Supporting a Career
I just now searched on the phrase "supporting a career" and copilot spat back a list of four links about employee development and strategies like career coaching and training and development. There is not one word about full-time wives and homemakers and how they support their husbands' careers.
At age eighteen, I was involved with a loser with no life from a more dysfunctional family than mine. His only dream was a military career.
His nutcase mother blamed her marital problems on the military and didn't approve of her son's dream of being career army like his father. At one point, my boyfriend was haranguing me about "How can you love me and support my desire for a military career when that's A DEATH SENTENCE???"
I felt blindsided by what I felt was an inane question and ended up addressing some of his baggage about "A military career is TERRIBLE because I could DIE!" with saying "I would rather be happy with you for a few years than unhappy with someone else in a nice safe job forever." and telling him he'll be happier pursuing his dream career than trying to become an accountant.
I guess I did a good enough job because he dropped it. The reality is I mostly didn't worry his career choice would kill him, though I did spend many hours at our first duty station terrified I was a widow with an infant waiting for the police to notify me of my husband's death because he never called when he was coming home late, even if he was HOURS late and he had eight car wrecks that year.
So I was all too often waiting for HOURS for him to come home while his dinner got cold and I figured he was dead in a ditch somewhere. Which wasn't anything I anticipated being subjected to when I was eighteen and wanting to marry him while he hung his mother's baggage on me and invented bizarre interpretations of what a military career meant.
Unless you are in the midst of a large scale war, joining the military isn't some "automatic death sentence." Furthermore, most deaths occur during the soldier's first battle.
If you make it through the first battle and make your peace with "It's kill or be killed. Get over it." odds of dying in future battles go down. Which is why Vietnam was so ugly.
Average age of a soldier in World War II was 25. Average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 18 or 19 and because it was politically unpopular, they sent a lot of people for just a one year tour of duty.
So there were a LOT of "first battles" for very young soldiers. The result: it was a meat grinder.
But to paraphrase Patton: Your job as a soldier isn't to die for your country. It's to make someone else die for their country.
So in addition to cooking, cleaning, following his career where it took us such that I was unlikely to have a career of my own even had I worked at a paid job, I also supported my husband's career by playing therapist and saying philosophical things to address his bizarre ideas rooted in his mother's crap that had nothing to do with how I saw a military career.
Supporting a romantic partner's career is work. It involves quite a lot of work and how women make sure their man gets his sorry ass out of bed every morning so he can keep showing up and performing daily until retirement age is largely unrecognized by the world.
That was my real focus as a military wife, not "He could DIE!!!" but "He needs to go to work every single day and bring his A game for twenty years straight to qualify for retirement and it's a physically demanding job with long hours."
And it was my job to buy the groceries and pay the bills and do everything else needed to make our lives work so he could focus solely on running that marathon consistently and successfully. For twenty years.
Unlike me, my sister has a real career. She made more money than either of her husbands and neither of them cooked, though her first husband was a neat freak who did at least clean.
She has some incredibly bitter, ugly, man-bashing opinions about how women can multi-task and men can't and women will do the prep work and clean up and men don't. They just do the main task and feel heroic.
It was an observation she made while she and I were redoing her master suite and her husband "helped" in a way that was straight out of TV Tropes old piece on "Stop helping me!!!"
He interrupted the project to run to the store and buy himself another widget because the four he already owned weren't good enough for some reason. He pulled out tools to do a thing, then left them strewn all over the place because putting them away wasn't part of the job.
And for his grand finale dramatic performance, when he got a drop of blue paint on the underside of his heel, he had histrionics like someone mocking a gay stereotype and scrubbed his foot like a surgeon preparing for surgery. I guess because one drop of blue paint on his heel under his sock would be such a tremendous threat to his professional work image at the office come Monday morning.
She has gone so far as to say THIS -- women multi-tasking and doing the prep work and clean up when men don't -- is why the dysfunctional American economy is still surviving at all: Because the entry of women into the workforce in large numbers has added unrecognized value that men don't provide.
This post is being written because I recently realized I joined Cyburbia in December 2017 right after applying for a job because they actually took my application seriously which I didn't expect and apparently promptly said "I've applied for a job. If I get it, what do I need to have on an economic development website?"
