure to give 110% to a job that he is good at but doesn’t like. He feels guilty for taking vacations (or more accurately dreads what awaits him when he comes back from vacation) and feels guilty for asking for flex time to go to doctor’s appointments, etc. with me and the baby. But there’s also the guilt of not “being there” for things like doctor’s appointments, etc. So how does he find a balance?
His boss is a really nice person outside the office, and the mother of two small boys. But at work, she expects her employees to give as much as she does, and says that being even 5 minutes late is “stealing from the company.” How can he give what he needs to give to our family and still stay in the good graces of his employer? The stress of finding that balance seems to weigh heavier on him than on me, mostly because (stereotypically) he wins the bread, carries the health insurance, and is the man and now the father. He feels like it’s what he’s “supposed” to do. It’s not necessarily what he would rather do. He doesn’t want to be the kind of employee that his father was – always working and when at home, was preoccupied with work.
We’re brand new at this, so I don’t know the answer. We’re just trying to do the best we can and figure it out as we go…
julia,
thank you for that thoughtful post — and congratulations on the new baby (and being able to write a long, well-crafted response when your baby’s just 7 weeks!).
Thinking back, I realize that it was easier for my husband in that respect — because he was doing a couple of part time jobs at the time of our first son’s birth, he didn’t have that one-boss, one-company pressure to perform. That is all hitting him now, when he tries to be serious about his career and fulfill his dreams, and remain the involved father and partner that I’m so lucky to have. Really, it’s time for American companies and policies to step up!
keep reading,
Denise
This is a really interesting, thoughtful post. Your distinction between white-collar and blue-collar fathers rings true with everything I’ve read on shared parenting. I also appreciate how you highlight the pressures men are under at work that make it hard for them to be available at home.
I second the feeling in your comment to Cathy. Shared parenting can be a messy, inefficient affair because you do constantly end up negotiating and renegotiating tasks. But I also far prefer the “colliding, crossing spheres” you describe to the alternative.
I only wish more couples had the opportunity to experience this arrangement.
One organization that has done a lot of interesting work in this area is the ThirdPath Institute. I interviewed founder Jessica Degroot years ago and she is very articulate and passionate about this subject. Their website might provide resources for some of your readers. They’re at http://www.thirdpath.org
Interesting post. My husband and I have lived and worked overseas for most of the past 10 years, so our take is somewhat different. I’m really appreciative of the fact that parenting is something we’ve both done together; with the exception of visits to the kids’ schools (cuz my french was better than his), we divide things pretty fairly. But I have seen the difference you quote between white and blue collar fathers.
best wishes to you and your husband! Hope he gets the job and it proves to be flexible too!