Face Off

I have a job which requires me to put in nine hours of face time every day. One of those hours is a lunch hour, which I am careful to take. I also have an hour commute each way, so my time spent at home during the week is limited. I am comfortable with spending nine hours at the office (I consider it to be part of the unspoken expectations for a job at my responsibility level and frankly I’m pleased they don’t ask more of me) but my husband objects to me falling in line with the nine hour requirement – he thinks I should work a strict nine to five day, and that no employer or job deserves more than that if you aren’t getting paid overtime. He sort of has a point.

There is history here, too – I once work a job which paid badly and demanded incessant fifty to 60 hour weeks, which I put in. That plus the commute to that job took a toll on my health and on our relationship, so I can see that my husband doesn’t want that to happen again. His fears are understandable, but from my perspective it’s a little frustrating – can’t he see that I learned my lesson from that other job?

From a practical point of view, there’s not a lot of benefit in it for me to insist with my employer on an eight hour work day. At work I have interesting, rewarding things to do that I get paid well for doing. Coming home earlier would just mean I had more time to do the housework. Sure, theoretically I could use extra time to get more writing done, but in practice my husband and I are both such neat freaks that I’d feel too guilty to be able to sit down and write while the house was a mess, so the housework would come first, and housework is such a time suck – there’s always more to be done – that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to carve out any more writing time than I’ve currently got.

But, you say, this is a dire viewpoint. Maybe my husband just wants to spend more time with his wife. To which I reply, that may well be true – and I’d definitely like to spend more time with him – but my husband, in addition to working full time, is in school half time and plays in a band. Of the two of us, I spend a lot more time at home than he does. And if I can deal with not seeing him as much as I’d like because of his obligations, why won’t he cut me some slack for my work obligations? It’s my career, I’m passionate about my field, I enjoy it, I’m ambitious. And as long as I’m able to maintain a good life-work balance, I think it’s okay to choose to spend 45 hours a week in the office instead of putting up a fight for 40.

So far, though, I’ve been unable to convince my husband of this, which makes me wonder if I am just completely off base. I also don’t know anyone else with this problem, so that’s hard too – I have no model to follow. I guess I’ll just continue to muddle through as best I can – which is what we all spend life doing, so I’m in good company there.

9 to 5

So recently I interviewed for a position a headhunter threw my way, and I decided going in that I wanted a certain level of compensation for the job, because it was a lot more responsibility and would also possibly be a lot more work (i.e., more than 40 hours) than my current job.

Fine, right? But here's the female angle: not only do girls have to be sneaky when they negotiate for more money, but I am also the executive in the family - meaning I make most of the decisions and deal with the outside world - everything from insurance to cat vaccinations to wedding registry stuff. That's fine for now, but here's my conundrum: a better-paying, more prestigious, higher salary job would be good in that it had more salary, but would be hard to balance with my role in this marriage. And I don't think a man would get stuck in this position - he'd have to decide to work harder or not when thinking about the job but he wouldn't be averaging 28 hours a week on housework* in addition to increased job responsibilities.

Meanwhile, my husband is clueless that I'm doing so much more than him - he thinks we have split the work equally. And it's hard to argue that point with him without resorting to charts and actual data or a hidden camera, or something. He tries to keep his end up, but he works full time, goes to nursing school half time and plays in a band. It's not as if he's sitting on the couch watching football and lifting up his feet so I can vacuum under them (my first husband actually did this), it's more that he's simply not physically present to help out and, since he's not present, he also doesn't see the work that I am putting in. Dealing with the litterboxes and taking the garbage out are only noticeable if they don't get done, because then the house smells like a garbage barge infested with a herd of feral cats.

It's a hard problem, and one I haven't really figured out yet. I'm sure something will come. In the meantime, I did take the higher-responsibility job, and we will probably use some of the money to have a cleaner come in once a week, to make my life a little easier. I really want Alice, the Bradys' housekeeper. That would be sweet. Unfortunately I don't think I could afford her.




* I am defining housework here as all the non-enjoyable stuff you have to do to keep the house going - cleaning, sure, but also cooking when you don't feel like it or folding laundry or medicating the cats or whatever.

A Cara by any other name would still smell as sweet, right?

“don't give me your name please.”





