When a husband travels regularly for work, what’s it like for the family?
When her husband left on his first business trip, Malka thought she’d be fine. She was a stay-at-home mom of six, and her husband worked late hours, anyway. Would it really be so different? She scheduled in hours at an afterschool daycare for her toddler, but otherwise figured that her routine wouldn’t change much.
Instead, Malka found that her older children, aged 8-12, had a really rough time with it. “They felt unbalanced. Even though they don’t normally call him during the day or see him, knowing that he wasn’t there as backup really made them uncomfortable.”
Gittel, whose husband has been traveling for business for the past five years, remembers a time when her son was only five months old and got sick. “He had the flu and my husband was away, and I was up around the clock at night.” She was afraid the baby might have to go to the hospital, and in the middle of the night, she didn’t have any support or anyone to watch her other children.
I speak to nearly a dozen women across multiple continents — each with a husband who travels for work — about their experiences. Some of them are financially comfortable because of it, while for others, parnassah is still a struggle. All of them have one thing in common: They have fully bought in to this lifestyle.
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