The Family Business

On Discerning My Husband Leaving His Job to Come Home and Work With Me

A few weeks back, I announced on here (and the podcast) that at the end of this school year my husband Chris would be leaving teaching to come home and work with me. Recently, I shared that news on Instagram. That’s when the questions started pouring in, asking me to talk more about why and how we made this decision, as well as what it would look like for us.

Today’s newsletter is a response to those questions. I couldn’t get to all of them, but I got to as many as time allowed. Hopefully, these answers do more than just satisfy curiosity, but also shed some light on the process of discernment in marriage and the rest of life.

Also, it almost goes without saying that we would never be making this decision without the support this newsletter receives from so many of you. So thank you for that. If we were a startup, you would be our first investors, and both Chris and I are incredibly grateful that you consider my writing and everything else we’re doing worthy of your hard-earned money. I promise to do everything I can to keep it that way.

P.S. If you are anywhere near Dayton, a lovely group of people in Russia, Ohio are bringing Chris and me in to speak on the evening of July 19. The event starts at 6:30 p.m. and goes until 8:30 p.m. We will each give a talk, followed by a Q&A together. The event will take place at Russia Local School’s Varsity Gym (100 School Street, Russia, OH), and doors open at 6. If you have any questions, contact Kathryn Francis. Admission is free.

*Note: I received a lot of repeat questions or similar questions, so I have edited and combined some of those for brevity’s sake.

Besides your need for help, what is primarily driving Chris’s decision to leave teaching? AI? The effects of social media on students? Shifting norms in the classroom?

In our most recent podcast episode, Chris talked about how things like Artificial Intelligence, social media, and different expectations of students have changed the experience of teaching over the last 30 years. None of those trends, however, factored into his decision to leave. I think he has adjusted pretty well to all of them and would keep on adjusting if he were still single. Instead, the single biggest reason for his decision is the kids. And his age. Which sounds like two reasons but truly is one.

Chris will be 57 in August. At that point, we will have a seven-year-old, five-year-old, and four-year-old. Chris is no better at math than I am, but we both know that, barring unforeseen tragedies, our kids will live the majority of their life, maybe the vast majority of their life, without us. If we’re lucky, we’ll live long enough to see them settled in their careers and their vocations. That’s our hope. But even if we make it to that point, we won’t have the strength and energy we do today.

Right now, though, we have this window of time where we’re both strong and healthy and energetic. Him transitioning to working from home with me, lets us take better advantage of that window. It gives us more hours in the day together. It also gives us more freedom to travel together as a family. And it just frees up energy that is currently getting poured into the classroom and allows it to go to our kids.

There are other factors, too. But, the combination of kids and age is the main reason for the shift. Chris has spent 29 years—really more, counting his work in youth ministry—giving the best of himself to other people’s children, both his students and his friends’ kids. Now he wants to make sure that his own kids get the best of him while the best still exists to give.

What kind of work will he do?

I am calling him the CFO of Emily Stimpson Chapman, Inc., meaning he will take care of the business end of the various projects run under my S Corps. So, he’ll mange a lot of the work of our podcast, which has been time consuming for Kate and me: posting episodes and show notes, inviting guests and maintaining the calendar, working with advertisers, handling invoices, responding to comments and questions, etc. He’ll do the same with my freelance clients and speaking engagements—invoicing, handling logistics, managing book sales, etc.. And he’ll oversee getting my website updated, for many reasons and in many ways, but primarily so we can sell books through it. Right now, I can only sell books directly to readers a few times a year because it takes so much time, but with him handling all that, we can do it year-round, and a new website (as opposed to a Google form) will make that process smoother. We also have a few other projects we want to take on together that we’ve been talking about for a while, but have never had the time to pursue. Now we should.

Besides all that, Chris will work on some projects of his own, including leading two religion seminars for high school students through Homeschool Connections, making a series of courses for the St. Paul Center, possibly teaching a theology seminar for local homeschool junior high/high school students (through our Montessori school), and hopefully speaking from time to time. He’s had a few offers to do some other work, but he wants to see how the first year of working with me goes—in terms of how much time he has—before committing to anything else.

With neither of you being employed outside the home, how will you handle health insurance?

This was the single most asked question from Instagram readers, which makes me think it’s the biggest sticking point for lots of couples wanting to run their own business together. Or else you’re just really worried about our health.

