Going Back to a Full-Time Job After 22 Years

Blog # 2

When I decided I was going to separate from my husband, in the fall of 2018, I knew that I was not going to ask him to leave the house. I would move out to an apartment nearby in our town.

This was not a popular choice, I soon discovered. Almost every married couple that I knew who separated had sent the husband packing, not the wife. The mother stayed in the house with the kids. This was traditionally what occurred in mainstream hetero marriages.

But I wasn’t going to do the traditional thing, even as I received lots of unsolicited comments and opinions once people realized what I was doing. But I had my reasons….

First of all, the separation was all my idea. I had decided, after 24 years of marriage, that my husband and I were just not compatible at all anymore. We were complete opposites on politics, on religion, and on just about everything we enjoyed in life. It occurred gradually over the years, sneaking up on me that we weren’t meant to be together. But although we had gotten into some really explosive fights in the past, we were not currently fighting at this time. I just withdrew from him and our relationship.

Eric (a pseudonym) did not really see it coming, and did not ask for a separation, so I did not feel right trying to kick him out of the house. If he had cheated on me, hit me or the kids, or been an alcohol or drug abuser, it would have been a completely different story. But he did not, technically, do anything wrong. I just knew there was no love left there, at least not on my part.

Second, we lived in a big, old house that required a lot of work and upkeep, both inside and out. I didn’t do much of the renovations around the house, and I never mowed the lawn, gardened, or took care of anything outside. He did all of that. Also, Eric is a mountain biker and kept an entire area of our walk-out basement as a bike storage and maintenance room, for himself and his friends. They biked from our back yard into the wooded trails nearby. The rest of the large basement was also Eric’s domain, filled with tools and other putting-around things, which would be impossible to re-create in an apartment if I were to send him to one. I didn’t have anything really that needed a house and basement. I could continue my life happily in a smaller home. So, I decided I didn’t need to turn his life upside-down and make him move all his things to a new place just because I wanted out.

Third, Eric paid the mortgage and could continue to pay it once I left. I could not handle the mortgage by myself, even if I were to get a full-time job. Throughout our time raising our kids, I had worked mostly from home as a freelance editor. I knew that I was going to have to get a full-time job, but it wouldn’t be enough to cover the mortgage on our five-bedroom house. Instead of asking him to move out but continue to pay on our home, it made more sense for me to get an apartment that was affordable on my future salary, and he would pay for the house on his salary. So my moving out seemed the right option financially as well.

Finally, my last reason was that I was less likely to want to stay in our town (a suburb of Washington, DC, in Virginia) for the foreseeable future. I was not originally from the DC area like Eric was. He had no plans to go anywhere else. I knew as our children grew up that Northern Virginia was probably not going to be my final destination. So why kick him out of the house that he had taken care of, loved, and planned to stay in for many years? It made more sense for me to find a transitional apartment.

At the time, our kids were 22, 19, and 16. The older two, our sons, were in college. Our daughter was in high school. So I looked for apartment complexes that were located near her school, and I ended up finding one that was literally next door to the high school where she was currently a junior.

I moved into my new home, a two-bedroom apartment in a no-frills garden apartment complex, just before Halloween 2018. It was sad for me not being on the street we had lived on for 20 years and not passing out Halloween candy to the neighborhood kids. I had strange new furniture in my living/dining room and second bedroom. I had new neighbors that I had nothing in common with, and I had to deal with noise and other inconveniences from the apartments around me. I missed our cul-de-sac neighborhood that I knew so well, and the wooded pathways that meandered behind our back yard. So as to be expected, I had a couple bumps in my moods those first few weeks after this drastic move, but still I knew that, ultimately, it was the right decision for me to be out of that house and marriage.

The number-one question that people asked me was, what were my kids doing in this new scenario? My situation with my kids was that I was not expecting any of them to uproot their lives, leave the only home they had ever known, and move in with me full-time. They could come over when they wanted to and when they had the time. My daughter was close by, and could walk to my apartment after school, but I did not pressure her to consider that this was her new home. I know that it was me who had moved out of the family home, and not my kids. I wasn’t going to make them lose the home security they had grown up with and loved. Of course, other mothers were judgmental of me for “leaving the kids behind” — but I didn’t see it that way, and they were not little children anyway. I think they were fine, and I tried to stay as involved in their lives as I always had.

After many employment applications and interviews completed, I finally had a full-time job that I loved, and that made my new move a bit easier and smoother. I could get caught up in my daily tasks at the job, and not obsess on everything that had changed for me in leaving my family’s house. It helped with any sadness or regret that I might be feeling. My job was working as an associate book editor for a trade association, the National Science Teaching Association, and I joined an all-women department that was supportive and fun. The work was right up my alley, and I liked the process of working on all aspects of shepherding a book through the editing and publishing process, from tackling a raw manuscript to watching the published copies arrive hot off the presses.

The job location was not close, though, and my daily commute (from Vienna, VA, to east Arlington, almost in Washington, DC) in the notorious rush-hour congestion of the DC area was not fun. For the first time in 22 years, I was dealing with traffic and hurrying to get to work on time. I had been fortunate for more than two decades that the type of work that I did (writing, editing, desktop publishing) was something that I could do from home part-time while raising my three kids. I was able to volunteer in all their classrooms, chaperone field trips and after-school activities, and drive them wherever they needed to go. Now my youngest was getting her driver’s license, and I was not needed as much anymore at school. So it was a good time to make this big change in my life.

But wow, was it a change. Now I had to be shower-clean in the morning and put on nice clothes, rush through my coffee time where I used to linger, and run to the car from where I would put on makeup in the front mirror at stoplights. Local traffic was a bear, but I started listening to talk radio as I had many moons ago in my work commutes, or I played the music from my iPhone (not an option 22 years ago!).

In my job, I began to travel to different places for work conferences, and that was something completely new for me and pretty fun. I went to different cities around the country where I helped set up and man the company bookstore at our national and regional conferences. I answered questions about the books we published and got to meet authors and science teachers from all over. I would not have wanted to travel like this when my kids were young, but it was all doable now.

But oh how this was a far cry from my former life — where I used to work in sweatpants from my home computer, changing in time to walk my dog to the school to pick up the kids (when they were in elementary school) or driving to pick them up from after-school activities (when they were in middle school and first couple years of high school). I also used to play tennis during the days or meet friends for lunch. Now I was living a more structured working life, going into the office each day, having business trips, even filling out expense reports!

You blink and life changes. If you had asked me 10 years prior if I thought I’d be living in an apartment again and traveling for work, I would say “No way.” I couldn't imagine not being in the big old house I had helped pick out, not being there when a kid arrived home from college or returned after a Halloween party or Homecoming dance. I never imagined this. I thought I’d always be there, taking pictures of my kids in the cul-de-sac in front of our house.

Ten years earlier, I did not think I would ever go back to the old "9 to 5." I was going to always work part-time in my freelance business in the home office I had set up on the second floor of our house, being at home with the family and dogs.

But people change, some feelings go away, and life ricochets in a new direction. Now I wanted something different, and the idea of being alone with my husband after all the kids moved out? Not a scenario I could live with anymore. And to move on and start a new life on my own, I had to have a full-time job.

And so I did, starting a journey to a whole new and different place.

Jenny and Lex