Time Off

My husband is a fairly good-natured sort who really doesn’t complain too much. So when, about a month into his new job at a small law firm, he started talking about how unhappy he was, I listened carefully.

Lots of people get the Sunday blues. Before I struck out on my own as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, I would sink into full clinical depression in anticipation of the work week. And once, at a family gathering, the conversation worked its way around to who liked their job, and—no surprise here—no one did. Probably most of us who need to earn a living wish we could just play instead or maybe just play a bit more, but I do think the Sunday blues are maybe a sign that you’re not doing your Life’s Work. And so, after getting myself used to the idea, this is what I told my husband: Just give your notice. Two weeks—no more, no less.

He told me he couldn’t do that. My theory, though, is that he wanted to but felt he needed to ask my permission—not a bad notion when you have a spouse and two mortgages. He said he felt responsible for me, for us. And there would soon be more us to take care of, since I was newly pregnant with our now-teenage son. But when I had quit my job to freelance, he was supportive, even though it strained our finances. And so I wanted to return the favor. Do it, I said. Leave.

It took him a few days, but he did it. In no time, he began to look happier. And it just seemed right to me. I stopped popping antacids: His unhappiness had been stressing me out.

But I consider myself a practical person, and there were arrangements to make. This, after all, was just a problem to solve. Purchase a second computer: done. Investigate and buy a health-insurance policy: done. Set aside money for mortgage and taxes: done. List makers, after all, like nothing better than a list, and the best defense against abstract worries is concrete information and clear action. Besides, making a list gives you something to do while you think.

The plan started to come together. My husband and I had been burning the candle at both ends for about five years, on a historic-house rehab project—trying to do the right thing for a beautiful but long-neglected two-family place we’d purchased to fulfill a residency requirement for a job he’d held. We had snagged it for less than $20,000—you’re thinking, wow, cheap—but we’d been hemorrhaging money ever since we bought the place. That, and we’d busted our behinds evenings and weekends. This was in addition to the half-renovated house that we actually lived in. We already had a great tenant upstairs in the rental property, and my husband’s first order of business upon leaving his job would be to finish the downstairs apartment and rent it, too, wiping away a whole lot of expenses we’d been carrying. Between that project, having full-time jobs, and normal daily activities, we also hadn’t been able to finish work we’d periodically started on our own residence, and the place was a mess. That would be the second order of business. Houses had pretty much dominated our life in the recent past, and we thought maybe it was time to tie up those loose ends. Essentially, he wouldn’t be sitting around watching television.

And so we convinced ourselves that as long as we were careful about cash—something the house projects hadn’t allowed us to be in the past few years—we could make this work and float this situation for a few months. For sure, mortgages can be worrisome and the health-insurance premium was not insignificant, but we figured out that we could cover them. And I was looking forward to cooking more and actually eating meals together. We could still go out to the movies sometimes, and I even planned a budget-conscious weekend away that winter. No, we could do this and even emerge from the other end of the tunnel with a nicer house to boot. We had a roof over our heads, we earned some rental income that at the very least offset our expenses for the property, and I had projects coming in. We wouldn’t starve.

But of course there were nonmaterial considerations as well.

I liked the challenge of becoming the chief breadwinner. And, odd as it sounds, I saw paying for our health insurance as a symbol of shaping our own destiny. Because let’s face it: More than a few people have stayed with a job they don’t like because of the health insurance.

Although we began to see it as a grand leap, we knew other people might call it an irresponsible step. I’ve done it more than once myself, but leaving a job with nothing lined up is, after all, a big taboo in our society. And as much as we might think otherwise, the reality is that you’re subject to other people’s expectations. Certainly, some family members were a bit concerned, and, I think, puzzled. My husband’s father tried to hand him a large wad of cash (he didn’t take it). My parents, whenever I spoke with them, asked whether he was even looking for a new job yet (he wasn’t). And when my husband told a work acquaintance that he was going to be taking some time off, the fellow said something along the lines of, “You’re taking time off? Who does that?” But mostly family members and other people we told commented on how relaxed he looked. One friend said she wasn’t at all worried about my husband, that he was smart and sensible and he’d be fine. And some even elevated him to folk-hero status: They were really jealous and wanted to take time off too.

Then there was the perplexing issue of what would make my husband, or both of us, happy. Him deciding what he wanted to be when he grew up was just part of the answer. But the broader question was this: What did we want our life to be like?

Around that time, I was listening to my local National Public Radio station and heard an interview with a person named Lee Eisenberg, who had written a book called The Number. The gist of it was that we’re all told to plan for our retirement—for our future—but that so many of us don’t really have a clear idea of what we’re planning for. I passed this thought on to my husband.

I also thought of a John Irving book I’d read a long time ago, The 158-Pound Marriage. It contained a line that I’ve always remembered: “If you’re living the way you want to, the concept of holidays,” meaning vacations, “becomes obsolete.” I mentioned this, too. And I reminded him that even when he’d enjoyed his jobs overall, he often felt like they were an interruption in his day. And if this was usually the case, maybe he wasn’t doing what he should be doing. He said I was probably right.

But how do we come to our career aspirations, or to what, in general, we want out of life? I know people who keep their lives on track through a five-year plan. I was well into my twenties before I’d even heard of this concept. I remember when I did, though, because I promptly brought the matter up with my husband, who was then still my boyfriend. “What’s our five-year plan? Why don’t we have one?” I think he rolled his eyes and asked why I always worried so much about what everybody else was doing. We’ve now been together for almost thirty-five years—married for twenty-five of them—and we still don’t have much of a five-year plan.

And though our life choices have been attributable more to twinges of inclination, perhaps, than to some life checklist or grand scheme, things have come together anyway. If life is the narrative, themes have developed. A happy marriage, most days. A sum total of three nice old houses, even though they’ve taken a lot of our time and most of our money. My freelance work, which for a long time gave me job satisfaction I would not otherwise have had.

I have often envied people who came to their focus, their passions, and perhaps their successes at an early age. The child prodigies, the supermotivated go-getters, the people who knew by the time they were eight years old that they would be, say, a doctor. But my husband and I aren’t those people. I’m told that my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Abraham, thought I would be a lawyer or the first woman president of the United States. Sorry, Mrs. Abraham. The only ambitions I had—evidently declared when I was about four years old—were that when I grew up, I wanted to be either an Indian princess, as I understood Pocahontas to be, or a frog. My husband said he never had any driving career ambitions either, although I think one could do worse than to be a frog.

But I don’t want to dwell on the past. Although the verdict is always still out—and, I suppose, the jury is reconvened daily—we’ve managed to make for ourselves a pretty good life.

What about my husband, though? When it came time to do so, of course he returned to work, though I remember telling a former co-worker of his who called from time to time—a nice man who seemed to be very worried about my husband’s future—that the “Honey-Do” list I’d prepared was so long, paid employment wouldn’t actually fit in his schedule. (All these years later, I still feel this way.)

While he was doing that light construction on our houses for six to twelve hours a day, though, he found it pretty enjoyable. He whistled while he worked.

During that time, he honestly didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do and said he wanted to get the renovations a bit farther along before he thought about it. You have to come to an understanding with yourself about what you want before you can go about finding how to get it. I’m an idea person, though, and I ran new ones by him every day. The way I saw it was that I had to stake a claim in our shared future. But during that time we tried to keep in mind that however things worked out—and they did work out—that time off from the workaday world was a gift.