The Definition of Insanity

Stop me if you heard this one. A recently laid off man is job-hunting on his computer. His wife asks him to watch the baby while she straightens up the kitchen, and almost immediately the baby starts to cry. The wife hollers a suggestion to stop the crying, and the husband shoots it down because he tried it before and it didn't work. She tells him to try it again; just because it didn't work last time doesn't mean it won't this time. The husband snaps back, "Honey, do you realize that's the very definition of insanity?" And his wife says, "Not with a baby!"

Okay, I know that wasn't funny. That wasn't even a joke; that was an actual exchange heard in our house just a few weeks ago. Except our house isn't our house anymore. We recently survived what will be remembered in our family as the Crash of '09. As of late we are sharing space with my sister and her fiancé, because times are hard, we needed help, and so did they. Of course, after we were forced to start a Code Enforcement investigation on our house, broke our lease, packed most of our things into a storage unit, and moved in, times got even harder when my husband lost his job, leaving the two of us unemployed spouses alone in a house to debate such issues. Now we don't know what is right and what is wrong. That is one definition of insanity.

For a little while there I was doing an okay job of standing by my man. It was actually working out well for the most part. I put my husband in charge of all the bills, and he started a record on Quicken of our expenses, our budget, our payments, etc. Where we came up short (thanks to our outrageous health insurance premiums and the outlandish utility bills we charged up living in a house with next to no insulation) he found a way to provide, and I didn't question. He kept track of where we were on the grocery budget and how much I could spend at the store each week. I took care of the planning of meals, the grocery list, the cooking, the dishes, the occasional deep cleaning, and other household worries. I watched the baby while he worked, and he watched her in the evenings while I worked. I asked for help when I needed it, sometimes he offered it, and vice versa. Having to move out of our house was not an ideal situation, but at least it moved us into a safer, cleaner environment for Lucy and took some major economic pressure off of us and my sister. It also put us closer to my husband's job, which didn't hurt. We cut our time and effort losses (the Code Enforcement case is ongoing), and we looked forward to getting caught up and back on our feet, and back into our own place as soon as we could, without the constraints of a lease. Then things really began to look up when I landed a contract writing job that offered me part-time hours and a pay scale similar to the day job I left in June. With my sister's occasional baby-sitting help, I started squeezing work time where I could into my busy schedule, and Lucy's.

Then, it seemed, the bottom dropped out when my husband came home one Friday evening and informed me he no longer worked for the law firm where he'd been employed for the last two and a half years. Due to budget cuts and re-assignments of duties, his position in the debt consultation division was no longer needed. Got to love the irony in that. At the beginning of October we were informed that we had my husband's remaining pay and vacation, a reasonable severance, and less than a month left on our health insurance coverage. And that was about it until my paychecks started rolling in. So my husband's new job became looking for a new job, and the following Monday he started working from home, with me.

How is this ever going to work, I thought, from the very first day. Remember how I was saying I wouldn't question how my husband fulfilled his role as long as he did it? Well, I got used to that idea, and suddenly I was presented with the challenge of standing by my man right in my own proverbial kitchen, not because he was there to see me but because he didn't have anywhere else to go. The bills were still getting paid (somewhat), food was still on the table (from his mom), and we still had a roof over our heads (my sister's), but I couldn't help wondering how long all that would last when my husband was spending so much time at our house. I tried to carry on as if he was just away at the office for another day. But while he was job-hunting I found it extremely difficult to just pretend he wasn't there, especially when I had my hands full of dirty dishes and the baby started screaming, or when I had my hands full of dirty diaper and the cats started fighting, or when I had my hands full of . . . you get the picture.

In the meantime, out of necessity, I also worked. Through my sister who was also laid off and had recently found work, I'd been referred to a self-named business guru who was publishing a sort of directory of industry professionals and donating proceeds for cancer research through a celebrity charity. My sister had taken over the position of Tour Coordinator from a friend of ours who was resigning, and she would be planning the book's publicity tour remotely from Austin. But the publishers in Vegas also needed some writing help with their website, their blog, some of their press releases, some of the copy in the book itself, and in the future possibly even a ghostwritten book about the upcoming publicity tour. She pointed them in my direction, and after a series of short phone interviews it was determined that I would be the book's newest editor and copy writer.

Just a few short weeks before my husband lost his job, I signed a contract and began work on my first professional writing job. And I was excited! I was working ten to twenty hours a week on my own, reporting to my employers by phone or by e-mail between feedings and diaper changes. I was rounding up all the materials I'd been sent from the previous editor, who'd resigned to spend more time with family, and I was about to embark on a mission to contact over a hundred artists and professionals so I could write or edit biographical paragraphs and feature articles about them, for their individual spreads in the book.

But it seemed as soon as I signed the contract red flags started popping up. When I sent in my first invoice (for my first four days of work), the accounting department tried to negotiate my pay amount, citing the contract they'd sent me to sign as "unclear". Because of this lack of clarity, not twenty days after I signed my ninety-day trial contract, my employers asked me to sign a revision that said I had to work more hours for the same rate of pay. I refused, and they backed off, assuring me they just wanted me to understand the job would require closer to twenty hours a week than ten, that they didn't want to be "taken advantage of". Then I began experiencing a flood of problems when reaching out to contact their clients.

