Mixed Marriages: When One Spouse Goes Freelance

My husband is a pilot. His workspace is fairly defined. It has huge fiberglass wings and crazy sharp propellers that will chop you to little tiny bits if you don’t knock properly on the office door.

I wish I had propellers.

Instead I have a laptop, which, sadly, isn’t quite so lethal, and my non-pointy office also functions as a DVD player, a bullhorn for Star Wars-related whines, a sports wire, a news station, a photo album, a gift shop, and a jukebox. So when he sees me staring at the screen with my head in my hands, I could be trying to figure out why people continue to care about Paris Hilton… I could be contemplating the fact that my nephew’s new haircut makes him look like a forty-five year old in a Piglet sleeper… I could be one syllable away from a Pulitzer… he never knows.

What he does know, for his own health, is to assume the Pulitzer thing, even if it’s five in the morning and the theme from The A-Team is pouring tinnily from the speakers as I sob face-down on the keyboard, bitter freelancing tears raining down upon my caps lock key. But that wasn’t knowledge he simply absorbed from basking in my per-job presence: He had to be carefully taught. And so did I.
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