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   JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Sep-2024 00:49:59 JST JNL

   I had a whopper of a fight with my spouse this morning about the increasing (frankly insane) travel demands of his job this year- nothing has changed at all except that suddenly four-day in-person off-sites are happening all over the continent, basically every six weeks. Covering this as a family with two teens is hard (verging on impossible- we are having to fly family members across the country to help), and it would be even without my own school schedule and planning needs.

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     JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Sep-2024 00:49:55 JST JNL

     in reply to

     As a woman whose male spouse is in this kind of position, having your family back against the wall in this way also pushes you into one of two directions (leaving aside the not so secret third one): to assent, at least with your own choices and your own hours, to be uncompensated support for corporate man lifestyle, or to throw down and go just as hard, forcing a more even negotiation and division of labor and basically leaving your kids with the husk of your presence and the 'comforting' idea that money is love

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     JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Sep-2024 00:49:56 JST JNL

     in reply to

     I'm naming all of this here because in marveling at how caught we feel and the ties we are going to have to chew through and the risks all of this will entail, WHATEVER medium term decisions we make, I realized something.

     The way the US system functions, it literally treats ANYTHING AND ANYONE YOU CARE ABOUT as basically a ransom.

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     JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Sep-2024 00:49:56 JST JNL

     in reply to

     The entire US system is designed to make it DANGEROUS for you to really care about others, including your family, at least by really putting them first.

     If you put your family first, how will you feed them hahahaha

     Bill repeated this.
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     JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Sep-2024 00:49:57 JST JNL

     in reply to

     We both recognize that all of this is nuts. Way too hard. Cuts against things we care about.

     But, here's the thing: pushing back puts us into precarity, and as currently our sole breadwinner (I mean, my PhD stipend is not literally nothing, but ... 😂 ) he feels that first and urgently. Rationally or not, he's SCARED to push back, including naming and holding to reasonable limits for our family.

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     JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Sep-2024 00:49:58 JST JNL

     in reply to

     This is before we even say anything about Covid, which is real and very concerning, or about environmental impacts, which are real and also concerning, collectively speaking.

     It's just unsustainable.