Regardless, we are still on diocesan insurance through August. Then, when that ends, our plan is to pay for our own health insurance with a traditional insurer. We’ve gotten a quote that seems workable and are moving forward with that. We did spend a lot of time talking to the many self-employed couples we know and looked pretty carefully at Christian health sharing ministries, which is what most of them use. We probably would have followed suit and gone with Samaritan if we were twenty years younger, but we just weren’t comfortable going that route at our age. Plus the prices have gone up significantly with Samaritan (and other health sharing ministries) lately. So, between monthly costs and costs per incident (and being able to deduct traditional insurance from our taxes), the difference between health sharing ministries and a more traditional, high deductible insurance plan (paired with a Health Savings Account) is relatively minimal. That difference is worth it to us if it means coverage that we have more confidence in. Losing the insurance that came with Chris’s job, however, was definitely the piece of this decision that gave us the most pause.

What classes with Homeschool Connections will Chris teach?

For this year, the plan is for him to lead two high school religion seminars—one in the fall and one in the spring. In the fall, he will lead a seminar on sainthood, using Mark Twain’s biography of Saint Joan of Arc as the reflection point. In the spring, the seminar will focus on the history of Black Catholics in America. Primary texts for those will include, The History of Black Catholics in the United States by Cyprian Davis; Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests: 1871-1960 by Stephen J. Ochs; and African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals by David Hackett Fischer. You can see more here.

How do you tell the difference between when a change needs to be made and when you just need to accept the difficulties of a certain season?

It’s hard to answer this in a way that could apply to all situations. Every couple is always discerning a particular move for particular people, so, I can only answer for us and how we approached the transition. In our case, I think our discernment largely involved identifying which of our struggles would change with time and which ones wouldn’t, as well as making sure we were moving towards something we desired and not just running away from something that felt hard. That sounds pretty generic, so I’ll explain a bit more in terms of our specifics.

Obviously, the past five years, maybe even seven years, have been pretty crazy for us. The combination of welcoming three babies in two-and-a-half-years, welcoming them through pretty high stress adoptions, and all the while traveling to Illinois almost monthly to help my sisters care for our sick and aging parents made life…challenging. We were also doing all that with me working from home and being the primary caregiver for the children. That would make life stressful for just about anyone. But we knew a lot of those stresses would fade as the kids got older. They weren’t a reason for us to make major changes. We definitely tinkered around the edges, with things like babysitting help, schedules, and even our move to Steubenville, but Chris would not have quit his job just because of situational stresses with a time stamp on them.

Two things, however, were not going to change.

First, was the need for me to work. As a Catholic school teacher, in the United States and especially in this part of the country, Chris was never going to make enough to support the family without my income. Not because he isn’t an incredibly intelligent, wise, funny, faithful, hard-working, and talented religion teacher. He is. Just about every high school in the Pittsburgh diocese has tried to hire him at one point or another. He is fantastic. He has been a gift to every school where he has taught. But being a Catholic school teacher simply doesn’t pay a family wage, which is why male married teachers almost never stay in the classroom long term, at least not without wives who, sooner or later, work, too. His other options—becoming a high school administrator or going into an entirely different line of work—didn’t make sense to us. The first would have kept him away from home all the time and the second is almost impossible to do in your mid-fifties.

What also wasn’t going to change was my need for help. Professionally, I juggle a lot. I always have. That’s what any person who hopes to make a living from Catholic writing must do. And between the writing and the kids and all the nitty gritty work that goes along with the writing, I have been needing help for a long time. Friends have helped me. Babysitters have helped me. But I really have needed consistent daily help for a while. And that’s not something we could afford.

So, that is part of it. But the bigger piece of the puzzle is that we have a vision for how we want to live our life with our kids and that vision didn’t involve either one of us being gone from the home and family for long stretches of time. Chris and I have long been captured by Wendell Berry’s assessment that one of the great ailments of the modern world is that homes have become places primarily of consumption and not production. People often connect that assessment with a call to homestead, but it’s so much more than that. The Industrial Revolution and runaway capitalism have pulled everyone out of the home, starting with the fathers, but also mothers and children. Too many neighborhoods, in too many cities, including our old neighborhood in Pittsburgh, are empty during the day. Everyone is gone and the most interesting parts of many modern families’ lives take place out of the home, not in it.

We didn’t want that to be the case for our family. We wanted Chris home more, not less. We wanted to be working together. And we wanted our home to be the place where the best parts of the day were happening. We wanted it to be a place of real production, economically and spiritually. That desire didn’t diminish as the years went by. It only grew.

Chris coming home to work with me allows us to remake our lives according to that shared vision we have for our family. It also meets my need for help. And while we will miss his income (and his health insurance), it was a teacher’s salary, so we think him being here will allow both of us to do more together that will at least come close to replacing that salary.

