Life Changes

So what's going on in our life besides the baby? This is going to be long. We haven't been able to finish off the construction in the baby's room. We've actually been working on the yard and planting flowers. We got a maple tree from my parents' backyard forest to replace the little one that didn't make it last summer and some ferns for the corner near the deck. Brian and a neighbor thatched and aerated their lawns together. Over one weekend Brian fertilized, over-seeded, and watered the lawn before we had an overnight visit with my family.

Our house was damaged in the hail storm a month ago. Our aluminum siding was all dented up, a basement window broke and all the screens are shredded by hail three inches across. The adjuster said the roof and siding needs to be replaced. We had been planning on painting the trim this summer, but now we're going to have to do a lot more. No matter what though, it has been so good to see our home come together.

There has been so much going on that we're still trying to learn to balance everything. We're still trying to learn how to keep up with the dishes and the laundry. We do really well on the weekends, but during the weekdays everything seems to get away from us. Brian's car is starting to die and will need to be replaced. It has been an incredible car and has barely had any trouble, especially with the way he drives it. Don't get me wrong, he drives excellently. Almost too much so. Sometime I swear he thinks he's Jeff Gordon. The car is just starting to get old and weary. We're planning on driving it to the ground.

But the biggest news is that Brian was let go. When he first told me, I thought it was a joke.

The company he was with had given him every indication that everything was going fine, however the behind the scenes situation was that they didn't have their customer contract signed and in the end "didn't have enough work to have Brian come in tomorrow". Brian and I wouldn't have been happy about having to find a new job, but the way the company handled letting him go was just terrible and has left us with a bitter taste. They must have known for at least two weeks that they might let him go. Everyone knew we are pregnant.

At his interview Brian had carefully asked if the position was to go to full-time or really was just a six-month temporary position. The owner of the company told him that as long as Brian's work was satisfactory, there was every reason to expect him to be hired full-time, that being temporary was to protect them from hiring someone unsatisfactory. When Brian was interviewed, they talked like the contract was signed. He has been working on the design for this specific contract for the past three months. Brian had known that the contract wasn't signed for the past few weeks, but it didn't seem to signal anything. They talked about finding a new customer and contract, especially with the new sleek (and cheaper) design that had come out of their work. It all seemed so very full of potential, for both Brian and the company.

On a Monday, three months to the day after he started, AFTER he got home from work and his half hour drive home, he was called by an agent from the placement office which had hired him on a temporary basis to work for the company. They left a message on his cell, and to quote, "Please don't go into work tomorrow" Really. "Call me back as soon as you can and don't go into work tomorrow." Brian's crucifix, wedding picture, design books, pencil from Sweden, and other personal effects were still on his desk! Brian called his boss, who told him not to come by to get the stuff, but that they would have it boxed up and sent over! The boss made noises about how it wasn't anything about his work performance, but was completely due to not having work for him and if they found something, potentially they'd like to hire him back. Brian ended up showing up the next day to get his stuff anyway.

I can understand letting someone go when you don't have the work for them to do. However, I don't think it's dignified or good business practice to hit your former employee over the head with the bad news of a job loss: "Don't bother coming in", particularly when they're pregnant and particularly when you had to have known about your options in advance. They handled it as if Brian had embezzled money, sexually harassed someone, or didn't show up for work. As it is, I guess they feel that they had paid too much already for the work that Brian's done which may not be utilized and may not make them money. Brian and I were willing to take on the risk that his work measure up to stay on. However, we would have rather known that they had no intention of keeping him on if the contract fell through. It feels a little unfair to us to have expected to have the job for at least six months and potentially longer, and to have it be SUDDENLY over with no warning whatsoever only half way through.

So anyway. Brian feels that he's learned the lesson to pay attention to his instincts, since he thought things might be a little funny with the unsigned contract. He wonders if maybe he should have stayed at the boring, lower paying steady job verses leaving for the high paying, fun, ended-up-ending job. I feel that we made the best decision we could at the time. We had prayed and felt it was what we should do. His other job wasn't furthering his career at all and really had him crawling the walls in boredom. If these people had treated us with a reasonable level of humanity, then I would say we would have come out on top, even if the job ended-up-ending. Brian was making quite a bit more every week, which we saved, which we thought would help see us through until we get back on our feet. Unfortunately, we had planned to use that to pay for the baby's birth. Fortunately, we didn't have to use it since Brian got another job.

In the first week, Brian already had two different leads on jobs and some ideas for stop-gap work if he needed to. Maybe not exactly what we would want in the ideal situation, but something to keep paying the mortgage. He took it pretty hard, but I wasn't really worried for the long term. He was worried about taking care of me and the baby, but I have so much confidence in him. He is so smart and has gotten every job he's ever interviewed for, including the one that just let him go. He's well educated and dedicated.

I prayed for us and particularly him during this difficult time. I wanted to hold strong in our marriage and have this time be a strengthening exercise in marital love. We are both going to be stressed and dealing with a lot of changes in the coming months already.