I pressed my nose against the glass of the Starbucks on Main Street in our city of Evanston, Ill., spying on my husband from the sidewalk as he placed a sandwich in the warmer, taking instructions from a fellow Starbucks “partner” half his age.
I felt grateful for this job but resented what it took for him to get here. As a nonprofit professional, I had worked full-time jobs throughout most of our marriage while consulting on the side. Marco was an accomplished graphic designer. I had married for love, passion and yes, financial partnership. And yet.
Seventeen years ago, I had just learned that I was pregnant with twins when Marco came home in the middle of the day carrying bags of his work belongings.
“I just got laid off,” he said. He sat on the edge of our bed, sighed, plunked onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
My heart reeled. How could he just collapse on the bed? Six months into our marriage, I had yet to account for our different coping mechanisms.
I was raised with privilege and opportunities; he was not. I come from a long line of worriers. For me, having the financial rug yanked out signaled impending doom. But this situation wasn’t new for Marco; he had grown up watching his parents fight about how to make ends meet. For him, this was just life.
Nearly eight years later, as we were about to close on our first home, he was laid off again, along with half his company.
“Babe, I’m so sorry,” he said when he called me from the bar across from his office. I drove to the city to meet him, blasting Louden Wainwright’s “Hallelujah,” heart racing yet filled with empathy.
When I pulled up to the bar and found my forlorn beloved on the curb with his banker’s box of personal belongings, my stomach sank. What would happen to our dream home, a quirky Midwestern farmhouse with a sleeping porch and separate room for our now 7-year-old twins?
He was laid off a third time a few years later, just three months into the pandemic. This time, someone from human resources delivered the news on Zoom.
“Oh, babe,” I said as I hugged the now white-haired man whose fate entwined with mine. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. Through recession and pandemic. Lice, locusts, climate change, Covid, hail. My stomach fell to my feet. As the news sunk in, I felt pummeled.
As Marco’s colleagues vanished from his life, he grew isolated. We attended his mother’s funeral by Zoom. The pandemic tanked us, not just financially but emotionally. Marco remained underemployed for four and a half years.
My husband is a talented professional in a field that constricted before his eyes. As a bright kid who excelled in school and found his way to tuition-free Cooper Union, he became the first in his family to graduate from college. His father, Marco Sr., the son of a farmer, grew up poor in Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx in the 1950s in search of a better life. He met Marco’s mother, Lucila, on the assembly line at a leather goods factory.
Later, Marco Sr. worked as a waiter at Chateau Henry IV on 64th and Park, and after that, as a hairdresser who struggled to keep his own shop. Lucy was also from Puerto Rico, a gutsy survivor who was raised by aunts after her mother died. She quit the factory job when she married and became a housewife, her own version of the American dream.
A resourceful woman with more schooling than her husband, Lucy often was furious with her spouse for not providing enough money to cover groceries. She would blast Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” when her husband came home.
I, too, was a survivor and wanted to embody that spirit when it came to making ends meet. Yet with each layoff, our savings drained away. Eventually, so did my optimism. Early on, we had traded Brooklyn for the Midwest and a lower cost of living. We were frugal.
But our family of four required two incomes. My work for social ventures and universities, along with my side business, wasn’t enough. When his income evaporated, I felt compelled to figure out how to earn more.
I loved Marco. His artistic spirit, emotional intelligence, love for me and our family and, yes, hotness, made him more attractive than any man I’d known. Yet my frustration had begun to outpace my love.
We had both wanted him to find the kind of professional job he had trained for. But the amount of time he spent interviewing, only to get passed over, alerted us to the ageism he was up against. I understood, for a few years, why he couldn’t apply for other kinds of jobs just to have work. His father had worked in service as a waiter. Marco thought his job was to “surpass” his father — anything less would be a failure.
Although Marco wasn’t bringing home a check, he did step up in the care of our children. He learned to cook. We thankfully had no debt. While we both had similar values about fiscal responsibility, I had more success finding work as a well-connected woman with a wide network when my jobs disappeared because of funding cuts.
But I’d hit a wall. What I thought was supportive began to feel more like enabling. In retrospect, it amazes me how long it took me to see that.
My situation reminded me of the line from a Muriel Rukeyser poem: “I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.” I was done covering. The thrum of frustration in my marriage combined with the fraught state of our nation as the election loomed had pushed me past my breaking point.
In early November 2024, just before the election, my husband flew to Nashville for a conference where he was meeting up with friends after a long period of post-pandemic isolation. It wasn’t career-related, but he went anyway — for a lift. And I felt a rush of relief as he walked out the door; my jaw unclenched. In his absence, I started to envision asking him to leave.
When he called from Nashville to check in that first night, the words of my ultimatum came from deep in my chest. I told him, sobbing, that if he didn’t have work by May, I was going to ask him to leave the house.
He applied for a job at the art store chain Blick, which he vibed with as a visual creator. When that didn’t pan out, he swallowed his pride and interviewed at Starbucks. For years, Starbucks had been our “office.” I had written my dissertation there, and we had both used it to get out of the house while freelancing over the years. I was addicted to their chai (another pleasure I had given up to cost-cutting).
Before long, Marco was behind the counter in a bright green apron, learning how to make every kind of coffee drink and work the espresso bar. His shifts began at 5 or 7 a.m. and he was done by 10 or 12, leaving him time for a freelance design project that had at last come through.
That December, we checked into a small, quaint inn in Michigan for one night around my birthday to see if we could repair our marriage.
“Look,” he said, stepping closer. “You’ve said you want to reinvent our marriage and make it better serve us both. It’s broken; I get that. But it would kill me to lose you.”
A few weeks later, I visited him at Starbucks. He was at the register and introduced me to his co-worker. I ordered a tall skim mocha latte.
“Mocha for Deborah!” called out my husband’s co-worker, who shot me a kind glance. “You’re Marco’s wife?” he said. “We think he’s great.”
Recently, amid a national wave of store closings, Starbucks announced that they were closing Marco’s store. He and many of his colleagues were not transferred to another store.
We have been upended once again. It seems to be our refrain. In marriage you either suffer together or you suffer apart. The verb “upend” bears multiple meanings. It can mean to topple, to turn something upside down, or to overturn it, or to disrupt or drastically change a situation, system or expectation.
Yet in another sense, to upend is to defeat, to overcome, master, conquer, subdue. To upend can also mean “to prevail.”
I hope, together, we do.
Deborah Siegel-Acevedo a writer in Evanston, Ill., is working on a memoir about the personal and cultural seismic shifts that break and remake us.
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