Losing the job Part 2

Continued from last post

Losing the Job...

There are so many feelings and emotions that come when you lose the "family" income/job.  In our case there was the husband (the one who lost the job), the wife, and two young sons.  All four people had different feelings and emotions and all of us had to try to support each other while going through it.  My husband was totally and completely devastated!  He had this job for 21 years and was quite comfortable in it.  He would never say that he enjoyed the job but he would say that he liked it!  He liked the pay, the hours, the level of intelligence that it took to perform the job, some of the people, some of the bosses and definitely the location.

When he lost the job, he felt real fear!  It was a fear of the inability to provide for his family.  As most of you know, this is a particularly difficult thing for a man.  His attitude that accompanied this was "I have worked all these years and made a living.  Now it is your turn to make the living and I can sit back and relax."  This was so very annoying to me and it rocked me to my core.  Never had I seen this side to him and quite frankly, I did not like it.  I had always felt that I was married to a hard working man that always had our back and would always take care of the family.  Seeing this side to him made me feel so very frightened and uneasy.  To me, we did not just lose our family income, I lost my foundation and my trust in life.  I just could not reach him and he seemed like a stranger to me.

My kids were kids and their fears were from other friends whose parents lost their jobs.  They did not show much fear or emotion at the time about what it meant to lose a job but they were very aware that there was a change in their Mom and Dad's relationship.  They would not realize for a very long time that the freedoms we had from having a steady income and a sound financial life, would forever be altered.  Really all my kids growing up life is a memory of their parents struggle with money.  No matter how much we tried to keep it from them, they knew.  Sometimes now, I can see how their foundations were rocked as well!

The frustration at trying to find a new job, one that would pay a decent wage, one that was a good distance from home, one that had good benefits became insurmountable!  Just dealing with the lack of income was difficult in itself.  Please understand, we believed, for a very long time, that this was all temporary.  We carved holes in our budget based on what was a temporary fix.  We really thought that this was all going to turn around and we tried to just keep moving forward.

I read so many books and listened to so many cd's to try and help me get through this mentally.  Everything and everyone said that you should never focus on what you don't have but to be happy and satisfied with what you do have.  I could not grasp this concept.  I could not pretend to be happy about our situation.  The fear of our impending doom overwhelmed any positive changes I tried to make.  I felt like my whole world was crashing around me and I did not know how to pick up the pieces.  I knew that something major was going fall apart if we could not get an income!

While going through all of this for over a year, I felt like I was totally alone.  My husband was a stranger to me in how he handled the whole situation.  Instead of working together as a team, we were separate entities who were totally working from a base filled with anxiety and fear.  Some how, some way, we were going to have to make this work!

More on my next post...