I didn't remember it that way and also shortly thereafter fell on an icy bridge and busted my ass so bad I has my son take over paying the internet bill, which he did online, because I couldn't walk the few blocks down the street to the office to pay it in person like I had been doing.
In fact, I couldn't leave the building at all for several weeks because it was a hundred-year-old walk up with no elevator. Suffice it to say I wasn't at my best at the time that an ex "boyfriend" emailed me out of the blue to be "friends."
He was fourteen or sixteen years younger than me and we had talked about me having a career and paying the bills and him supporting my career. I had dumped him because he couldn't do what little I was asking of him for taking care of some of my emotional needs in a long distance relationship and it quickly became clear that his idea of "supporting my career" boiled down to saying "Honey, it's okay with me if you pay my bills while I watch TV all day!"
He had zero concept that supporting a career involves substantial work and it's not sufficient to be a guy who won't bar his lady from having a career and will give her his permission to work, oh gracious lord and master.
So at the time, I didn't make the connection between "I said publicly I've applied for a job and coincidentally this freeloader wants to be all friendly again." But I did think about the situation and concluded that if I got the job, he would be there in a flash to mooch off me, so after exchanging a few emails I told him I didn't really want to continue our friendship.
But now I'm thinking he was probably cyberstalking me and read my remarks on Cyburbia though I hadn't participated there in a lot of years and emailed me hoping I would get the job and then he would be set for life and I would stupidly pay his bills in exchange for the glorious privilege of being the sock he chose to cum in. I know he knew my handle there because I once blogged about it and he razzed me about it in a way I found aggravating.
My sons are fine with me not being the household's defacto slave, obligated to cook and clean and do all the grocery shopping, etc. I don't bother to try to explain it to outsiders who routinely assume that's the deal.
Sometimes, I do the grocery shopping. Sometimes they do it. I sometimes cook for myself but my oldest son took over cooking family meals years ago when I had a corporate job and he's the closest thing to a homemaker we have among the three of us.
If I'm doing the shopping, it's probably because I want to go eat somewhere and will grab a few groceries while I'm out. I still typically eat one more meal a day than they do most days and I like variety in my diet that's challenging to get when sharing meals with my "boring" kids who don't eat Asian, etc.
Other people see me shop and assume I'm their bitch.
When we were homeless in Southern California, I once managed to make like $500 in 48 hours from a blog post hitting the front page of Hacker News and we had no computers or tablets at the time. I did that work from a public terminal at a public library.
I used about half the money to feed us for the last week of the month and half to buy a cheap laptop for us. My son spent the next few days playing tech support and getting the laptop set up while I continued logging in on a public computer to blog, entertain myself and try to do freelance writing to try to earn a few bucks.
I overheard some bitchy librarian criticize the fact that we bought a laptop and he was on it while I was on the public computer. As if it's any of her goddamned business.
Do yourself a favor: Don't be my bitter, angry sister, earning money like a man and cooking for some man who doesn't appreciate you. If he isn't helping to make your life work, move him out of your life.
You'll be better off alone.
And if he is helping to make your life work, turn a deaf ear to criticisms from outsiders who likely have no idea what is really going on in your life behind closed doors and if they SEE you do the grocery shopping ONCE, will assume you're their bitch at home and have no idea how much anyone else is doing.
I don't really like talking trash about my sister and I prefer to assume that I just don't know what her husbands brought to the table. But unlike most people, I think I know the details of my sister's life well enough to say EITHER she's a fool who would have been better off alone OR she's secretly a criminal mastermind and her loser husbands are part of the cover story.
Either way, I can say for absolute certain she made the most money, she did the cooking, she complained endlessly her younger trophy husband didn't put out and she's clearly extremely bitter about both her marriages.
I hope you do better than that for yourself. Because most men seem to think "supporting her career" boils down to not telling her -- like my father told my mother -- "No wife of mine will ever work."
Yeah, little elves stock the pantry and cook the meals and wash the clothes. Sure. And the time and energy women spend on those tasks doesn't subtract from what they can give their career.
If you want sex, heterosexual women can get that by not saying no to the countless men who hit on them nonstop throughout life. No cooking and cleaning required.
Please don't tell yourself that being some man's house slave is somehow a requirement in life. Any man who wants that without:
1. Making enough to support the family on his own.
2. Providing you the children you want.
Should be moved out of your life.