My husband and I met as teachers.
When we were introduced, I instantly respected him. I was drawn to our shared desire to teach and help young people, and to our mutual love of all things related to English Language Arts.
When we worked together, we maintained our professionalism and didn’t even realize we liked each other until later. When I transferred schools, we ran into each other at a track meet where we were each coaching, and the rest is history.
I loved having the same career as my spouse, because he understood everything I was going through. We could both lament together and build each other up with real teaching advice.
But due to a slow onset of health issues and my inability to keep teaching, I transitioned to full-time writing two years ago.
It hasn’t always been easy no longer working in the same field
It was difficult for me to feel like I was losing my career. It didn’t feel like I had a choice, as my symptoms were suddenly hindering me. However, I did have a choice about what to do next.
I had already been writing professionally while I was teaching, and truth be told, writing had always been my core dream. Only recently have I seen that being forced into freelancing full-time was a blessing in disguise and the push I needed to pursue this path.
With my husband still in the classroom, I can help him with the career-specific stress I’m so familiar with. My understanding of exactly what he’s going through goes a long way in our relationship. I have a good sense of what he might need help with simply because I’m so familiar with the peak exhaustion times of the school year.
Over the years, my career change has created a difference between how we each approach work. My husband and I used to agree to leave work in the classroom because bringing it home was too emotional. So, we had clear boundaries between work and home.
However, now that I’m doing something I love even more than teaching, I don’t ever take time off from it. I am always thinking creatively and working on ideas throughout the day so that I’m never exactly off the clock.
My hope for my husband now is that, in time, he can become as enthralled and obsessed with his own projects as I am with my own.
I’ve started encouraging him to pursue his passions on his time off
I don’t regret leaving the field only because it’s been so much better for my health. I’m grateful I was put in a position where I really had to work hard at writing full-time, rather than just doing it on the side.
Plus, I still get to satisfy my teaching urges through volunteer opportunities at my son’s school and developing curriculum for other teachers.
The common desire my husband and I have to give back and help others is the true reason we were led to teaching, but the ways in which we want to do that now have changed.
We’ve begun brainstorming what we’ll do when he retires from teaching in the next few years. Opening a makerspace for young artists is just one idea we have for using our teaching experience in a less stressful, more rewarding way.
By communicating more about what we want out of life next, I’ve realized I can be my partner’s teammate and help him find work he never wants to stop doing. Because I work from home now, I can also accomplish a lot of logistical tasks for a small business we’re starting, where we can sell his artwork and other products.
Seeing him light up again when he’s working on what he loves has been rewarding for me, because I just want the best for him.
More importantly, we’re becoming more of a team through our creative endeavors, strengthening our bond in the process, and that has been the real reward of helping him to start thinking beyond the classroom.
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