When my husband got laid off last April, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
For one, I had lost my job the previous November and was still unemployed. I figured it was all OK because he still had a job. Our special needs daughter would still get therapy, we still had health coverage, and I could rest easy knowing we could live comfortably.
Then, one day, he came upstairs and said the words I was not expecting: “I just got laid off.”
We became a no-income household in the middle of an economy where inflation is at an all-time high. I knew I had to step it up, so I did. I got a job (two, really) and held on to hope that a new job for him would come sooner rather than later. Yet, here we are, nearly a year later, in the same position.
The panic set in pretty quickly for me
I realized how bad our financial situation was during Christmas, when we were staring down a list written by an oblivious 7-year-old who was none the wiser about our financial situation. My income, which would have supported a family of six in 1990, barely makes ends meet in 2026.
I didn’t want to tell anyone how I was feeling, because saying it out loud made it more real. But I felt it in my body constantly: the tightness in my chest, the way I couldn’t sleep. I vented to friends about my stress, and their response was always, “Why doesn’t he have a job yet?” Validating, sure, but not overly helpful.
Suddenly, the normal spending felt overwhelming. Did we really need coffee creamer? Can I just make sandwich bread instead of buying it? And the worst part is how quickly you can start to feel like you’re failing just by living a normal life.
When you’re in a two-income household, you forget how much easier life is with money. There’s more cushion for unexpected costs and bad timing. On one income, everything feels closer to the edge. Even if you’re technically “fine,” you can feel how quickly fine could become not fine.
I became the breadwinner, and somehow I was still the default parent
As stressful as it was to be the only income, what broke me down was realizing that I was still the default parent and the household manager, too. The school emails still came to me. I still had to remember to schedule the doctor’s and dentist’s appointments. I still knew we were out of laundry detergent. I still had to load and unload the dishwasher, make the beds, and change the sheets.
Job searching is real work, I know that. It’s time-consuming and emotionally brutal, and rejection can feel personal even when it’s not. But there were days when I’d be on a work call, muted, half-listening, while also trying to answer a school message, schedule therapy for my daughter, unload the dishwasher, and prep dinner.
There’s a particular exhaustion that comes from being responsible for everyone’s financial and emotional stability, while still being expected to keep the fridge stocked and my daughter’s life running on schedule.
I hate admitting it, but sometimes I resented my husband
The truth is that sometimes I resented him. I resented that he could sit at the computer for hours rewriting a résumé (or video gaming, because let’s be honest) while I was trying to stay focused at work, manage the household, and keep our daughter from feeling the tension.
I resented how fear settled into me and started to eat away at my very essence. I then felt guilty for resenting him because I know he didn’t choose any of it. He didn’t wake up and decide to implode our finances and his own sense of identity.
Some nights after my daughter was asleep, we’d sit silent on the couch, and I’d feel a distance between us mounting so fast — not because we didn’t love each other, but because stress changes a relationship.
We had to switch roles and learn to ask for help
After a few weeks of living in that constant state of fight-or-flight, I realized something: If we didn’t make changes, our marriage wouldn’t last.
So, after a really hard conversation about my job performance with my manager, I came home, and I had to get painfully specific about household responsibilities. I told my husband, point-blank, that if he wasn’t working, he had to step it up at home.
That was the hardest part for me to articulate without sounding accusatory. Because it’s not that he wasn’t doing anything. It’s that I couldn’t keep being responsible for everything in our house. Not only was it affecting me, but it was affecting my job, too.
I’m learning to swap resentment for empathy
I wish I could end this with a neat lesson and a happy update. But that’s not life, and it’s certainly not ours.
We’re still living on my pay, but thankfully, my husband is helping out more around the house.
This experience has made one thing painfully clear: When you become a one-income household, you don’t just lose a paycheck. You lose the part of you that could enjoy the little things in life that made coexisting in such a hard timeline worthwhile.
