Lace — especially moose lace like this in sport weight yarn — doesn’t look like anything much till you block it, but I think Adiri 3 will be quite a nice sweater, more textured than lacy but nice even so.
My husband has been out of work for two weeks and has spent nearly every minute of that time sitting down and watching TV. And not even knitting while he watches. I don’t think he understands that severance pay is supposed to help you manage while you look for a new job. I think he plans to do nothing for three months and then look for a job when he has no income at all.
I’m trying to be accepting and supportive, especially since he is not interrupting my work day and therefore I have no good reason to complain. At least not yet. But I’m actually not accepting. If he wanted to take a couple of weeks and visit his family or take a month and go to Laos, I would be supportive. Sitting around watching TV? I can’t respect that.
And yet in his native Laos there is a lot of hanging around. He grew up seeing adults work hard when it was time to plant rice or something, and relax and do essentially nothing when it wasn’t time to do something like that. The idea of working all the time because work has value is not one that makes sense to him.
A coworker of his once told me that he was a “legend — he does the work of three men.” I know he’s hard-working, and after years of 12 hour days starting in the middle of the night, he deserves some time off. But I worry that he’ll miss the window for the retraining option, or that he’ll settle in and do nothing permanently while I support him, and I don’t like sharing space with a slacker. I asked him whether he had a plan yet, and he assured me that he doesn’t.
The Empress stayed on unemployment as long as the government allowed it. My husband hasn’t even started to receive unemployment compensation yet, and he may feel that it would be wasteful to go ahead and get a job without having gotten all the unemployment payments he can. He may be taking this better than I did my layoff, which involved a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Here’s the advice I found around the web for women whose husbands are unemployed:
- “You may have to watch a tendency to give your spouse unspoken permission to stay stuck in self-pity and inaction. Push too hard and you risk coming off as cold and uncaring.”
- “Trying to control his steps to resolve the difficult situation your family is in, is only treating him like a child and not respecting the man you married. “
- “There’s a fine line between encouraging your spouse and being annoying. Don’t cross it. “
So I guess any whining I do will be done here at the blog, which has been my primary whining venue for over a decade.