FAQ: Why Do You Travel? Why Don’t You Work?

The decision of whether to stay and/or work in the U.S. while your husband plays overseas is one that may families have wrestled with.  It is one that we have spent a good deal of time talking about and have come up with the best solution to at the present time.  This is not to say that this will never change because we truly can’t know all the situations our family may face in the future.  So right now, these are the reasons we make the decisions we do for our family, and that is not to say it is what is right for every family in our situation.

Currently Joe typically plays overseas from August until May/June.  For the first year of our marriage, Joe started off in the minor leagues.  He had just finished up his rookie season in the NBA and wanted to give it another try to get back to the NBA.  At that point we knew there would be a possibility of either him being called up or us heading overseas after a few months.  So this did not lend itself to me finding a job where he was playing.  And me staying home was not an option for us in our first year of marriage.  We felt the first few years of marriage to be crucial to be together as we worked through issues and figured out what we were going to be about as a couple.  Since we did not believe in living together before marriage, the turning point of the wedding was a time when now we were in a covenant relationship with one another and could live together.  We spent the first few months in the states and then headed to Greece from February until June.  It was a great time to learn about one another and store up lots of time with the Lord through private devotions, reading and listening to sermons.

The next season I was a month pregnant when Joe began the job search.  At that point I was a bit scared to head overseas to have a baby, so Joe went the minor league route once again.  If he would be called up, at least we would still be in the States, but otherwise we decided to stay put in  he minor leagues for the season.  Thankfully, he had a great situation with a team in Kansas City and we spent the whole season there.  Once again, I choose not to work, which we were able to do comfortably from a financial stand point.  I did decide that since I was not able to further my speech-pathology career that I would get some education in another area that had interested me: nutrition.  So for the next three seasons I did online classes to fulfill some prerequisites in order to do a masters program in nutrition science (consequently I never began the program because of the workload.  By the time I was ready to start the masters program I was pregnant with our third child in three years.)

Once we began having children, the decision to stay together for the majority of the season became an easier one.  Before we felt it extremely important for our marriage to be together the majority of time, but now we feel it to also be important to the welfare of our children to be with their father as much as possible.  Even with the moving, different cultures, being away from family and friends, to be together as a family we believe is a much greater benefit to the kids.  There are so many ways the role of the father is undervalued in our society, but we don’t wish to go along with that trend.

We also feel that the benefit of having Joe and I together as husband and wife to be of greater value than having a steady income back home provided by me.  Obviously not everyone is in the financial situation where they can have the wife at home, but for us, we are committed to go to whatever lengths to make it happen (an issue I will deal with in a later FAQ).  Although we aren’t against a woman working outside the home, our conviction is that a woman’s main role is to be a helper to her husband (Genesis 2:18) and a worker at home (Titus 2:5).  We also recognize that in order to keep our marriage as a priority we must protect it from temptation and that requires us to be physically present together (1 Corinthians 7:5).  As a mother it is crucial that I be at home as well.  Especially when the children are young, we want their primary care to be given by their parents.  I know that I could not fully do my work at home, support my husband and raise my children if I had an outside job that took the majority of my waking hours.

In regards to issues like will I ever work or what might cause Joe to stop playing or having socialization for the kids, I will try and answer those questions in other FAQ posts.

**Obviously I realize in this day in age, the issue of working mothers and families who live separately are touchy subjects.  I am not trying to get into debates on those issues, but just to share where we stand since it is a question that is often addressed to me.