The contact list I'd been sent turned out to be inaccurate and unorganized, e-mail addresses weren't working, and an e-mail signature I'd been asked to use, which was full of links advertising the project, kept tripping up my spam filter and those of my would-be recipients. Few people were returning my calls or my e-mails, which I was making from my personal cell phone and a Gmail address I set up just for the job, because I wasn't furnished with any of it. I was given a toll free callback number to give out, as well as an inbox e-mail address, but I was not given access to my messages either way. I had to depend on the project office in Vegas to send me my messages. By the time I decided to drop the spammy signature, stop trying to reach clients by phone, and give them my Gmail address to reply to, communications from my bosses had all but ceased.

I hadn't heard from Lisa, the woman who'd hired me, in weeks. Her husband and partner, Todd, and the sales manager, Brad, were e-mailing me and on rare occasions calling me, but it became apparent that many e-mails supposedly from Brad were actually written by Todd. Soon it became obvious so were the communications from the "accounting department", a separate company employed by my bosses, or so they'd implied. By then I'd already realized their local business address was a UPS box (conveniently explained by their recent change in headquarters to Vegas), and I figured out their accounting department was Todd. And I still hadn't received the standardized time sheet they'd promised me, or any paychecks for that matter (according to my contract they had thirty days from my invoices, and that time was not quite up). Whenever I made inquiries on these and other issues I was given short, vague, dismissive answers alluding to the pre-launch publicity gala scheduled to occur in Vegas that month. They were running around like crazy trying to get ready for it, and things would be back on track after that, they said, thanking me for my patience and good work. I was getting frustrated at this point, especially when I learned that the friend who'd referred my sister was still waiting for her last two months of pay. I also wondered why the previous editor had really quit; it certainly seemed like she hadn't gotten much work done. My load was starting to feel too large for someone coming in less than two months before press time. And I still hadn't been given a concrete date on when that was supposed to be. The book was supposed to be selling in January.

After about six weeks of this mess (by then my first paycheck was officially overdue) I learned that the huge, star-studded, charity-benefitting gala event they'd been using to sell their product all along was canceled less than a week in advance, causing the charity beneficiaries and some of the clients to drop out of the project. And I learned this not from my bosses but from my sister, who'd been experiencing her own problems on the job. At this point we were reading clients' testimonies on ripoffreport.com, and it became undeniably obvious we were not going to be paid. So I was forced to admit to myself that I'd been scammed and decide what my legal options were. At the end of October when yet another invoice became contractually overdue, I wrote my letter of notice. My bosses responded by pleading with me to reconsider, promising to pay me by the end of the week and on time thereafter. I told them I'd reconsider pending payment, and if they paid me everything I'd billed them for, I'd finish my contract. They thanked me and told me to stay tuned for a conference call later that week, and that was the last I heard from them. I still haven't seen a dime. The only light in any of it is the clause in my contract that gave me ownership of my written materials if they were just late enough with my pay. Of course, they were, so I wasn't required to turn in anything I'd written for their use. Unfortunately I can't really do anything else with it. No future employers will want to read the materials I wrote for a book that was never published because it was a scam.

In the midst of all this I was sharing with my husband the space I'd convinced myself was mine to rule, trying to figure out how one stands by a man who's barely standing himself. We'd agreed to a half-on, half-off system. He'd spend the mornings in the office, looking for a job while I watched Lucy. Then I'd have the office for the afternoons and on Saturdays, while he watched Lucy. But it didn't work out that way. After a couple disheartening weeks of full-time job-hunting, my husband started getting out of bed later, starting the hunt later, showering and getting dressed later, going out on errands later, getting home later, and therefore handing over the office later. These delays in combination with Lucy's nursing needs and our need to eat dinner each night cut my work hours into smaller and more erratic pieces. And when Saturdays rolled around my attempts to catch up became little wars over the better computer, my husband's. I'd found myself in a situation not unlike the old one. There I was again, working on making money, working on the house, taking care of the child, asking for help, going through power struggles, and feeling completely overwhelmed. Only this time my husband wasn't reporting to work every day. This time we weren't in our own house, not even our own bedroom. This time was worse than before. So in an effort to keep from going insane, ironically enough, I drove myself in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. I gave my husband one more plea, like I had so many times before, just in a more blunt form of language.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked him, many times over the course of several days.

If there is ever a time I ask my husband not to do something (and there is), I offer him an alternative. If he's not making me happy, I try to tell him how he can make me happy. I ask him to do the same for me. Because despite what he tells me in times of peace, I'm not always making him happy. But he won't do it, and I can't figure out why. Again I've been left to come up with my own conclusions.

So I guess I was just driving myself insane. I guess this is just another case of goose and gander politics, and I should just deal with it. Maybe when the kingdom beats up on a man, the castle beats up on a woman? In an effort to keep myself from going insane, I've made a decision. If my husband can decide what his job is, do it, and not worry about much else, I can too. If he can "come home" from a day of his worries and take the evening to relax, so can I. Now that I'm free of my first so-called writing job, I've decided to relieve myself of the responsibilities of work and finance, just like my husband, in action, has relieved himself of the responsibilities of the house. I'll take care of the house and the baby all day, I'll cook, I'll clean, and I’ll do the shopping. But I'm not going to worry about much else. I've tried, and my repeated actions always yield the same results. It wasn't my dream to give my husband so much responsibility, nor was it my dream to take on so much for myself. I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it.

My father, a minister, cherishes an essay Wendell Berry wrote on poetry and marriage; in lieu of premarital counseling it's required reading for any couple he marries, including my husband and me. To paraphrase Berry's thoughts, what you alone think marriage is going to be, it won't be. I was warned of this, and it appears to be true. Because I thought we'd live in our own house, take care of it, work hard for it, and enjoy it. I at least thought we'd eat dinner together. But I'm typing this as I eat mine alone.