A few of our friends — all busy working parents — have a regular date night on Friday night. One of the couples has two young girls and they have an agreement with their nanny to stay late on Friday so they can go out to dinner after work together. Another couple tries to make it out to the movies or the theater or some other fun event every Friday. They told us they don’t always plan ahead what they will do but they know they have the night so just pick something that looks fun.

I love the idea of a regular date night, although my husband and I have never quite done that. We get out, just the two of us, a few times a month, but we don’t have a regularly-set day and I think that would be kind of nice. But a Friday night? Forget about it.
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Over the weekend a few of my husband’s colleagues came over for dinner. (I have to just take a minute and brag, in the most unashamed way possible, about the rockin’ dinner menu I pulled off. It included my wrapping a large piece of salmon in dozens of lemon slices and bay leaves, tying it with kitchen twine and grilling it in a fish basket — absolutely none of which I’d done before. You’ve got to give it a shot - here’s the slideshow on how to do it.)

OK, back to the actual topic of this post. So we’re sitting around and talking after the delicious dinner (promise, last mention of that), and one of the guys mentions this big project they’d just finished. I knew that my husband was working more than usual, but besides that, had no specifics on what was going on with this big client deal and I said this much to his colleague. He was really surprised and that’s when we got to talking about work-talk with your spouse.
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Five months ago my husband’s company announced that they would have major layoffs and four months ago he emailed me that he was on the list. As I drove to pick him up from work (and take him out for some too-expensive but-oh-amazing Japanese food) I felt strange because I wasn’t freaked out.

But after the idea of him being laid off and my working for several not-well-paying start up companies firmly set in a few weeks later, freaked out became my default mode. He got a fairly OK package, including several months paid at his regular salary and health benefits, but here he was, laid off in the worst economic and employment crisis in our lifetimes. It was scary. And it got scarier as the months went on, the job opportunities were few and far between, and even successful interviews didn’t lead to job offers because those jobs disappeared before they were filled.
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Photo from LA Times

The latest political buzz is hard to escape — apparently President-elect Obama has offered Hillary Clinton the job of Secretary of State. Yes, unofficially, unconfirmed, rumored, but seemingly true if you trust the many news outlets reporting this.

What I’ve found really fascinating in all the discussions is how much her husband is playing into the picture.
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No, I am not actually going to write about my sex life here.

But we are talking about it with Heather from Dooce, Rebecca from Girls Gone Child, and Mindy from The Mommy Blog on the latest Momversation video (posted below).

The producers must not like me very much because my parts got cut down to a few seconds in which it sounds like my husband and I didn’t have sex for years after our daughter was born (honey, it might have seemed that long, I know.) But the topic is interesting, however, and I don’t think it gets any less interesting when we talk about finding time (and energy) to have sex while juggling work, family, and endless chores.
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I love my husband very much. We’ve been married for seven years and have been together for twelve, having met back in college. We were an unlikely pair but when people meet us now they like to tell us how we fit together.

OK, now that the basics are out of the way…

In the car yesterday I heard a bit of the NPR interview with Diahann Caroll. The radio host must have asked her something about her personal life because just as I’d tuned in she said that while her career was great and she achieved a lot, she could have been much better as a wife. “I guess I needed my work a lot more than I needed a good marriage,” she said.
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There is an interesting article over at Babble about a new, apparently growing group (I have nothing to back up this claim, it is from the article) of well-educated, married women who are choosing to stay at home and NOT having kids. They pursue their interests, passions, creative outlets, or just focus on managing everything about their household life. According to one researcher mentioned in the article, these women are the new status symbol for their husbands because “their lifestyle alerts the rest of the world that the husband makes enough money for the both of them.”
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My husband and I have one daughter, who is four years old.

At this point we’re not planning on having another child. I never say never for anything in life — having learned enough lessons — but it’s not in the short-term or long-term plans.

When people ask me when we’re having another (and I’ve noticed that it’s almost always “when” and not “if”) I say that we might just be done with one. This is usually greeted with utter surprise or treated as a joke. “No way, really?!” (Unless of course the question is asked by my parents or grandparents, in which case the answer is greeted with a long lecture about how they need another grand/great-grandchild or how crazy we are to not have another great kid like the first one.)

But a few times in the past year when I said that we’re likely having only one child what I heard back wasn’t just surprise, but judgment, and harsh one at that.
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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while (and if you haven’t, what’s wrong with you!?) you know that I have always been the main breadwinner in our household. This changed dramatically when I left my nicely paid investment job to launch this here, Work It, Mom!, but until that point I had always made a multiple of my husband’s salary. As I’ve written before, while I am proud to have been able to support our family I’ve often felt resentment at having so much pressure and my husband and I have had more than one “heated discussion” (why does this sound better than a fight?) about our situation.
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Lisa Belkin has written another uber-piece in the New York Times Magazine about couples attempting to equally share childcare and household responsibilities and I’ve just had a chance to read through it. (Her original uber-piece being The Opt Out Revolution.)

It’s long, but if you’re married or have a partner or have been married or are just interested in family dynamics, you should read it. It is way too rich with detail for me to summarize, but a few things stuck me:

According to one researcher Ms. Belkin talks about in the article, “…the single-most-predictive factor of how equal a couple will be… is how equal their friends are.”
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