Why my Husband Quit his Job

There is often a vague big picture vision of things before they actually come to be. That’s been my experience anyway. The vision isn’t necessarily focused or clear. It doesn’t come with how to’s or money or guarantees.

But it does come with hope, and that’s what keeps you going in the fog.

For years I’ve been looking forward to this time in our lives. I’d originally only conceived it as a small seed idea in my mind (maybe my heart), and now it’s time to share it here on the blog – that my hubby Derek quit his job.

Ever since we had our second child, maybe even our first I can’t remember back, I’d brought up the idea of Derek staying home with the kids when I return to work. Always half joking with a “wouldn’t it be nice” flare to it.

We didn’t exactly know that we had the ability to actually make a plan like that come to fruition at that stage in our lives. We were both caught up in the work hard and do what’s “normal”.

But we did see arrows, faint as they may have been leading us down the twisty path of life. Each time we hit a cross road we had to decide which way to go. Every decision allowed us to grow, individually and as a couple. The choices we made were not always easy ones. We have experienced joy, success, also hard work and sacrifice. We followed the arrows and here is where they have led so far.

We Found Grief :

After My Dad passed away during the fall of 2013, we knew things would never be the same for a lot of reasons, the main one being that I lost my best friend and mentor in life. That changes you. We generally grow through two things; experience and trauma. Hello, welcome to both. What a whirlwind!

After he passed I went back to work, back to routine, back to my regular scheduled life, AND THEN SOME. That year, I worked the most hours I’d ever worked. Equivalent to almost 2 full time jobs.

The following year, Derek worked the most he ever had. Six and seven day weeks for the first 9 months that year, then “eased back” to only 40-50 hour weeks for the remainder of the year.

We knew there had to be another way to balance life, but at that time, we didn’t know how. We now see and understand that we had it backwards.

This post is not a recap of the last 5 years of our lives, I go back that far only to communicate that this transition has been slow, changed shape, yet fit together over time, and it is about a lot more than simply quitting a job.

We have Desire :

Long before my Dad got sick, Derek and I had talks about the future.

I’m a planner, I love goals. Especially far fetched ones.

I would initiate dream talk, you know the kind: If you could do anything regardless of income or location, what would it be?

While I was able to chatter away about moving to a small remote town or writing books together or traveling the country for a year with the kids, Derek was always more hesitant. Even in hypothetical conversation, he is more resistant to take pretend risk. His mind simply didn’t allow his heart to dream. This isn’t uncommon, logic and limits often get in the way of longing.

As we grew together we took more risks. The more they paid off the more we would dream of what was possible. This isn’t about continual “what’s next”, It’s important to be able to answer the question: What do you really want? We only get one life to live, we may as well live it the best we can.

It can be scary, but it was only when Derek and I began to honestly explore the answer to that question in the pursuit of purpose that we started to get a hopeful vision for what was next for us.

Fast forward and here we are, at a place and time in life when our young, vulnerable children need us to be present. And we can be. What an honour.

Like anything, we walk our paths and meet in the middle. That’s compromise at its best, we balance each other well. So, instead of traveling the world for months at a time we will travel, but for smaller increments of time. Rather than over lap his time off with mine by one month as we had originally thought, we decided to overlap by 6 months. We feel blessed and ridiculously fortunate to get to spend this time together as a family. When making the decision we took a real look at the fact that we will never look back and regret spending time with our children. While we both enjoy work and both work hard, we know we will never look back and wish we had worked more.

So, here we are, going all in on this newest adventure.

Whatever the outcome, we will love and we will learn and if the winds are unforeseen or change direction, we will adjust our sails.