Recession Forces More Breadwinners to Live Apart From Family
From: Dispatch
Stacey Wilkerson’s professional life reveals a good news/bad news story.
First, the good news: She loves her full-time nursing job at the Cleveland Clinic as well as her monthly home-care visits for a private company in the Columbus area.
The bad news? The married mother of four lives in Mansfield – 60 miles or more from both jobs.
So she commutes, spending two nights a week in hotels and countless hours on the road. In less than three years, she has logged more than 100,000 miles on her 2007 Chevy minivan.
Wilkerson, 35, would love to work closer to home but can’t find equivalent positions in her hometown, where unemployment hovers around 12 percent.
And because she and husband Brian Yates – who works in Mount Vernon and is loath to give up his information-technology job – owe more on their house than it’s worth, moving closer to her work is out of the question for now.
“But at least I have a job,” she said. “And in this economy, that is almost everything.”
Anecdotally, Wilkerson’s predicament is growing increasingly common in Ohio and across the country as high unemployment and depressed housing values push couples into less-than-favorable living and working arrangements.
There’s even a name for the phenomenon: When job seekers are forced far from home, their stay-at-home spouses are sometimes called recession widows or widowers.
“It’s happening more and more because people are doing what they have to do,” said Janice Worthington, a central Ohio executive recruiter and founder of Worthington Career Services.
“Sometimes, in order not to lose the house or to keep kids in a particular school, an individual has to work out of town,” she said.
John Spurlin, a career military lawyer, worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton from 2004 until his retirement from active duty in October 2008.
At the time, one daughter was at Miami University in Oxford and another was a senior in high school in the Dayton suburb of Oakwood, so his first choice was to find civilian work on the military base or get a job in the private sector in the Dayton area.
Unable to secure either, Spurlin, 52, settled on a civilian job at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., while his wife,
Susan, remained at home.
Their thinking was twofold: In this depressed real-estate market, their house, too, was worth less than what they paid for it in 2004. Plus, Mrs. Spurlin wanted to be near their daughters (the younger one now attends Wright State University) and her sister in the Westerville area.
So Mr. Spurlin lives in a small apartment in Alexandria, Va., where he is comfortable enough but longing for more contact with his family.
“We’re all very frustrated by it, but there just didn’t seem to be any other option,” he said. “We decided that this is just the best way to do it, although we don’t like it personally.”
Maxine McKee of Dublin has a similar story.
Married with grown children, she lost her job as a district manager with a women’s specialty retailer in 2008, then searched in vain for months for an equivalent position in central Ohio.
Her best opportunity turned out to be 90 minutes away in Lima, where she manages a major department store, working five or six days a week and living out of a small apartment for $600 a month.
Her husband, Kevin, a real-estate broker, stayed behind because they figured he would struggle to find similar work in a smaller city.
“Obviously, my preference was to stay” in central Ohio, said Mrs. McKee, 55. “But for right now, this works best for us. Lima is a very nice town, and I love the people I work with.”
Although nontraditional work and living arrangements might be better than unemployment or an unsatisfying job close to home, the personal and financial costs can add up.
With children ages 13, 11, 6 and 8 months, Wilkerson said she and her husband spend $800 a month on child care, even with her husband lending a hand with the care and household chores.
All the driving is taking a toll on her minivan: Last month, she replaced the tires, front and rear brakes, and wheel bearings.
Hotels add $300 to monthly expenses.
“My family misses me,” Wilkerson said. “But because my pay is more than half our income, it’s a necessary evil.”
For Spurlin, the novelty of living like a bachelor after 28 years of marriage wore off quickly.
“I have freedom, sure, but that’s not why I married,” he said.
“I’m fortunate that I have a good job, but I don’t get to see my family too often. It’s terribly hard.”
