Food, Home and Style

Love in the Time of Layoff: Man Behind the Curtain

Note: Deborah Siegel was due to submit her post today, but her growing responsibilities in a rapidly developing venture have precluded her from doing so. In other words— the twins are really kicking her ass. Despite being deep into the second trimester, her “morning sickness” hasn’t let up, and she is currently sitting up in bed with a cold compress on her fevered brow. She has thereby ceded the reins of “Love in the Time of Layoff” to me. You, dear reader, know me as her house-husband, Her Man Godfrey, her Sancho Panza, her sometimes Bartleby. And now I’m honestly maybe a little too giddy with power. I am Marco.

Yes, I do exist… even as I eliminate the last traces of my existence in our little one-bedroom apartment.

I spent the afternoon yesterday dismantling my desk and bookcase and moving them out of our bedroom: We are staging our apartment yet again. It’s been on the market for months, and with a looming move to bigger digs in Park Slope we’ve redoubled our efforts to get it sold. New broker, new price, new priorities: we needed to let in more light and air, make the place roomier. It became obvious that my office away from work, my study and refuge from a crazy world, my anchor, was doomed. Into the boxes with my design books, my graphic novels and old Tarzan pulps. Reality beckoned.

No doubt about it: this is Oz territory. Kansas is but a memory; the twister has struck, the house has been spun on its axis and the land visible in sparkling Technicolor through the doors and windows is enticing, but terribly unfamiliar.

Of course, I still have my other duties; as Debbie becomes increasingly immobilized by the pregnancy, I need to take up the slack and become more mobile. I’ve spent weeks perfecting the choreography: out of bed, dash to kitchen, make eggs for Deb before she gets up to stave off pukiness, step over/around cat, feed cat, serve eggs while pushing cat food can out of sight with foot (to stave off pukiness) make myself coffee, WAKE UP, start day (supply Deb with endless water, rub feet, feel for twins jostling in belly, clean kitchen for open house, make/plan dinner, feed Deb ice cream — to stave off pukiness), hit sack, stop snoring, get up REPEAT…

Meanwhile, Deb has somehow managed to partner with a friend to start a new online social network for women writers. Yesterday they were working out of our place even as I was doing my domestic pirouettes around them. Deb was sitting at the dining table wearing her hands-free headset, fingers flying over her keyboard, swollen feet propped up on a chair. She was setting up a webinar. Her partner was on the couch, peering intently at her laptop, swigging a Stella. She was researching the more esoteric possibilities of their new website’s interface.

As I watched them work, I felt a thousand miles away from my staff job, and a million miles away from business as I knew it. It wasn’t just a gender thing; I was seeing physical evidence of that tectonic shift we’ve all been reading about for years. The corporate office as safe haven from domestic reality is finally dying. Here are my pregnant wife and her friend, a newly single mom, venturing forth together into the wide world on the deck of a new business model. No doubt about it: this is Oz territory. Kansas is but a memory; the twister has struck, the house has been spun on its axis and the land visible in sparkling Technicolor through the doors and windows is enticing, but terribly unfamiliar.

We are through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, way the hell over the rainbow. The most adventurous boys in my beloved pulp fictions haven’t been this far, it seems. Only the gals, Alice and Dorothy, have had the fortitude to deal with this. Women, perhaps, have less to lose in a new paradigm. Certainly it seems that in my life, right now, they are the protagonists. Many of the men I know are more like secondary characters, the strange and somewhat wayward denizens of Oz, milling aimlessly in the background as Dorothy sets off on the Yellow Brick Road.

But, you know, even Oz isn’t what it used to be. Sure, they still recommend you “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” And do you know why? Because there IS no man behind the curtain—nothing left but a darkened computer monitor, a couple of bent paperclips and old scribbled-on Post-Its. He was downsized months ago, off to who knows where in his patched and leaky balloon, the gondola crammed with fileboxes of personal effects, leaving the munchkins to fight over his wastepaper basket.

Tags: entrepreneurs, family, Love in the Time of Layoff, relationships