Wives of Professional Athletes, Part Five
ByContinuing on in our series…
Occupational uncertainty
1. Occupational uncertainty is inherent in different kinds of stressful occupational events, but perhaps the “waiting games” and “setbacks” in the husband’s career are two of the more difficult for a wife to cope with. In fact, these events are also very difficult for the husband to cope with because he is highly dependent on his career. Therefore, when they occur he will often shift his dependency from his career to his wife, and overemphasize his dependency on her.
In general, our lifestyle is not very certain. Even in the case of our husbands signing long term deals, those are never certain. You live from season to season (and often just from month to month), so that is enough of an inconsistency to begin with. When you add in the waiting periods, which is typically the summer months for basketball players, and setback, such as early releases from a team, the stress levels often rise even higher. We have experienced two longer waiting periods in our marriage, during the fall of 2006 and 2007, so those will be the times I will refer to in how some of these specific issues affected our family.
Both of those times were tough on Joe, as any period of unemployment usually is on the provider of the home. For those of you who read Joe’s interviews though, you know Joe went through a life transforming time after his sophomore year of college where God moved in his heart to replace the ultimate love and identity of basketball, with a love and identity in Jesus Christ. So although those times we hard on him because he struggled with 1) not providing for his family and 2) not being able to use the gifts God had entrusted him with, there did not seem to be an identity issue in those times.
I don’t know that I can say his dependency on me increased, since I don’t bring in a second income for our family. There were definitely times that he needed a bit more encouragement and the promises of God spoken to him by me. I think that it also helped to have constant reassurance that I still believed in his career and was content to wait and see what God brought about.
2. In addition to the increased dependency of their husbands, they disrupt the seasonal routines of the wives, which serve as ways of stabilizing family/marital life in an unpredictable occupational world.
The hardest part for me in those times was the interruption of the rhythm of life we had gotten into. I was used to being home in the summer and then gone by mid-fall, at the latest. I was used to scheduling summer activities, but once the fall rolled around, it was tough to know how far ahead we could commit to things. Usually when we were asked to do something, the acceptance came with a big “Lord-willing” surrounding it.
Waiting games
3. Contributing to a wife’s stress during the lockout was the presence of her husband in their home, because he “should be” at spring training and not at home–not “underfoot.”
It was interesting for me that after the summer time ended, an almost automatic switch turned on that said, “Joe should not be around this much anymore”. I found it really unnerving the way I had to fight against wanting to just tell him to go do something! He was still working out, doing things around the house, playing with the kids, but all of the sudden it felt weird that he didn’t have a job. The summer time never felt that way, but it was strange the way it changed when the fall time rolled around.
4. In discussing her ways of coping she told me, “I’d go to the bar a lot. I’d escape. I had my job, shopping, rearranging the house, and traveling to visit friends I don’t get to see very often. But all the time you worry. You don’t really ever enjoy anything.”
I can’t say I experienced a need to escape in those waiting times, but I can totally relate to things not being quite as enjoyable as I would have liked them to be. Being home for Thanksgiving and Christmas was nice, but it didn’t feel right and never brought the enjoyment one would have expected. People would constantly be saying to me, “Well, at least you get to be home for _____.” And while I was glad that we were, it still felt odd. It was almost like I was living in someone else’s life and it just didn’t fit right.
5. As another common way of coping with such stress, through her “domestic” control work, a wife will try to manage her constant worry about the uncontrollable outcome by distracting or distancing herself from the stressful occupational event (overfocusing on the care of the children, household tasks, or family responsibilities). Still another commonly used coping strategy is to block the situation out of her mind, and domestic control work helps her to do this. As forms of denial, such survival strategies may be effective when they are used for short periods of time. However, when they are relied on for long periods of time, serious consequences may result.
Distraction can be a deadly coping mechanism. It is something that all human beings do though and is not specific to only professional athletes wives. The difference is that we often have more opportunities to use it in stressful situations. Plus we can make it look acceptable. Even though we may not feel that people do not understand our stress in these times, sharing and being real about it is always more freeing than pretending it is not there. When we don’t deal with the root problem, we may get the weed above the surface, but the roots will grow deeper and have hold of you more.
