Post-Backlash Feminism

Here we sit watching television in a house we may be booted out of very soon. The economic disaster has eviscerated my husband's small business, and we cannot keep the house on my salary alone. By "eviscerated" I mean ended. Can't make payroll, can't pay bills, gotta close up shop. 

 I now know someone who has lost his "life savings." My husband began socking money away in his twenties, started a business at 40 and now, in his 48th year, it's gone. All of it. It's one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed.

Plans for retirement, helping grandkids through college, easing peacefully, ordinarily, into old age--gone. We no longer talk about the future, look forward with anything like optimism or cheer; we plan for the worst. We get through the day. Cheerful around the kids, exhausted and vacant when we're alone. Our marriage is in abeyance, somewhere else, not this place, waiting for us to reclaim it after the numbing business of getting on with things has been gotten on with.

My husband and I don't have much in common, deal with things in very different ways, but he makes me laugh and when I smell his skin I feel safe, so I dial down my anger, terror, disappointment and watch television after work, laugh with the kids and wait for better days.