This was the entirety of an email sent to me by my new (as of May) husband Dave. It was the end of a string of emails between my and my mom (Dad and Dave were cc’d on all the back and forth) about the weather up in Maine where we are going to visit my parent this weekend.

I was completely confused by his email (maybe more discerning readers aren’t) and called him. Turns out that somewhere in the email string he saw “Cara and Dave deBeer” and thought that I’d changed the name field to “Cara and Dave deBeer” to show as sender on my own emails. deBeer is my last name, not his (I did not take his name when we got married) and Dave was, understandably, objecting to his wife inflicting her last name on him when he was quite happy with his own – particularly when said wife had not changed her name on marriage. In fact, I hadn’t actually made any changes to my name on email and the misunderstanding was quickly cleared up – in her Blackberry contacts lists, my mom has an entry for “Cara and Dave deBeer” (her little joke) which apparently has my personal email listed as the primary email for that entry.

So no problems, right? Right, but I thought it was interesting enough to write about since he’s also mentioned that he’s a little weirded out when he gets called “Mr. deBeer” at the vet. (All four cats have my last name, since I’m generally the one who does the cat/vet wrangling – a division of labor topic all on its own, but not in this post.) And then I thought how interesting it is that his reaction is so different to my own – I’m pretty sure this year that we’ll get Christmas cards addressed to Mr and Mrs Dave’sLastName, and probably my letters from older relatives (not that I have many left) will be sent to Mrs. Cara Dave’sLastName, even though I’m still Ms. Cara deBeer – and all of that stuff is so not worth getting worked up over, even though it blithely ignores my own conscious choices and reasons not to take my husband’s name. They’re letters and Christmas cards – it’s really okay with me here to accept these well wishes in the loving spirit they are written. In different circumstances, yeah, I’d be pissed, but social niceties like this are not worth losing sleep over.

Anyway, so Dave finds the experience of being associated with his spouse’s name disconcerting because he’s so unprepared for it, while as a girl, I’ve been prepared for it all my life by a million cultural inculcations, and my job is to pick my battles. Being addressed as “HisLastName” on letters? Not worth it. Defending my decision to a (male) friend not to take his name: worth it. “But my wife changed her name!” he said, when I awkwardly explained what a pain in the ass it is to change one’s name across credit cards and bank accounts and email accounts and insurance policies and and and … and I don’t want to, basically. Valid reasons aside, I didn’t want to change my name. My friend’s attitude was pretty much like, “If my wife did it, you can do it!” Which misses the point: I didn’t change my name to Dave’s last name because I didn’t want to.

I like deBeer. It has been my name all my life. I am attached to it, quirky capitalizations and questions about association with certain famous diamond purveyors* aside. And Dave feels the same about his last name, which is why it’s strange for him at the vet and coming across it unexpectedly in someone’s contact list – those are instances where his choice not to take my name is ignored, for one reason or another. (I should specify: I’m writing about this because it occupies a lot of my headspace, but I don’t think it’s more than a mosquito on the windshield for Dave; he’ll probably have forgotten about the whole thing or wonder why I’m making such a big deal out of it by the time he gets around to reading this.)

And here’s the kicker: this is really about choice, and respect. I have another friend who has changed her email name display so it now reads “Mrs. HerFirstName HisLastName”, which is cool, although I personally think including Mrs. is an unnecessarily formal display on an email. But she wants to emphasize her own choice, which is, again, cool. Lots of my friends have gotten married and are now Mrs. HisLastName. Others are still Ms. HerLastName. Some men are now Mr. HerLastName. And as long as everyone understands and respects the choices of others, I have no problem with any of it.

Writing all this has made me think that A) this really written from, and about, hetero marriages, which is my perspective, but B) I wish I knew how gay people dealt with this and C) I really wish gay marriage was legal in more states than MA and CA, so I’d have a bit more information and a valuable perspective outside of the whole patriarchal name-goes-down-the-male-line stuff that heteros get shunted into when they marry.

Update: when I re-read that last sentence, I realized that it read as if I was lamenting the availability of gay marriage for my own sake. I think gay marriage should be legal all over because that's what's fair. And as a nice side bonus, it would provide me with more models of marriage to look at and learn from than just the standard hetero one.

* no relation. It's a coincidence I and that company both have Dutch roots from a century ago. And yes, I disapprove of that company's despicable human rights practices and price fixing and attempts to gain a monopoly on the gem market as much as you do.