I should also add that we have had nothing but support from our friends and family on this. Everyone thinks it’s a great idea. Everyone is excited for us. So, that also has been good outside confirmation. Other people’s support on big life changes is not infallible. But when you trust those people, it can underline good discernment.

Do you have any advice about how to know when it’s time to make the move from praying and discerning a change to making a decision and acting on it?

In general, there are three guides which can consistently help us in the discernment process: desire, ability, and opportunity. God’s will often (but not always!) becomes clear to us when the good things we desire, our ability to do those good things, and the opportunity to actually do them all line up. In other words, if you have been dreaming about doing something for a long time, you have the skills to do that thing, and the opportunity to do it presents itself, it’s probably the prudent choice to make the decision and act.

For us, we’ve had the desire to do this for some time. It’s something we have been talking about for years, since at least when Becket was born, but probably longer. We also knew we had the ability to do it. I’ve been doing what I’m doing, supporting first myself and later my family, through my writing for 20 years. Chris has been helping me and supporting me in many ways for most of that time, as both a friend and husband, and absolutely has the ability to come alongside me and work with me on a more full-time basis.

Those two pieces were clear. With opportunity, it got fuzzier. What counted as opportunity? If it was me making so much money that his salary was unnecessary, then that was never going to happen. I can only do so much on any given day, and without help I’ve been maxxed out for a while. But there have been opportunities coming both my way and his lately that we could only say yes to if he said no to teaching. And with those opportunities came at least the semblance of a plan for how we could make up his salary. Not a guarantee. But a possibility. And for now, that’s been enough for us.

Along with that, we are not getting any younger. I am not getting any less stressed. The commute to Pittsburgh is not getting any easier for Chris. At this point, we didn’t see a whole lot of advantages to waiting. Without Chris leaving teaching, we would still be where we are now in another year or two or three. So why wait?

And that’s how we made the decision to act. We felt confident that we wanted to do this and could do this. And doing it now made as much sense as doing it later. If one of us hadn’t wanted it, if we had good reason to think we couldn’t handle it, or if there was a significant advantage to be gained by waiting, we would have held off. But there wasn’t. So, ultimately, this seemed like the prudent decision for us to make. You’ll have your own set of variables, but starting with those three pieces of discernment—desire, ability, and opportunity— should at least bring you closer to knowing if it’s time to act or just keep praying.

After you made the decision did you feel an immediate sense of relief about things?

Not after we made the decision. We were inching towards it all last fall and felt committed to it by the end of the year, but Chris didn’t tell the school until the end of March. I felt confident it was the right decision, but there were still plenty of nights in February and March where I was tossing and turning at two in the morning, running numbers in my head. As soon as he told his principal that he wasn’t coming back, though, the peace came. All the anxiety disappeared and hasn’t returned. I’m still running numbers in my head, but not in a panicked way. Which can also be a sign of good discernment; it’s often accompanied by a settled peace. And we both feel that.

Now that you’re both home will you homeschool?

Nope! We are firmly committed to sending our kids to our little neighborhood Montessori school. Our kids are so happy there. They’re thriving learning alongside their peers, and their guides are doing a better job of teaching them than Chris or I would. If the school were ever to close, homeschooling would be the next option for us, but for now, we have no plans to change course.

How do you know this is what God wanted?

This is a good question, and I think the nature of discernment—not our discernment in this specific area—would make a great topic to cover in an upcoming podcast. But for now, I’ll just note two things.

First, when we’re discerning anything, looking to the three points I talked about above—desire, ability, opportunity—is an excellent starting point. If you don’t have the desire, ability, or opportunity to do something, that’s usually a good sign that God’s will doesn’t involve you doing that thing. Not always. There’s nuance. But it’s still a helpful way to rule certain decisions out.

More fundamentally, though, we need to remember that God is not a gameshow host in the sky. Every time we have a decision to make, He is not up in Heaven, hoping we guess the right answer so that we get the life He wants for us and not some consolation prize of a life.

In other words, it is a bad idea to over-spiritualize every decision we make. God wants us to love Him and seek Him and serve Him. He also wants us to love others and serve others, especially the poor, whether poor in spirit or poor in material resources. He gives us some fairly broad instructions about how to do that in Scripture and Tradition. But He doesn’t micromanage our every decision. He expects us to use our reason, guided by faith, to make prudent choices. And most of the time, there is more than one prudent choice to make.

