In August of 2011, The Redhead was entering second grade. We had the school shoes, the first day outfit, the backpack, the lunch box, most of the supplies, and gifts for our teacher. On the 15th of August, a Monday, I was upset over something trivial like someone de-friending me on Facebook (come to find out, that person had momentarily deleted their account altogether) and while processing that, I quickly e-mailed Mister Man, asked about his day, griped for a second about things that don't really matter, and he e-mailed back with "call me."
"Call me," turned into words I didn't expect to hear. He had been let go from his job as well as some of his other employees. No warning, no severance, not even pay from vacation time. Because they were a small enough company, they could do this legally. I was immediately frantic. I had a million questions. What were we going to do? How do we get through this? How can this be?
Our phone call lasted maybe three minutes. As soon as I got off the phone, I briefly cried tears of panic, then I called a temp company I had worked for in the past and left a message. I was between hyperventilating and reasonable thinking. I had no idea what we were going to do. The economy wasn't at its best, and while he had found many opportunities in the past, or rather, they found him, they weren't always local. And salary would be an issue.
But I couldn't worry about all of that.
Something hit me. If I was this worried, what about him? He was the one used to providing for his family. He was the one who liked his wife home. He was the one who put in extra hours, attained his masters, and again, he was the one who confidently knew he could provide for his family. I realized this had to be a huge blow to his ego. I told myself "to get it together." I smacked myself around a bit. I told myself I had less than an hour to calm myself down and be there for him.
Thousands of people had been in this situation. I had seen so many people lose their cars, homes, their sanity, their pride. I had feared that would be us. It's a practical fear.
The next day, we went to a wholesale club and bought up a lot of chicken and hamburger. I already saw a lot of Hamburger and Chicken Helpers in our cabinets. I can't stand them, but it would be fine. I stocked up on supplies I thought we would need like Ziploc bags, peanut butter and jelly. I was in survival mode. I was no longer outwardly panicking. I had a list of free things we could do. We went to a local free museum with The Redhead. She loved having her father along. By that Wednesday, I had called the temp agency again, wondering if they had gotten my message. They hadn't, but they set me up to come in to work the very next day.
Then Thursday evening, they called again with more work. At first, I didn't want to go in on The Redhead's first day of school, and the lady on the phone understood. She put me on hold, she even asked about having me come in at 9. But I told her I would come in at 5am. Then I told her I would work the Saturday and Sunday shifts too. I know Mister Man felt terrible that I was missing the first day, but I didn't want him to. Momentarily, I had hung on to that moment, but in the end, I knew the right thing to do would be to take the shifts, even though my husband told me not to. After all, he was just as capable of snapping some photos as I was. The outfit was laid out. Our neighbor helped with her hair. I told him what to take to the office for our teacher.
Taking those shifts opened me up to a realm of possibilities. Because of that, they kept offering me more work. I had worked at least two weeks straight. Weekday shifts were ten hours, weekends were twelve. I was working a lot of hours, but it didn't matter. I was making over thirty hours of overtime pay. If you think we must have been that hard up for cash, think again. It was honestly never about the money.
It was about survival. It was about distraction. It was about separation.
When I would talk to people at work about the situation, I would tell them I really didn't think my husband and I needed to be home together. It scared me to death. The women thought I was either being funny, strange, or questioned my marriage. The men thought this made perfect sense. All of them said, "I know my wife and I couldn't be home together nonstop. No couple should be." That is what scared me the most. You take one of the most stressful situations, then you lock them up in a house together. That is a recipe for disaster if you ask me.
We went on a spending freeze. Aside from bills and grocery staples, the glue sticks left on our school supply list, we bought nothing else. Occasionally, other things would come up. We did buy Mister Man a new suit and white dress shirt. My hours were not always consistent, and there were days where I would either go in for merely two hours, or a week they couldn't use me at all, but we were doing the best we could. We told few people, as we needed to deal this stress on our own. But we stayed focused.
Within five weeks of being unemployed, Mister Man was hired. Unfortunately, we had to wait three more weeks until he could start his new job. It was supposed to be only one week, but someone in HR had taken their time on the paperwork. Meanwhile, I continued to work.
People later thought I was working because of money. They thought the situation must have been dire, and perhaps that's what the situation in their household would be. People have had this impression of me that I don't want to work, that I don't like to work, and that couldn't be further from the truth. I love to work. I love feeling productive and when I am working, I feel the most productive because my work is actually paid for. While the job loss was a heavy hit to my husband's self esteem, it was a huge boost to mine. I felt liberated. Renewed. Vindicated. I felt like I suddenly mattered.
It doesn't mean I don't always matter. But it was a huge esteem boost. When I first jumped in, I didn't even do it for that reason, I just did so because that's what I do. It's how I live. When life hands me lemons, I drown myself in busywork so I can pretend everything's fine. It's more productive than putting your head in the sand.
We never got behind on our bills. We didn't have to break into retirement or borrow money. Mister Man qualified for the highest amount of unemployment, but it was still very little. We had already made far too much for the year to have even qualified for food stamps, even if we had needed them, which we never did. We didn't buy a lot of extras for that two months, but it honestly didn't matter. I sold a few things on Craigslist for tiny amounts and had the cash in case we needed it when we went to local festivals. People still asked me for things I could have sold, and I still gave them away. We still donated to the school. We still went to the pumpkin patch. We went to a couple movies.
We did our best to still be us. It was important for us to continue to allow The Redhead to have experiences so the stress wasn't carried onto her too much. We still planned our annual Halloween party. Although we were on a spending freeze, it still appeared we were spending money. But aside from school donations, that money wasn't coming out of our account. It was being spent with gift cards we hadn't used and the few items I sold (like dress up costumes). The party was covered because of clearance items I had bought the previous year. We never went hungry. The Redhead was still dressed as cute. We just didn't eat out. We didn't go on any major shopping sprees. We drove minimally, making sure we didn't waste gas. We had every single dollar accounted for.
It wasn't until Mister Man was working again that we even had told his parents about what had happened. His mother had suffered a stroke that past May, and there was no way we were burdening them with that additional stress. We're private people anyway. Somehow a few people had found out that I hadn't told, and since we hadn't told many, I sort of had it narrowed down to who talked. But we weren't ashamed. I'm not ashamed at all. In fact, we're both still very proud of how well we had handled it all. Aside from one terribly nasty fight over him moving everything in the kitchen cabinets while I was working, we handled ourselves quite civilly.
It doesn't mean I ever want to go through an ordeal like that again, but it had boosted my confidence. It made me stronger. It allowed me to go back to work, something I kept doing until we moved to California. Not all people could go from that sort of salary to nothing and be quite as gracious. For women who already work, they couldn't have just jumped into a job. In fact, not all people could just start a job within two days. We were very fortunate people. We lived in an affordable house, we had few bills, we had only one child, and while we didn't eat the best of food, we still had food to eat. We still managed to live as though nothing was wrong, which wasn't because of denial, it was because of a mutual understanding. We barely felt sorry for ourselves because we knew how good we had it. We were surviving. And by that Christmas, we still donated as generously as always, The Redhead had many gifts, and we didn't cut back on family. We had survived. We hope to never forget that.
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