“Don’t bring home any men in skirts,” my mother told me, only half joking, when I left Los Angeles for a graduate program in Scotland. Five years later, I’m back, armed with a PhD and a kilt-wearing, haggis-eating Scottish husband.
Mom is coping. For a start, she’s learned not to call it a skirt. As the old joke goes: Why do they call it a kilt? Because they kilt the first guy who called it a skirt. Ian and I have had to put up with a few good-natured jokes about who wears the pants in the family, but for the most part we’re enjoying the inevitable cultural adjustments.
Mom’s not so sure about the sporran. A sporran is a furry pouch worn around the waist over a kilt. It bears a strong resemblance to a purse, so Mom can be forgiven for occasionally slipping up and calling it that. (What does the modern-day Highlander carry in his sporran? Car keys, PDA, Altoids, wallet and a cell phone that plays the love theme from Braveheart. When the phone rings, it draws baffled stares toward my husband’s groin.)
Most of all, though, Mom is happy to have her only daughter back home. For I am literally back home, sharing my parents’ cramped guest room with Ian, our dog, Mandy, and several dozen boxes containing our worldly possessions. We’re all wondering how long this physically and psychologically precarious arrangement will last.
A confirmed fuzzie since my days on the Farm, I resigned myself long ago to living without a savings account, that new-car smell, and furniture that didn’t come flat-packed. When I married a hardcore techie with a comfortable salary, we both assumed that his career would keep the family finances healthy, leaving me free to pursue whatever low-paying-yet-socially-commendable job I fancied. So it is with a certain amount of shock that I now find myself the sole breadwinner in the family. (I use the term loosely; with my paycheck, “crumbwinner” seems more accurate.)
We moved back to the United States so I could accept a professionally rewarding job (as a curator of 18th-century French art) and be less than 5,000 miles away from my family for a change. It meant that Ian had to give up his salary from a Scottish university, but we were confident that a physicist with his skills, qualifications and experience would have no trouble finding an even better job within a month or two.
It has now been six months, without so much as an interview. Like so many in America, we’re playing the waiting game, continually hearing that the economy is picking up but never seeing any evidence of that. Meanwhile, our savings are shrinking and our “temporary” housing solution is feeling more and more permanent. The fact that Ian’s PhD is in laser sensor development—a field that has been virtually closed to noncitizens in the security crackdown since September 11—hasn’t helped. In the five years that I was away, the land of opportunity turned into a land of suspicion, anxiety and downsizing.
I’m worried as well about what I’m turning into. I’ve always been a proud feminist, reveling in my self-sufficiency. I hated the idea of having to rely on a man financially, although I wasn’t too principled to enjoy the fruits of Ian’s much larger income. It didn’t matter which partner had the “better” job, I told myself, so long as both were equally committed to the real work that makes a marriage successful.
None of these abstract convictions quite prepared me for the responsibility, the emotional mayhem and the exhaustion of supporting a man who is perfectly willing and able to work, if only someone would hire him. Suddenly, self-sufficiency isn’t enough; indeed, I’m ashamed by how limited my financial and spiritual resources have turned out to be. Those jokes about who wears the pants don’t seem so funny anymore.
Perhaps we’ll be a two-income family again soon. Until then, we’re downsizing our expectations (by contemplating longer commutes and smaller apartments) and dreaming up alternative careers for Ian (Hollywood accent coach? Whisky sommelier?) We’re trying to focus on the positive: spending time with our family, exploring our new surroundings and learning to measure ourselves—and each other—by the size of our dreams, not the size of our paychecks.
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, ’94, is a postdoctoral fellow at The Huntington in San Marino, Calif. Just before this essay went to press, Ian Campbell was hired as a senior physicist at Meggitt Avionics.
