Are You Shouldering More Than Your Share?
On Asking Your Body for Wisdom When You Feel Overwhelmed About Money Conversations
Recently I recorded a podcast on asking our body for intuition and while writing about our wisdom centers (heart, gut, and brain) I was drawn to pay attention to my shoulders instead.
Apparently they had wisdom for me, and they felt “louder” in an energetic sense, for lack of a better way to explain this. My own intuition tends to take the form of clairaudience, also knowing as clear hearing, or claircognizance, clear knowing. Immediately some questions arose:
Where in your life are you overdoing things?
I was drawn to ask my shoulders: What are you having to carry right now that feels like too much?
And of course, my body always has the answers when I slow down long enough to listen. I’d been working on finance clarity for my business earlier in the day, and also paying household bills. My shoulders told me that the burden of making all the decisions is more than I want to bear for the shared household that includes my husband.
Oh, bummer.
As I have recently been exploring my relationship with money, it has occurred to me that it is something I’d like to unpack with my husband also. And of course, some of my internal parts have massive resistance to this, given the history of these conversations, and memories from my first marriage (where money was a sore point).
However, I also see where avoiding these conversations and staying planted in my desire for control and autonomy on this front might not serve us long-term as a couple. As I’ve embarked upon a self-employed and more independent journey of work, this has brought up some insecurities in myself and for my husband.
It makes sense, given that when we first got married, I’d been in a job for about 9 years where I had gotten three promotions and in the final few years was making a 6-figure salary. But I had talked changing careers for 12-18 months before that, careful not to set the expectation that it would be a lifelong commitment, and intuitively sensing I was ready for a change.
In recent years, my mother-in-law amplified some of the conflict in our marriage about money, work, and resources. There was an implication that I had a “fancy management job” when we got married, so she assumed that was how things could continue. And while that tested my boundaries, and allowed me to declare that space off-limits for her input, the residue of those interactions persists.
I decided over the long weekend to learn more about my husband’s money stories and lessons he absorbed from his family, as well as sharing some recent discoveries of my own beliefs. It was a good opportunity to bring greater understanding to some of the experiences he had with money and with small business. When he was a teen, his dad started a driveway seal-coating business and drafted his older brother and him to work on it.
The upshot of the story is that a rival small company was started by a family with more resources, able to invest in more equipment to help with the work. Given that his Dad was bootstrapping and trying to operate on a fairly thin margin, the business did not end up being profitable, and ultimately did not succeed.
At this early juncture, I was not sure about delving deeply into his feelings around that, but I observed “that must have been disappointing” for his dad (and maybe for him). He agreed. It helped me understand a vital part of his insecurity about my business, and knowing that helped me empathize with his fear.
I realized I want to bring him into the decision-making parts of our financial life more regularly. I have largely been shouldering these, outside of occasional (about twice annual) reviews. We may need to do this gradually, and with gentle assurance that we are on the same team.
I also acknowledge my own volatility when questioned about my desire to keep this self-employment path. My husband and I are navigating some class differences in our expectations also. His parents always had multiple cars, and yet eventually, they got divorced. Though his mom earned a graduate degree, she still described herself as “working class,” which surprised me.
My parents came from humble beginnings. They were both teachers, but Mom took 10+ years outside the paid workforce when my sister and I were young. They didn’t own more than one car at a time. Yet I went to Swarthmore College and later, to graduate school, on some very generous financial aid.
While I don’t necessarily aspire to the life a lot of my wealthier peers have, I definitely thought I was “middle class” until I got to college and realized I grew up much less privileged than many. We never went hungry, and I knew I was loved by my parents. If we were poor, it sure didn’t feel that way to me.
Recently I’ve been listening to a wonderful new podcast called “Classy” in which host Jonathan Menjivar looks at the ways in which class affect our interactions, particularly for those of us scaling that wall, or having mixed identities. It resonated so strongly with me because that’s part of the reluctance I have in broaching this topic. There are class issues here, and things that have gone unsaid between my husband and me related to this topic.
Taking a year off to live on savings, while writing my first book and making a small fraction of my old corporate income, I fulfilled a dream I had since I was about 8 years old. I doubt I will ever have regrets about that. Hubby is tired of shouldering the process of being more of the main breadwinner for the past 2.5 years, while his income covered about 40% of our total expenses, and I opted to take retirement distributions to fund the shortfall.
Yes. I get it. I set the expectation during the first 8 years of our relationship that I’d always have the “big” job before taking a sabbatical and then getting laid off after less than a year in another 6-figure role. Now, we are moving into a new phase of our relationship together. We need to both shoulder the decisions and responsibility we will take for our financial future.
I am both scared and excited by the possibility. Taking deep breaths as I delve into this next chapter.
-cdlc