I watched him through the Starbucks window on Main Street, my nose pressed against the cool glass. My husband, Marco, was inside, meticulously arranging a sandwich in the warmer, receiving instructions from a coworker who looked young enough to be his child. It was a surreal sight.
While a part of me was relieved he had found work, another part deeply resented the path that had led him to this. For most of our seventeen-year marriage, I, a nonprofit professional, had balanced full-time work with freelance consulting. Marco, on the other hand, was a highly skilled graphic designer. I had married for love, passion, and, quite frankly, a shared financial future. But life had thrown us a curveball.
Our journey began seventeen years ago, when I discovered I was pregnant with twins. Around the same time, Marco arrived home unexpectedly one afternoon, clutching bags filled with his office belongings.
“I just got laid off,” he announced, his voice heavy. He sank onto the edge of our bed, let out a deep sigh, then collapsed onto his back, his gaze fixed on the ceiling.
My heart plummeted. How could he simply collapse like that? Just six months into our marriage, I was still learning about our profoundly different ways of dealing with crisis.
I grew up with privilege and abundant opportunities; Marco did not. My family lineage is steeped in worry, so for me, losing financial stability felt like the beginning of the end. But for Marco, whose childhood was marked by his parents’ constant struggles to make ends meet, this was simply another chapter in life’s unpredictable narrative.
Almost eight years later, just as we stood on the brink of buying our first home, the axe fell again. Marco was laid off, along with half of his company.
“Babe, I’m so sorry,” he whispered over the phone, calling from a bar opposite his office. My heart pounded, yet empathy surged through me as I sped to meet him in the city, the lyrics of Louden Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” blaring from my speakers.
Pulling up, I saw my heartbroken husband on the curb, his life packed into a banker’s box. My stomach twisted with dread. What about our dream home, that charming Midwestern farmhouse with a cozy sleeping porch and a dedicated room for our now seven-year-old twins?
A few years later, just three months into the global pandemic, he was laid off for a third time. This time, the devastating news was delivered impersonally, over a Zoom call from human resources.
“Oh, babe,” I murmured, holding the now white-haired man whose destiny was so profoundly intertwined with my own. Through richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, through recession and pandemic — even through lice, locusts, climate change, Covid, and hail. My stomach dropped to my feet; as the full weight of the news settled, I felt utterly devastated.
As his colleagues faded from his professional sphere, Marco became increasingly isolated. We even attended his mother’s funeral virtually, via Zoom. The pandemic didn’t just hit us financially; it took a heavy emotional toll. Marco endured four and a half years of underemployment.
My husband is an exceptionally talented professional whose industry dramatically shrank around him. A bright, academically gifted child, he earned a place 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 rural Puerto Rico, 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 found work as a waiter at the upscale Chateau Henry IV on 64th and Park, then pursued his passion as a hairdresser, though he struggled to maintain his own salon. Lucy, also a resilient survivor from Puerto Rico, was raised by her aunts after losing her mother. She left her factory job upon marriage, embracing her version of the American dream as a housewife.
Resourceful and more educated than her husband, Lucy often seethed with anger when Marco Sr. couldn’t provide enough for groceries. She’d frequently play Gloria Gaynor’s defiant anthem, “I Will Survive,” as he returned home.
Like Lucy, I saw myself as a survivor, determined to tackle our financial challenges head-on. But with each successive layoff, our hard-earned savings dwindled, and eventually, so did my inherent optimism. We had moved from Brooklyn to the Midwest years ago, seeking a lower cost of living, and lived frugally.
However, our family of four simply couldn’t thrive on a single income. My roles in social ventures and universities, combined with my side consulting, were no longer sufficient. As his income evaporated, the pressure fell squarely on me to generate more.
I truly loved Marco – his artistic soul, his deep emotional intelligence, his unwavering devotion to me and our family, and, yes, his undeniable charm. But a creeping frustration had started to overshadow my affection.
We both desperately wanted him to secure a professional role aligning with his design expertise. Yet, the endless cycle of interviews, always followed by rejection, starkly revealed the ageism he faced. For a while, I understood his reluctance to take on "just any job." His father had been a waiter; Marco felt a profound need to "surpass" that, believing anything less would be a personal failure.
While Marco wasn’t contributing financially, he fully embraced his role as a caregiver for our children, even learning to cook. We were fortunate to be debt-free. Although we shared strong values regarding fiscal responsibility, my extensive network and connections often gave me an advantage in finding new work when my own jobs were cut.
But I eventually hit my limit. My unwavering support had, unwittingly, morphed into enabling. Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it took for this realization to dawn on me.
My internal struggle echoed Muriel Rukeyser’s poignant line: “I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.” I was finished pretending everything was fine. The constant hum of frustration within our marriage, coupled with the turbulent political climate as the election approached, had finally pushed me past my breaking point.
In early November 2024, just before the national election, Marco traveled to Nashville for a conference, a chance to reconnect with friends after years of post-pandemic isolation. Though not career-focused, he went seeking a much-needed mental break. As he departed, a wave of relief washed over me; my clenched jaw finally relaxed. In his absence, a stark thought began to form: I started to imagine asking him to leave.
That first night, when he called from Nashville to check in, the words of an ultimatum surged from deep within me. Through sobs, I delivered it: if he didn’t secure employment by May, I would ask him to move out.
He initially applied to Blick, an art store chain that resonated with his identity as a visual artist. When that didn’t work out, he took a deep breath, swallowed his pride, and interviewed at Starbucks. For us, Starbucks had always been a familiar "office" — a place where I’d written my dissertation and where we both often freelanced to escape the confines of home. I even harbored a secret addiction to their chai (a small luxury I had sacrificed during our financial struggles).
Soon, Marco donned a bright green apron, mastering every coffee concoction and operating the espresso machine with newfound dedication. His early shifts, starting at 5 or 7 AM and ending by 10 or noon, unexpectedly provided him time to pursue a long-awaited freelance design project.
That December, around my birthday, we escaped to a charming little inn in Michigan for a single night, hoping to find a way to mend our fractured marriage.
“Look,” he said, drawing closer, his voice earnest. “You’ve expressed a desire to reinvent our marriage, to make it work for both of us. I understand it’s broken. But the thought of losing you… it would destroy me.”
A few weeks later, I visited him at the Starbucks. He was at the register and introduced me to his co-worker. I ordered a tall skim mocha latte.
“Mocha for Deborah!” his co-worker called out cheerfully, giving me a warm smile. “You’re Marco’s wife, aren’t you?” he added, “We think he’s absolutely great.”
However, fate had another twist in store. Amid a recent nationwide wave of store closures, Starbucks announced the shuttering of Marco’s location. Tragically, he and many of his dedicated colleagues were not offered transfers to other stores.
Once again, our lives have been upended. It feels like a recurring theme in our story. In marriage, it seems you either face adversity together or you fracture apart. The word “upend” itself carries a powerful duality: to topple, to turn upside down, to disrupt, or to drastically alter a situation or expectation.
But “upend” also holds another, more hopeful meaning: to defeat, to overcome, to master, conquer, or subdue. To upend can ultimately mean to prevail.
Together, I fervently hope, we will.