Peering through the steamy window of our local Starbucks on Main Street in Evanston, Illinois, I watched my husband. He was carefully arranging a sandwich in the warmer, taking cues from a younger colleague, a ‘partner’ half his age.
My Husband, the Accidental Barista
While I was certainly grateful he had found work, I couldn’t help but resent the path that led him to this point. For most of our marriage, I, a nonprofit professional, maintained full-time work and side consulting gigs. Marco, my husband, was a talented graphic designer. I had always believed in our bond of love, passion, and yes, financial stability. But life, it seemed, had other plans.
The first blow struck seventeen years ago. I had just discovered I was pregnant with twins when Marco arrived home unexpectedly mid-day, carrying boxes of his office possessions.
“I just got laid off,” he announced, the words hanging heavy in the air. He collapsed onto our bed, sighed deeply, and lay staring blankly at the ceiling.
My heart pounded. How could he just… lie there? Only six months into our marriage, I was quickly realizing how vastly different our ways of coping truly were.
My upbringing was one of privilege and opportunity; his was decidedly not. I inherited a lineage of worriers, so for me, any financial instability screamed ‘impending disaster.’ For Marco, however, this was a familiar scenario, having witnessed his parents constantly struggle with finances. For him, this was simply how life unfolded.
Then, almost eight years later, just as we were on the brink of buying our first home, the axe fell again. Marco, along with half his company, was let go.
“Babe, I’m so sorry,” he whispered through the phone, calling from a bar opposite his office. I sped into the city to meet him, Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Hallelujah’ playing loud in my car, my heart a chaotic mix of panic and profound empathy.
Spotting my beloved, a picture of dejection, on the curb with his meager box of personal items, my stomach plummeted. What would become of our dream – that charming Midwestern farmhouse with its inviting sleeping porch and a dedicated room for our now seven-year-old twins?
A few years later, fate dealt another cruel hand. It was just three months into the pandemic when Marco was laid off for a third time, the news delivered impersonally via Zoom by a human resources representative.
“Oh, babe,” I murmured, holding the man whose hair had now turned white, his destiny so deeply intertwined with mine. ‘For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health.’ We had faced recession and pandemic, lice, locusts, climate change, Covid, and hail. Each new blow felt like a punch to the gut, leaving me utterly beaten down.
As Marco’s professional connections dissolved, he became increasingly isolated. We even attended his mother’s funeral virtually, through Zoom. The pandemic wasn’t just a financial drain; it took a heavy emotional toll on us both. For four and a half long years, Marco remained underemployed.
My husband, a truly gifted professional, watched his entire industry shrink before his very eyes. A brilliant student, he earned a coveted spot at the tuition-free Cooper Union, becoming the first in his family to graduate from college. His father, Marco Sr., had grown up in poverty in Puerto Rico, the son of a farmer, before moving to the South Bronx in the 1950s for a new beginning. There, he met Marco’s mother, Lucila, while working on an assembly line at a leather goods factory.
Marco Sr. later took on roles as a waiter at Chateau Henry IV on 64th and Park, and then as a hairdresser, though he struggled to maintain his own salon. Lucy, also from Puerto Rico, was a resilient survivor, raised by her aunts after her mother’s passing. She left her factory job upon marriage, embracing life as a housewife – her personal vision of the American dream.
Lucy, a clever woman with more education than her husband, frequently erupted in frustration over his inability to provide sufficient funds for groceries. She would pointedly blast Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” whenever he walked through the door.
I considered myself a survivor, too, and desperately wanted to live up to that spirit in our ongoing struggle to make ends meet. But with every layoff, our savings dwindled, and eventually, so did my hope. We had long ago exchanged Brooklyn for the Midwest in pursuit of a lower cost of living, and we were always careful with our money.
Despite our best efforts, our family of four simply needed two incomes to thrive. My work with social ventures and universities, plus my side business, just wasn’t enough. When his income vanished, I felt an urgent, undeniable pressure to find ways to earn significantly more.
I truly adored Marco. His artistic soul, deep emotional intelligence, unwavering love for me and our children, and, yes, his undeniable attractiveness, made him stand out from any man I’d ever known. Still, a creeping frustration was slowly, steadily, overshadowing my affection.
We both desperately wished for him to land a professional role aligned with his training. However, the endless interviews and constant rejections painfully revealed the ageism he was battling. For a while, I understood why he resisted taking just any job. His father had been a waiter, a service role. Marco felt a deep-seated need to ‘surpass’ his father’s career, believing anything less would signify failure.
While Marco wasn’t bringing in a salary, he wholeheartedly embraced his role in raising our children and even learned to cook. Thankfully, we remained debt-free. Although we shared similar values regarding financial responsibility, I, as a well-connected woman with an extensive network, generally had more success finding work when my own jobs vanished due to funding cuts.
Eventually, I hit a wall. What I considered supportive behavior began to morph into something closer to enabling. Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it took me to recognize this shift.
My internal struggle echoed Muriel Rukeyser’s powerful line: “I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.” I was done making excuses, done softening the edges. The simmering frustration in my marriage, coupled with the escalating tension in our nation as the election approached, had finally pushed me beyond my breaking point.
In early November 2024, right before a pivotal election, my husband traveled to Nashville for a conference, a chance to reconnect with friends after years of post-pandemic isolation. Although not career-focused, he went for a much-needed morale boost. As he left, I felt an unexpected wave of relief; my clenched jaw finally relaxed. In his absence, a stark thought began to form: I started to envision asking him to leave.
That first night, when he called from Nashville to check in, an ultimatum I hadn’t consciously formed erupted from deep within me. Sobbing, I told him that if he didn’t secure employment by May, I would ask him to move out.
He first applied to Blick, an art supply chain that resonated with his creative spirit. When that didn’t work out, he made the difficult decision to swallow his pride and interview at Starbucks. For years, Starbucks had almost been our second office. I had even written my dissertation there, and we both frequently used it as a workspace while freelancing. I even missed their chai – another small luxury I’d sacrificed to our budget cuts.
Soon enough, Marco was proudly donning a bright green apron, diligently learning to craft every coffee concoction and master the espresso machine. His shifts typically began at 5 or 7 a.m. and wrapped up by 10 or noon, leaving him valuable time for a freelance design project that had finally materialized.
That December, around my birthday, we retreated to a charming, cozy inn in Michigan for a single night, hoping to find a way to mend our fractured marriage.
“Listen,” he said, drawing nearer. “You’ve expressed a desire to reinvent our marriage, to make it work better for both of us. I understand it’s broken, truly. But the thought of losing you utterly devastates me.”
A few weeks later, I dropped by his Starbucks. He was at the register, and proudly introduced me to a colleague. I ordered a tall skim mocha latte.
“Mocha for Deborah!” my husband’s co-worker cheerfully announced, offering me a warm smile. “You’re Marco’s wife? We think he’s fantastic.”
Recently, however, amidst a nationwide trend of store closures, Starbucks announced the shutdown of Marco’s branch. Unfortunately, he and many of his fellow ‘partners’ were not offered transfers to other locations.
Once again, our lives have been turned upside down. It feels like a recurring theme. In marriage, you either weather the storms together or you face them in isolation. The word ‘upend’ itself carries layers of meaning: to topple, to invert, to disrupt entirely, or to shatter expectations.
But ‘upend’ also holds a more hopeful connotation: to defeat, to overcome, to master, to conquer, to subdue. It can also signify the act of ‘prevailing.’
And together, I hope, we will prevail.