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Richard Downs |
“Don’t bring home
any men in skirts,” my mother told me,
only half joking, when I left Los Angeles for a graduate
program in Scotland. Five years later, I’m back,
armed with a PhD and a kilt-wearing, haggis-eating Scottish
husband.
Mom is coping. For a start, she’s learned not
to call it a skirt. As the old joke goes: Why do they
call it a kilt? Because they kilt the first guy who
called it a skirt. Ian and I have had to put up with
a few good-natured jokes about who wears the pants in
the family, but for the most part we’re enjoying
the inevitable cultural adjustments.
Mom’s not so sure about the sporran. A sporran
is a furry pouch worn around the waist over a kilt.
It bears a strong resemblance to a purse, so Mom can
be forgiven for occasionally slipping up and calling
it that. (What does the modern-day Highlander carry
in his sporran? Car keys, PDA, Altoids, wallet and a
cell phone that plays the love theme from Braveheart.
When the phone rings, it draws baffled stares toward
my husband’s groin.)
Most of all, though, Mom is happy to have her only
daughter back home. For I am literally back home, sharing
my parents’ cramped guest room with Ian, our dog,
Mandy, and several dozen boxes containing our worldly
possessions. We’re all wondering how long this
physically and psychologically precarious arrangement
will last.
A confirmed fuzzie since my days on the Farm, I resigned
myself long ago to living without a savings account,
that new-car smell, and furniture that didn’t
come flat-packed. When I married a hardcore techie with
a comfortable salary, we both assumed that his career
would keep the family finances healthy, leaving me free
to pursue whatever low-paying-yet-socially-commendable
job I fancied. So it is with a certain amount of shock
that I now find myself the sole breadwinner in the family.
(I use the term loosely; with my paycheck, “crumbwinner”
seems more accurate.)
We moved back to the United States so I could accept
a professionally rewarding job (as a curator of 18th-century
French art) and be less than 5,000 miles away from my
family for a change. It meant that Ian had to give up
his salary from a Scottish university, but we were confident
that a physicist with his skills, qualifications and
experience would have no trouble finding an even better
job within a month or two.
It has now been six months, without so much as an interview.
Like so many in America, we’re playing the waiting
game, continually hearing that the economy is picking
up but never seeing any evidence of that. Meanwhile,
our savings are shrinking and our “temporary”
housing solution is feeling more and more permanent.
The fact that Ian’s PhD is in laser sensor development—a
field that has been virtually closed to noncitizens
in the security crackdown since September 11—hasn’t
helped. In the five years that I was away, the land
of opportunity turned into a land of suspicion, anxiety
and downsizing.
I’m worried as well about what I’m turning
into. I’ve always been a proud feminist, reveling
in my self-sufficiency. I hated the idea of having to
rely on a man financially, although I wasn’t too
principled to enjoy the fruits of Ian’s much larger
income. It didn’t matter which partner had the
“better” job, I told myself, so long as
both were equally committed to the real work that makes
a marriage successful.
None of these abstract convictions quite prepared me
for the responsibility, the emotional mayhem and the
exhaustion of supporting a man who is perfectly willing
and able to work, if only someone would hire him. Suddenly,
self-sufficiency isn’t enough; indeed, I’m
ashamed by how limited my financial and spiritual resources
have turned out to be. Those jokes about who wears the
pants don’t seem so funny anymore.
Perhaps we’ll be a two-income family again soon.
Until then, we’re downsizing our expectations
(by contemplating longer commutes and smaller apartments)
and dreaming up alternative careers for Ian (Hollywood
accent coach? Whisky sommelier?) We’re trying
to focus on the positive: spending time with our family,
exploring our new surroundings and learning to measure
ourselves—and each other—by the size of
our dreams, not the size of our paychecks. |
