Food, Home and Style

Love in the Time of Layoff: The Changing Hearts & Minds of Men

This morning my husband Marco got up early to buy me eggs before my morning sickness kicked in. Before he got laid off, such an errand would have caused him strife. When he had to show up somewhere on time, anything that deviated from the norm of morning routine could throw him off. But this morning was different. This morning, Marco had a reverie buying me eggs.

“I got to the store on the corner before it opened,” he came back and explained, his voice all quiet and calm. “So I walked around for a while in the hazy rain. And when I came back and picked up the eggs, I thought of where they came from. I thought of the farm.”

“The farm?” I asked, plucking two eggs from their carton in a rush to cook them and get them in me quickly before I threw up. We live in busy Manhattan. Even the closest farmer’s market is a few subway stops away.

“Yeah, the farm. I felt part of that cycle of farm life where you get up before dawn because you have to get some things done before everyone else wakes up. I felt part of some kind of more natural work life cycle. I felt part of that somehow just looking at these eggs.”

While urgently scrambling, I asked him to explain. A corporate environment takes you away from the eggs, he said. It isolates you from all that. The tactics of a corporate life are very different from the tactics of a home life, which has its own approach, one for which my husband seems to have a newfound appreciation.

A corporate environment takes you away from the eggs.

“I feel like in the time that I’ve been laid off, I’ve become a family man,” he continued as I listened while stuffing my mouth with sustenance from the hen. “Maybe I’ve been growing that way anyway, but being laid off has given me another level of awareness. It makes me want to be somewhere where you can hear the roosters crow—like back in Puerto Rico.”

Ah, Puerto Rico. Marco’s parents hail from there, and more specifically, from villages where the roosters still crow in the mornings and wake people up. He’s always harbored a bit of the rooster nostalgia. But I’ve never heard him speak of it this way.

How interesting, I thought, wondering if this longing for a lifestyle more in synch with the rules and rhythms of nature, removed from a corporate arena that had proved a massive disappointment in so many ways, was happening in homes across the land. Is the recession redefining “value” in the minds of men?

Time will tell. But in our household, I don’t think things are going to be the same when Marco eventually finds another staff position. Once you commune with the eggs, it’s hard to turn back.

Marco confirmed my suspicion. When I asked him how he thought things might be different when he eventually goes back to work, he said this: “I almost think of the corporate environment as being foreign already. Servicing the client was the ultimate ethic. Everything was focused on the payoff, the deliverable. Being home, I feel more a part of a much bigger timeline, connected with the kids we’re having. I’ve gotten used to a life in which everything is attached to real values—you, me, these unborn babies, staying healthy, providing a life that’s not just an income but an organic whole. I feel like my whole life right now is preparation for the rest of my life.”

When he goes back to work, my dude doesn’t want to be competing for what amount to essentially minor perks in a company. He wants to be part of a team with real-world values. Perhaps that will mean a company that’s green, or even a nonprofit. (“It’s got to be something where if I’m going to lose sleep over a project, it has to be for something that’s really valuable to society at large.”)

When he goes back to work, my dude doesn’t want to be competing for what amount to essentially minor perks in a company. He wants to be part of a team with real-world values. Perhaps that will mean a company that’s green, or even a nonprofit. (“It’s got to be something where if I’m going to lose sleep over a project, it has to be for something that’s really valuable to society at large.”) When he does find that next fulltime staff job, may it be in an environment that jives with his newly developing priorities, his connection to that rooster, and his desire to be part of what he calls “our growing domestic whole.”

The eggs, in the end, didn’t help my nausea. But Marco’s shifting sense of himself soothes my existential angst. Though the income plummet stinks, Marco’s getting laid off may turn out the be the best thing for our future sense of well being.

(For more on all this, join me and three other panelists at Dads, Dudes, and Doing It – a candid, recession-fueled discussion at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday June 20 at 2pm, the day before Father’s Day!)

Deborah Siegel is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild and creator of the group blog Girl w/Pen. Read more Love in the Time of Layoff columns here.

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Tags: eggs, family, home, Love in the Time of Layoff, relationships