I'm sitting here writing this from my home in 2023 with my son, who had a life-saving heart transplant 11 months ago and is thriving at the age of three: I've learned that hardships will come in all shapes, forms, and sizes. I've learned that financial hardships are difficult, yes, but they're even more difficult if you don't come together as a team and conquer them head-on.
My husband and I had never really faced any major financial hardships together until the pandemic hit in 2020. I was a stay-at-home mom and pregnant with our third child; my husband worked long hours with very few days off at a demanding job. Four days before I had my C-section with our baby, we lost our entire household income in June 2020.
Suddenly, the comfort and consistency of regular paydays became something of the past. We didn't know where our next paycheck would come from, and we also knew that I would need surgery again and that we would have a new baby at home along with our other two young children at the time. My husband had always worked, and when I met him, he could have been classified as a "workaholic." Work was very important to him, and his top priority was to look after our family financially.
It saddened me over time that he didn't have much time to spend with our children and had always wanted to be a dad. A few months after we had our third baby, I was told there was a need for Substitute/Supply teachers during the pandemic. My teaching degree had sat on the back burner since having young children, but it was there, and it was as though God knew our family would need it during this difficult time.
My husband became a stay-at-home dad, looking after our three children and bottle-feeding our breastfed baby when I was gone. So I would pump and work, and my husband would take care of everything back home. It was a very difficult time for both of us, but one thing I learned was all of the stresses that come along with being a parent that is the main provider of your family's income. For years I don't believe I actually knew the stress my husband was under or how tired he was. And on the flip side, my husband also learned how tiring, challenging, and laborious it is to be a stay-at-home parent. All the stress and, of course, no paycheck.
This journey for us was the first time we really learned the importance of working together on our finances as a team. I can remember when I was pursuing my education degree, I went through a difficult time where I told my dad that I just wanted to give up and be done with school. He raised a very important question to me at that time. I had always said that I would get married someday and be a mom, and in my young mind, I wondered why I would need to pursue a specific career if all I really wanted to do someday was be a mom. My dad said to me that it's great that I want to be a mom and that I want to get married someday, but what happens if I meet someone, get married someday, and have children, and then something happens to my husband? What if he's injured or something worse? What if he's unable to work, and I need to take over providing for our family? Or what if we are in a position where I need to help provide for our family? I didn't know back then how important these questions were.
I'm sure many of us can agree that with the rising costs of practically everything nowadays, it can be very hard to provide for a family on one income, and it can be tough to find a new job that pays as much or as well as a previous job. And so, in that moment, my husband and I realized that we are a team when it comes to raising our family: when he was working outside of the home, I supported him, and when I was working outside of the home, he supported me. As long as there was food on the table and everyone was happy and looked after.
Here are five steps in working together as a team when it comes to your finances:
1. Be honest with each other.
Let your spouse know when you're tired or perhaps need help. If you're the one that's providing financially for your family, let your spouse know that you're tired, that you're stressed, or that you're worried. I'm saying this because my husband worked many stressful years and didn't talk to me about these things. It wasn't until later that he revealed he didn't tell me how he was actually feeling because he didn't want to stress me out. He knew I was already exhausted and overwhelmed being home alone constantly with young children and recovering from multiple surgeries.
Even if you're worried that it will stress your spouse or upset them, it is really important. You wouldn't want to look back and think you could have helped them with this in some way, divided time and talents better, or instead realize that they were overwhelmed and exhausted too.
2. Realize that you both have unique strengths and gifts that have been given to you by God.
As time went on, I realized that my husband was an excellent cook and a wonderful stay-at-home dad to all of our children. As someone with a hidden physical disability, I would often sustain pain and injury from the heavy physical load of motherhood and carrying babies in silence. I never let my husband know how stressed out or worn out I was because I didn't want to stress him out at work. I knew his job already had a lot of that along with it. So we realized that we both had different strengths that we didn't know the other person had because we hadn't seen them in action.
3. Realize that you don't need as much money as you think you do.
For us, this may have been one of the most important realizations when we came into a spot where we didn't know where our next paycheck would come from. We realized that there were a lot of things we had and a lot of debts that we could get rid of. There were a lot of things we didn't need in our home. There were things we could sell. We got rid of car payments. We downsized to older vehicles without payments that were paid for. We got rid of other costs for services and things we didn't need that we always thought we did. We went down to the bare necessities. We downsized our grocery list, the number of trips we took, and the amount of gas we spent money on. We stopped buying coffee and food out all the time like we used to do.
And then in 2021, after all of this downsizing, our youngest son was hospitalized for a very long time. During that hospitalization, while we were spending our nights in hospital beds and on cots beside him, we really learned how much we can live without. We also learned that there's so much more to life than money and that you can always make more but can't make more time.
4. Realize that hardships, especially financial ones, that are devastating at the time can make you stronger as a team.
As a couple, you can follow all of the standards that you think are right when it comes to parenting and who should work and who should play which roles in the home: but all of this changes when one of you or your children falls sick or injured. All of the things that you once thought were once normal become abnormal. I don't know what your situation is, but I do know this: if you work together as a team, the hardship may not seem a blessing at the time, but it can bring you closer together.
5. Know that someday this hardship won't be in front of you anymore, but that it will actually be a memory because you've already worked through it.
I'm bringing up this last step because when our family lost our household income in 2020, we had no idea that our youngest son would be hospitalized in 2021 with end-stage heart failure. This job loss was devastating for us; our stress level was the highest it had ever been, but when we entered that hospital with our son and when we received his diagnosis, which came out of the blue, one of the first things my husband said was that he was so glad he became a stay-at-home dad. He got to spend so much time with our son before he was confined to a hospital.
I'm sitting here writing this from my home in 2023 with my son, who had a life-saving heart transplant 11 months ago and is thriving at the age of three: I've learned that hardships will come in all shapes, forms, and sizes. I've learned that financial hardships are difficult, yes, but they're even more difficult if you don't come together as a team and conquer them head-on. I've also learned that hardships go much deeper than money, and that when they enter your life, such as a new diagnosis, you realize that the financial hardships weren't the hardest thing of all. You'll learn you learn that financial stress can always be alleviated to some degree, but there are some things you can't change and that you have to rely on God for the things that you don't have control over and trust in him and his ability to work everything in your life financial or otherwise: together for good.
"And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose." -Romans 8:28.
