Sometimes It Is What It Is.

..you have to relax and trust the decisions you made and let them happen. You and [your husband] are meant to be together. But you have been spending a lot of time together. He has been used to much time alone, you are used to dealing with politics. Just let it work its way out.

The hardest part of leaving the corporate world has been readjusting to spending a good portion of my daily time with my husband. I love him – I mean, I truly adore him on every level – and the fact that I am now able to spend all day, every day, talking to him and spending time with him is the best part of working from home. I love that when I wake up, I don’t have to shove him out of bed so I can shower and floss and try to find clean underwear and not be late for work. We drink coffee together in the morning, typing away on our respective laptops, eating some breakfast and swapping news and links. I do my thing, he does his, and we meet up at random moments in the day – looking up from our laptops or eating lunch, or plotting out how to run errands and have a client meeting at the same time with only one car.

The words above were said by my friend Kathie – she’s obviously a very smart cookie – when I mentioned just how aweful I was feeling at that moment. Displaced and out of sorts and crabby.

I was bemoaning the number of arguments and disagreements that have taken place in this house since I left my job. Little, petty, silly things for the most part. A few miscommunications, coupled with some differing expectations, led to some hurt feelings and tears and some raised voices. We had some rough days – days where both of us looked at each other as if to say, what-the-hell? where did THAT come from? who are you? But then we’d work it out and move on and laugh and play some Tetris and things would be okay again. I kept wondering: what the hell is wrong here? Where are all these little crabby bits coming from? Why isn’t it all sweetness and light now that we’re actually together all the time?

Kathie hit the nail on the head, above. She answered the question of why things have been crappy from time to time – crappy on a scale previously unseen in this household. My husband has spent the majority of days, for the past three years, alone in the house while I’ve been at work. He had the company of the dogs, and email of course, but was mostly alone until I came home – grouchy from work, but grateful to fall into domesticity. He had a daily scheduled that was solely his. And likewise, I was at work all day trying to manouever my way around politics I couldn’t understand, hidden meanings and pre-determined situations. It was required, for my sanity, that I try to read all the undertones and examine my flaws and keep my innermost thoughts to myself (it’s not a good idea to leap up in a meeting and shout, “You’re all assholes!”, for example).

I’m home now, and my instincts are still unwinding from those three years of hypervigilance. My husband, for the most part, says what he’s thinking and meaning – there is no need for me to guess at undercurrents of hostility or secret meanings. We have aired that laundry – had a big ‘discussion’ about expectations and previous disappointments and little things we needed to clear up. And I know that when he says, “I don’t care”, he means it. For my part, I am adjusting to being safe when I express my emotions (he can’t exactly fire me), to being loved regardless of my foibles, and to who and what I am being perfectly fine – something I never felt when I worked at the big corporation. He, on the other hand, is adjusting to me repeatedly asking, “Are you coming back?” every time he attempts to leave the room to pee, or, “Are you mad?” every time he falls silent. He reassures me repeatedly that things are fine. Things are good.

It’s been a little over a month and a half since I left the big company, and it’s only been the past few weeks that I’ve started to feel comfortable again. Reclaiming my personal life, reclaiming the things that make me happy, finding my new routines and feeling a bit more like the person I used to be. I am believing him when he says things are good, because everything really is – it’s just the details that require some fine tuning. And there is not a shadow of a doubt – even through tears and hurt and long conversations – that we’ll get all those ducks in a row. And whatever comes next, too.