The Tuesday we became a one-income household

On my husband’s layoff

So my husband got laid off today.

The day began the way most days do: with the second alarm. For once, the baby—our usual human alarm clock—had decided to sleep in, granting us a small mercy we didn’t actually have time to accept. But this wasn’t just any Tuesday. It was the Tuesday after a three-day weekend. MLK Day still clinging to the edges of Monday. Tuesdays like this don’t allow for mercy.

We started dividing the morning like labor. The teenager needed a ride. The three-year-old had a parent-teacher conference. Someone had to stay with the baby. Breakfast, lunches, shoes. Get your shoes on, please. A fight about a hat.

“Do I have to wear one?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not cold.”

It was 20 degrees farenheit outside.

In the car, my son turned the seat warmer all the way up—the same child who, minutes earlier, had insisted he wasn’t cold enough to wear a hat.

My husband stayed home with the baby while I played chauffeur and mmhming earnestly through the parent-teacher conference. When I got back, he handed me the baby immediately because he had a 9 a.m. meeting, sharp. I breastfed her and scrolled through emails, easing myself into the day that was jam packed with back to backs.

I don’t know why I scheduled therapy for the Tuesday after a three-day weekend. Everyone knows that day is the most Monday of all Tuesdays. Tuesday on steroids.

He finished his meeting just in time for me to leave for mine. As I was halfway out the door, he mentioned that he had a random meeting with his boss Stacy¹.

Stacy. The name alone tightens something in me. Nails on a chalkboard. Stacy is the woman who once told my husband during their 1:1 that she expected him to be more proactive and do but also didn’t have anything for him to do. The same woman who, when he was violently ill, asked if he remembered to send something over. She was the same woman who would cancel 1:1 last minute and not talk to him for 3 weeks.

My husband and I are different species. I am an oversharer. I am ambitious to the point of restlessness. I grow bored when days stagnate, when things start to look too similar. My husband is the definition of good enough—and I mean that with sincere admiration. He believes work is a means to an end. You work to buy back time. You spend that time on what matters. For him, that’s our kids, our house, our life.

For five years, he gave this company his steadiness. No raises beyond the small, annual three percent (last two years was even less than that). No bad performance reviews. No drama. He would have stayed twenty years if they’d let him. He is content. He is loyal. He trusted that if you showed up, did your job, kept your head down, things would be fine.

They were most certainly not.

Five years, and what they offered was this: We’re restructuring. Here are five weeks of severance.

Five weeks.

We have three children.

There’s a moment after something like this happens where the house feels off, even though nothing has actually changed. The day still carried on. The baby still needs to be fed. The laundry is still unfinished. The day keeps moving forward as if it hasn’t noticed what just happened to us.

My first instinct was math. How many weeks. How many bills. How much runway we actually have if five weeks is truly all there is. I kept opening my phone, clicking through random apps mindlessly, as if something would pop out and the numbers might rearrange themselves if I stared long enough.

Five years. Five weeks.

I kept thinking about how carefully we built this life. Two incomes braided together. Childcare schedules balanced like a Jenga tower. Everything working because everything had to work. And now one piece was gone, and I couldn’t tell yet whether the whole thing would wobble or collapse.

He didn’t spiral. At all. He was calm in the way only someone who genuinely believed in the deal can be calm. He kept saying things like, “We’ll figure it out,” and “It’ll be okay,” and I wanted to scream at the optimism of it, at the unfairness of how quickly five years could be reduced to a mere calendar invite and the added “oh but we’ll keep you on payroll for 2 weeks, too!” Like that’s some sort of consolation prize that we should be happy with.

I thought about all the mornings he logged on without complaint. The meetings he took seriously. The way he never asked for more because he was never trying to be more. He showed up. He stayed steady. He trusted that steadiness counted for something.

Apparently, it doesn’t.

So the day kept going. Dinner. Baths. Homework questions shouted from the other room. The baby asleep on my chest, warm and heavy and unaware that anything had shifted. I tried to stay present, but my mind kept skipping ahead—to conversations we hadn’t had yet, to decisions we weren’t ready to make, to the thinness of five weeks stretched across a life that can’t pause just because your employer did.

I’m not sharing this as a means to offer any kind of perspective. I don’t have any takeaways. I do, however, have the sharp awareness of how fast comfort can turn conditional, and how quickly stability can be revoked. Because that’s what happened today. We are still living inside it. Still standing in the middle of a day that began like any other and ended with everything slightly off.

Fucking fuckity fuck fucking A!

1. Name has been changed for the purpose of this publication.