Then suddenly, there was nothing.
Just me.
And Mark.
At first, I thought that might bring us closer.
It didn’t.
Mark had become increasingly absorbed in his career.
He was a senior manager at a major construction company and had worked his way up over more than twenty years. He was good at what he did, and I had always been proud of him.
But somewhere along the way, his job became his identity.
He measured people by their titles.
He talked about salaries.
He talked about promotions.
He talked about who drove what car and who had bought a bigger house.
And slowly, he began treating the things I did as though they were somehow beneath him.
When our children were young, he used to joke that I was “just a housewife.”
I never minded.
I knew what I contributed.
But after the children left, those jokes became sharper.
One evening, I told him I wanted to find something part-time.
He was sitting on the sofa looking at his phone.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I want to work.”
He looked up.
“Work?”
“Yes.”
He smiled.
“You’ve been out of the workforce for years.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
