Personal Essay: Daddy Got Laid Off
Losing my job made me feel like a failure as a father.
by Werner Trieschmann
May 11, 2009
It's been about a month and a half now, but I haven't told my boys, six and three, that daddy was laid off. I would have thought they would have picked it up from my stubbled face, crappy demeanor and daily dress of mismatched and stained warm-ups and T-shirts.
Then again, my boys can be holding a fat stack of Pokemon cards in their hands and be screaming to their mother upstairs about how they can't find their Pokemon cards.
I'm pretty sure at this point that I'm not going to tell them. The reason isn't that they couldn't handle the news or because of my own shame at the situation. The reason is that it's not their problem. Childhood ought to include a Free Pass on adult nightmares
— at least within reason.
Am I keeping secrets? Is my house going to turn into a psychological petri dish teeming with nasty viruses only to be solved by years of therapy? I don't think so. We don't shield them from the hard facts of life. When we found our goldfish belly up one morning,
we told them it died before we flushed it down the toilet. We haven't held from them that I'm an unrepentant Cubs fan (this has turned out to be a nice form of aversion therapy — my kids run away from televised baseball like vampires from silver stakes). In
any case, they understand at least in a general way that life comes along with some amount of pain.
My boys were only vaguely aware of what I did in the first place. As it happened, it was only in the last year I started taking them to my former office, which is as dramatic and intimidating as a movie set, a great open space filled with cluttered desks
under a bank of skylights. Once they figured out they could snag candy from some of the desks, they liked it. Otherwise, it was just a weird and stuffy place we had to stop before going to the park.
Being jobless has turned daddy into
a bit of a bipolar mess.Of course I liked showing them off. Even if the whole idea of work never fully registered with them (which it never did), it felt important to demonstrate that their father was more than just the suspect dude who can find the remote.
At the moment the most immediate concern for me — other than, of course, how to replace a fifteen-year job at a newspaper when newspapers are viable as buggy-whip manufacturing plants — is how to keep hold of my sanity. Being jobless has turned daddy into
a bit of a bipolar mess. I am high with possibilities and grand schemes one minute and then in an incredibly dark mood about the bleak future the next. My family is on this roller coaster with me and they didn't ask for a ticket.
And I am with my family all the time. Cut loose from a time clock, I spend more time with the boys than ever. My wife is working two part-time jobs with irregular hours. I take our boys to school and day care in the morning and I am home most afternoons,
trying to figure out how to pry my oldest from SpongeBob SquarePants. Don't think I haven't noticed how SpongeBob takes great joy in his job as a fry cook. God, I hate him.
What amazes me is how completely different my life is now — as if the day I walked out of my office for the last time, I was transported to one of the moons of Jupiter. I knew staying at home was work. I sympathized with my wife whenever spring break paired
her with the kids. But I never realized. I never had the first clue. Even on the days when I've spent maybe two more hours tending to my brood than normal, I feel like somebody has worked me over with a sack of oranges.
And the days have shrunk. I'm hardly a neat freak, but working in a house with dirty dishes in the sink unnerves me. So I do the dishes, then maybe a load of laundry and then look up at the clock and its time to pick up the boys. Having a 9-to-5 (or what
closely resembled it) kept fences on family time and personal time. Don't for a minute think I didn't see work (which over the years had become an entirely manageable routine for me) as a regimented refuge away from the messy but sweet chaos of home.
©2009 Werner Trieschmann and Babble Media
About the Author
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Werner Trieschmann is a playwright and former editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He has written for American Craft, the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix and anybody else who will have him. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with his wife and two wild boys. Like everybody else in the known universe, he has a blog wernertplays.blogspot.com |
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