My going-away gift—a rocking chair—arrived today and joined the pile of cheap, stylish furniture I brought to Cleveland. I've spent hours putting it all together with screwdrivers, bizarre little Ikea tools and a spare hammer I shipped west to use hanging pictures. Or most of it, anyway. Some pieces, like my new life, remain only partially assembled.
Last March I learned that the job I'd held for more than five years was to be eliminated. I spent the next six months searching for work in what economists have variously declared to be the worst employment market in—pick a number—25 to 70 years. From the beginning I feared that the best (or only) offer I received would not be close to home. This scenario played out when I was offered a very good job in a very inconvenient place—600 miles from my family in suburban Boston.
Ambition is an enemy of family commitments. I first surrendered to that notion 10 years ago when I worked for Harvard, an employer of obvious prestige. After a couple of years there, I realized the path upward was clogged with people not inclined to move on—lest the eminence their employer lent them be lost. The roadblocks grated on me, but I rationalized them away. The pay was pretty good, the benefits were great, and Harvard was, well, Harvard. You are a father, I told myself, you are a husband: Leaving would be a species of irresponsibility.
I was briefly rather pleased with myself for securing a promotion despite the logjam, but this triumph came about only because I was willing to take a position about which others had reasonable doubts. It was a job that not everyone thought needed doing. I thought it needed doing, though, and I wanted the money and title that came with it. The position was eliminated after 20 months.
As luck would have it, I was able to get a better job without leaving town. Again I forswore ambition and accepted that my good job offered no prospect of promotion. My career increasingly resembled a handsomely dressed corpse in a deluxe coffin, but I made few efforts to revive it. Then, still 12 years from the Social Security retirement age, I was again out on my ear.
During a career that now spans 30 years, I have been fired, laid off, reorganized twice and caught once in the general staff exodus that attends a college presidential transition. I have left an employer voluntarily only three times. It is with some surprise, therefore, that I now encounter people who question my values. How could I choose to leave my family? Have I no love of home?
In Next Stop, Reloville, author Peter Kilborn discusses the mores of young American "executive gypsies" who migrate from soulless suburb to soulless suburb (and from overseas American enclave to overseas American enclave) in search of high-paying jobs. (These folks are criticized for driving up suburban real estate prices and putting down no roots.)
I don't doubt the existence of such a class of people, but it is swamped in size by the present hoard of middle- and upper-middle-class Americans faced with the entirely unwelcome choice. They must embrace their inner gypsy (if moving might yield them a job), or "relocate in place," as Kilborn puts it—by selling their houses, downsizing their lives and accepting that, at least temporarily, they no longer have a seat on the American gravy train. That was the choice I confronted late last summer.
I always thought that a midlife crisis was something you had—something triggered by processes within you. My midlife crisis was not something I put in motion. Its most striking feature is how hard it has become to observe the middle-class verities: I will work for a living and support my family. I will settle somewhere, buy a house and pay it off over time. I will save for college and retirement and be a responsible head of household.
You may manage to do these things, but don't be surprised if it's harder than you expected. And don't be surprised if you don't.DONALD STEWART, MA '79, is a longtime college administrator who lives in Needham, Mass., and Cleveland.