Chris and I don’t feel like he would have been going against God’s will if he had continued teaching, any more than we feel like he absolutely had to quit teaching in order to obey God’s will. We just think this is the most prudent choice for our family, given what we know. God hasn’t thrown up any major roadblocks, so we’re going to continue moving in this direction, trusting that He knows our hearts, sees all that will follow from our decision, and will help us as we go. If it becomes clear at any point that it’s not working, Chris can just go get another job.

Do you worry about getting pushback for such an untraditional arrangement or that Chris will feel emasculated working for you?

Do I worry about getting pushback? No. I mean, we might get pushback. I get pushback for lots of things, from the paint colors I pick to the length of my hair. But the opinion of random Internet strangers isn’t going to stop Chris and me from doing what we think is best for our family. Neither of us, however, would call what we are doing “untraditional.”

Historically speaking, husbands leaving their family and spending the whole day in an office is way more untraditional that what we’re doing. The former didn’t happen with any regularity until the late nineteenth century, and even then it was mostly a phenomenon among the upper classes and emerging middle classes. Husbands and wives working alongside each other in the home is what most men and women have been doing since human beings stopped hunting and gathering. And a lot of time, it was the wife who brought the property or business to the marriage. A husband helping his wife manage her property or run her business was not unusual at all. It was quite ordinary.

As for emasculating … I’m not married to some reactionary. Chris is strong and wise and confident. If you want to hear him talk about how he feels about my work, you can listen to this episode of Visitation Sessions from about a year ago. He is super proud of me and feels very strongly that God has called me to write. He thinks what I do is important, and that it matters. And I am pretty sure he feels more strongly about that than I do.

I am not a woman who has big career ambitions. I have plans, but those plans are oriented towards how I can better serve God, love my family, and pay our bills. In other words, they’re practical, not aspirational. All things being equal, I’d be just as happy being a full-time housewife as I am a professional writer. In some ways, probably happier. But that’s not the choice God has put before me. Not ever. Not when I was single. Not now. He has arranged the circumstances of our life in such a way that me continuing to do the work I do and Chris working with me is what makes the most sense. I’ve already talked a lot about discernment, but one other piece is recognizing that God’s will for us is often made clear in the circumstances of the present moment. Chris and I both believe that. We believe the circumstance of our life show us that God’s will is for me to write. Chris would tell you that us choosing this path is simply us living in obedience to that will.

More than that, though, I can’t stress how much I already depend on Chris. His wisdom and knowledge is woven into so much of my work. I’ve never written a book without Chris’s input. I’ve barely written a newsletter without asking him to read it over first. He is my best friend, my most trusted advisor, and the spiritual leader of our home who is constantly calling me on to holiness. Him coming home is not about him working for me but rather about him working with me. We are a team, with a shared desire to help people grow in spiritual maturity and see the world with Catholic eyes. This is our work, and while we may each have different tasks within that work, it really is a mutual project.

As for the rest, Chris is the most authentically masculine man I know. He is so healthy, so engaged, so humble, and so strong. I wouldn’t have married him if he wasn’t stronger than I am. Which is to say that anyone who thinks what he is doing is in any way emasculating, is actually just revealing their own weakness (or the weakness of their husband).

Does the loss of stability and reliable income worry you?

Not enough to stop us from doing it. I mean, I have no idea how this will play out. I don’t know how everything will come together. I expect we’ll struggle at least for a while. But I have been self-employed for 18 years now. My income has never been predictable or reliable in all that time, not even with Chris’s salary. I’m always juggling multiple streams of income that change monthly, so I’m used to getting creative and adapting to the cycle of lean months and fat months.

I’m also used to trusting God’s provision. I don’t do it perfectly. Not even close. But I am getting better at it. Or, more accurately, I’m getting better at recognizing that when Chris and I are generous in how we serve and how we give, when we are generous in saying yes, God always takes care of us. Always. He has never let me down. Sometimes He cuts it pretty close. The work and the provision don’t always come when or how I expect them to come. But it does come. Through all my single years and all my married years, God has provided for me, so Chris and I don’t have any reason to believe He'll stop taking care of us now.

This doesn’t mean living with an unpredictable income isn’t stressful. It is. It’s just normal stressful to me, an ever-present reality of my life. Like death and taxes.

How will you and Chris divide work between the two of you—paid work, kids, household management, etc.?

This fall, the boys will be in school full day (8:30-3) and Ellie will be in school half day (8:30-12). We’ll both work in the mornings, then in the afternoons, we’ll alternate time with Ellie. Chris’ will definitely need Monday afternoon for his Homeschool Connection seminars, and I always need Thursday afternoons to finish up this newsletter (since it normally comes out on Friday). Once the school day is over, we’ll aim to be done with work, and do things together around the house with the kids: playing, reading, cleaning, working outside, etc.. When I have speaking engagements, with maybe one exception a year, we’ll travel as a family, like we have been. I don’t plan on taking on more than 4-6 events a year, though. My primary professional vocation is writing, not speaking, so I want to make sure that stays the focus of my work.

