Couples find swapping roles builds versatility
By Maggie Jackson, Globe Correspondent, 1/29/2006
Perhaps she's always paid the bills or been the breadwinner. Maybe he's the laundry guy, trip-planner, and ambitious one. Then, wham! Along comes a downsizing, a temporary assignment in Dallas or a diagnosis of cancer, and things have to change.
When one spouse has to step into the other's shoes and fill in for his or her paycheck or housework or decision-making, there's a lot of learning to be done. Couples are no longer trapped in rigid Ozzie and Harriet roles, yet neither are they interchangeable clones. A bout of role-switching, however painful, makes us versatile and stronger in an ever-volatile world.
"We've gotten flexible by necessity, not by choice, and not without some discomfort, and stretching and willingness to stretch ourselves into areas where we hadn't ventured or hadn't desired to venture," says Elaine Eliopoulos, a divorce attorney who is a veteran role-switcher with husband Richard Frankosky. "It's a huge stressor. However, it has indeed been enlightening."
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For years, they traded places as breadwinners and caregivers. Until 2002, she worked part time and handled most care of their son Turner, now 12. Then, after Frankosky lost his job as a software engineer, he stayed home full time for three years. Last spring, he took a job in Philadelphia, coming home to Weston on weekends and turning her into a weekday single mom.
The adjustments are myriad. As a novice homework helper, she recently had to admit failure and call Philadelphia for help on figuring out the area of a parallelogram. When her husband was a new Mr. Mom, he made extra trips to school to deliver the forgotten lunch box. Both are now more well-rounded, says Eliopoulos.
The learning curve is steep when you fill in for a spouse. Simple domestic chores are often harder than they look. How do you change a fuse, bargain with a car dealer, or determine whether the baby's sick? And cranking up or downshifting a career is tough. Often, it's as hard letting go of one role -- "you don't load the dishwasher the right way" or "I'm a failure if I'm not the breadwinner" -- as adopting another. Good communication is key.
Yet a sense of accomplishment often arises from these upheavals. In the dozen years since Annie DeVeer's husband, Manuel Lopez de Victoria, has struggled with leukemia and chronic illness after a bone marrow transplant, they've learned to live with shifts in their responsibilities, especially after he became too disabled to work.
"If he's doing the bills this week and he gets sick, I have to take over. If it's snowing out and he's not well, I have to" shovel, says DeVeer of Boston, a mother of a 4-year-old and a work-at-home hotel sales manager. "There are days when I think, 'How can I do it?' And then I just do it. Then I'm amazed that I do it." She says she's grown stronger and more outspoken as a result.
You can hear the pride in Nikki Fisher's voice as she recounts her achievements during her husband's recent six-month stint with the Air Force in Iraq. For the first time in her life, she mowed a lawn, managed their investments, and bought a new car on her own. Her biggest accomplishment: driving into Boston from their home in Worcester. The last time she tried, she got so lost and upset her husband took the MBTA in and drove her home.
"I think I have become far more independent and confident in my own ability," says Fisher, a litigator who has been married four years.
She also has a new respect for her husband, who returned home in mid-January. "I used to complain that I did everything," she says. "Now that he's been gone I realize how much he did."
While no one yearns for a curve ball like a military tour, we could all do with a booster shot of empathy in our relationships. Generally, women do two-thirds of household tasks, excluding child care, government data show. Yet men tend to overestimate their contributions, while women underestimate what their husbands do, according to a study of professional couples co-written by University of Chicago professor Linda Waite.
When men step in and do more at home, the whole family often benefits. A recent study by Brandeis researchers Rosalind Barnett and Karen Gareis of 55 Boston-area families in which the mother is a nurse found that the moms who work evenings remain close to their children, while fathers wind up pitching in more around the house and becoming more engaged with their offspring.
There were flash points over laundry duty and a need to rehash the chore routine after Evan Shelby lost his high-technology job in 2001 and began staying home in Hamilton, with his then-infant son Dylan.
But there were unexpected rewards, too. His wife, Susan, put in long hours to ramp up her public relations career, Evan formed a close bond with their son, and both became more resilient and more agile around the house -- hence more egalitarian in the long run.
"There was a division of labor before," says Evan Shelby, a product marketing manager for a software company, "but now it's a shared responsibility."
Maggie Jackson's Balancing Acts column appears every other week. She can be reached at .
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