Layoff brings an exchange of roles

For most of the first 10 or 11 years of our marriage, I got up each morning and headed off to work, leaving my wife at home. While I toiled at the office, she stayed home, filling her day with household chores, child care, home projects, and, occasionally, hobbies and reading.

Now our roles are reversed. After about 25 years of our jointly going off to work each day, leaving behind a vacant house, it is now I who is left behind at the house. As my new reality moves into its third month, the novelty has worn off, and it is becoming more difficult to sustain a positive attitude. Misery loves company, it is said, and all of us who have been laid off in this economy have plenty of company.

When my wife was out of the job market, her days were consumed primarily by the care of a child, then two, then three. Any realistic person will admit that child care is a full-time job. She has often described those days as the most rewarding work she has ever done — and the most societally important.

When I despaired of my inability to provide for all of our family's needs, we would run the numbers and realize that my measly salary might not be much, but it was better than two paychecks minus child care costs. Once our children were in school and my wife began working, first part-time, then full-time, then full-time plus college courses, we had more money and felt more comfortable when we paid bills or faced unanticipated expenses.

But a two-paycheck household has its disadvantages, too. When she was at home, I relied on my wife to run errands or do things I couldn't do while working. Sometimes it was as simple as looking up a reference in those days before Google put such information at my fingertips.

In my stay-at-home life, I am not as valuable as my wife was. I am not nurturing children. I am not sewing clothes or baking bread. I'm doing some housework, but I'm not so good at it. I'm walking the dog, but that hardly compares with keeping children happy. I'm doing some writing, such as this. And I'm sending out job applications, thus far without success.

It's no wonder that the unemployed often get depressed. You miss the friendships and camaraderie of co-workers with whom you've spent 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week for years and years. The hard part, for people who have been sole breadwinners or who have held important responsibilities in a job, is to face the feeling of impotence, uselessness and dependency. With half a million workers added to the unemployment ranks in just the last month, there's a lot of despair out there, and a lot of anger. Take a look here at the anger of one laid off journalist.

Being positive in this economic climate might be harder than finding that elusive new career.