As for the house and kids, I usually do most of the housework (with some help from Chris and the kids) and all the cooking. He does most of the outside work (with some help from me and the kids). And we both care for the children. I don’t think any of that will change, other than Chris having more time to work on some projects outside.

I’m curious about how this will work with your budget? I know you write a lot, so will you just write more?

I’m curious, too! In all seriousness, there is an element of risk here. But again, my work has had an element of risk to it since 2007, when I quit my job at Franciscan University to freelance full-time. So, I’ve had a lot of practice navigating this kind of risk. It requires having many projects lined up, usually months in advance, and managing multiple streams of income and many different clients.

In this case, for us, Chris will be doing paid outside work (for Homeschool Connections, the St. Paul Center, and local students) that will help replace a chunk of his old income. He’ll also be creating a new source of revenue for us with year-round book sales and making it possible for me to use my time more productively. I currently work about 25 hours a week, and maybe 25-30 percent of that time is spent doing the work he will take over. I don’t plan to work much more when he comes home, but fewer hours sending emails means more hours writing, and that will generate more income. I also won’t lose nearly so much work time for things like snow days, sick days, and a babysitter cancelling, all of which can be costly for a freelancer.

Beyond that, we feel optimistic about a lot of the irons we have in the fire: the podcast’s trajectory; potential sales from the lineup of books I have coming out over the next year (the Around the Catholic Table cookbook, the Story of All Stories youth story Bible, and a children’s book about Saint Joseph); plus Beautycounter’s relaunch (as Counter) later this month. I don’t quite know what will happen with Beautycounter/Counter, and I am not looking to it to provide the kind of income it once did for our family, but we hope it will be a helpful bridge revenue source for us, as we make this transition. We’ll see.

Last but not least, we think Chris and I working together will allow us to be more strategic about the various projects I’ve been doing alone and that we’re planning on doing together, whether that’s the podcast, this newsletter, speaking, pilgrimages, social media, book sales, or other ideas we have. I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants for a long time, with very little space in my schedule or my brain to do some of the basic marketing work I should be doing, especially for my books. That hurts both our income and our apostolate. Having him help me with this will be huge.

And that is probably way more about our financial planning than you needed to know!

Five Fast Things

1. Grace Jagla has the most charming little children’s book launching this week. It’s called If a Saint Had a Song, and I loved the humanity of how it details Heaven throwing a party.

2. Another children’s book I picked up recently is The Story Orchestra’s version of Sleeping Beauty. Ellie and I like to go on adventures when the boys are in school, and that most often means getting a treat at the local coffee shop (Leonardo’s), then wandering over to hang out in the children’s section of the local bookstore (the wonderful Bookmarx). Ellie was so enchanted with this book that we had to bring it home. The illustrations are charming, the text simple and sweet, and on each page you can press a button and hear a snippet of Tchaikovsky’s score. If you have a little girl in your life who loves fairy tales and music, this will delight her.

3. I semi-retract last week’s endorsement of Tucci in Italy. We’ve watched the remaining episodes since then, and while most of them are great, Tucci just couldn’t resist getting political in the second episode. His particular way of getting political (advocating for same-sex couples adopting and using surrogates) will leave a sour taste in most Catholics’ mouths. But, if you decide to push past that, the rest of the show is truly fun.

4. My friend Christina kept showing pictures on Instagram of the amazing French baked eggs she was making for breakfast, and when I begged, kindly sent me this recipe she had found, with the added advice, “Generally do this, but use more cream and more butter.” I have been following that tip without any precision, and also using more Parmesan and random herbs, likewise, without any precision, and it has turned out delicious every time. Highly recommend for a weekend breakfast.

5. I have been meaning to share a sneak peak of the cover for the upcoming cookbook, with Ellie’s sweet little hand down in the corner. I was messing around shooting some possibilities for a cover photo, when she reached in to grab some cheese. We liked it so much that we ended up going with that idea for the cover. It will be out late summer/early fall, and I am so, so excited to get this into everyone’s hands! Pre-orders aren’t available yet, but I will share as soon as they are.

   

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In Case You Missed It

“Why I Don’t Feel Guilty About Not Homeschooling”

“The Weeds and Wheat of Motherhood”

“Circling the Drain: On Feminism, the Patriarchy, and What Marriages Really Need”