­Falling out of Balance

July/August 2008 Issue | Posted by Wayne Laugesen in Marriage

Kristen and Matt had five kids at home when Matt was laid off from his medical technology job in New Mexico. Life had been chaotic and stressful over the years, but now it was worse.

Just to keep bread and milk on the table, Matt quickly went to work for two guys with a pickup who had a makeshift landscaping company.

While Matt mowed lawns and shoveled dirt, Kristen made phone calls trying to find him work in his field. Matt eventually took a variety of high-tech consulting gigs that required travel, and household finances were shaky.

Kristen had a teaching certificate, but she wasn’t inclined to work full time. She had dabbled over the years with substitute teaching, but it didn’t seem to be her calling.

Her calling — what Kristen really felt Jesus wanted her to do — was to volunteer.

Since her college days, Kristen had volunteered for every good Catholic cause she could find. After the kids were born, she began volunteering even more. She found ways to volunteer that involved the children — and even her husband, whenever possible.

But now times were hard, and Matt began wanting Kristen’s time and energy to help with the household bills. He asked her to get a job — a full-time job that paid real wages and reflected the value of her education and teaching
certificate.

“It very definitely became a serious issue in our marriage,” Kristen said. “Matt felt I should be generating some income, and also doing more to maintain the home. I knew where he was coming from, but the thought of doing something just for money was completely counter-intuitive to me. I really felt like I needed to be serving the less fortunate. I felt like I needed to be available to our children during the day, doing volunteer work that involved them.

“I wanted to bring up children who had a sense of serving the needs of people other than themselves. As for the house, I knew it would always be there for me to clean later. So I had to do the best I could to strike a balance, respecting Matt’s desires and fulfilling my deep-felt need to serve.”

CollegeDays

Serving the less fortunate was something Kristen had long done to an extreme. For no financial compensation, she became accustomed to working long days and long nights fulfilling the needs of Catholic parishes, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.

She grew up Catholic, attending an all-girls’ Catholic high school. After graduation, she attended college at the University of California-Berkeley. It was the 1960s, and Berkeley was a hotbed for radical students engaged in a counter-cultural revolution. Kristen became part of the scene.

Though Kristen began straying from her Catholic roots, she remained in a local parish. It was at church that Kristen got her first real taste of volunteering. A nun at the parish had founded a shelter for the homeless, and she needed volunteers to cook, serve meals, raise funds, collect clothing, and tend to other needs of the poor.

“There was a tradition of social justice at this church. So I joined the parish social justice committee. I felt it was my duty to work with the anawim — the lost, the little and the forgotten people
I had learned about from the Bible,” Kristen said.

Kristen hung around San Francisco, spending time with left-wing folk singers who seemed to embrace the Catholic social teaching she’d grown up with without all the religion attached to it. She began viewing service to the poor as something that could just as well be handled outside of the Church. Then Jesus came calling, as he often had in
her life.

“When I was in San Francisco, I began going to Mass at the Camaldoli monastery, which was home to a group of cloistered monks. I became friends with a Camaldoli brother, who worked as the doorkeeper. Through that friendship I really began to realize that I was a Catholic.”

Culture Quiz

She returned to New Mexico and enrolled in graduate school. Working on a graduate research project, she met Matt, who ran with a different crowd. He was a burr-headed doctoral candidate with a scientific, less artistic view of the world. He was a veteran of Vietnam — a war Kristen had protested.

“He was clean-cut, and I identified with the whole ’60s anti-war movement,” said Kristen. “But there was something that attracted me to him. I felt I needed to adjust in some manner, so I got involved more at a local church, and with the social justice committee, because that was something we had in common. We had all these differences, but we were both Catholic. Being more Catholic was about the best I could do at the time to move more in his direction.”

The two attended Mass together and gradually became more involved in parish activities. They married and settled down to have children. With each child, Kristen felt called to volunteer more. Eventually, the couple had five kids.

“I always found volunteer work that involved the kids,” Kristen said. “I felt that it instilled in them a sense of service, and it gave me work to do that didn’t take me away from the family.”

She involved the children in an exhaustive list of routine volunteer efforts.

When Kristen and Matt’s oldest children were babies, Kristen organized functions of La Leche League — a support and advocacy organization for wo­ men who breast-feed their babies.

Through Scouts, Kristen and her children found a variety of ways to help feed and clothe the poor. Routinely, the family spent nights preparing and serving meals at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. They volunteered at a food bank, where donations are left for the hungry and poor.

They worked to publicize and raise funds for pro-life functions. They tutored illiterate adults. They organized the annual book drive for a jail. They attended and helped with Knights of Columbus activities. They volunteered at nursing homes and nurseries. Kristen volunteered in the health room of her children’s schools. When Kristen and her children weren’t making food, collecting food, serving food, or helping with a variety of church activities, they were behind the scenes writing and publishing publicity materials for a variety of charitable events.

And Matt, dutiful husband and father, was working to make ends meet to support a family of seven.

For a while, he worked as a teacher. Then he worked full time as an engineer, designing precision medical devices, before a recession resulted in layoffs. At times, when lacking full-time work, he would travel so much finding temporary work that he spent only one extended weekend at home each month. He struggled with the fact that Kristen was helping others, when his own life seemed unmanageable.

“I respected the volunteering a great deal, and it was part of our Catholic faith,” Matt said. “But sometimes it felt like I was married to Mother Teresa. That was fine, except the Mother Teresa I was married to had five kids, a home, a yard, and a garden that were being neglected. I would come home to a kitchen that hadn’t been cleaned, clothes that hadn’t been managed, and a garden taken over by weeds. And where were Kristen and the kids? They were at a Scouting event, or a soup kitchen. That was great, but I didn’t feel there was balance. The family had legitimate needs of its own.”

“To me, the volunteering seemed more important than a tidy house,” Kristen said. “But Matt didn’t see it that way. It was always a source of tension.”

Kristen and Matt weren’t the type to fight, but Matt made his feelings known.

“It would just come out in conversations all the time,” Kristen said. “We would talk about it, and we just had a different view of how I should spend my time.”

Whenever circumstances led to tighter household finances, tensions rose — with Matt reiterating his feelings that Kristen should earn money. His polite reminders about household finances were sometimes met with reminders that Catholics are supposed to give to those around them. Kristen pointed out to Matt that she believed the family was comfortable and fortunate enough to be giving much of the time.

“Sometimes I thought the needs of the kids weren’t always met to the highest standard, because of all the volunteering,” Matt said. “It made me feel like a real lout, because I was in the position of asking Kristen to curtail activities that were giving and good. But I wanted us to be putting aside money for education, and I wanted the kids in nicer clothes. We were having trouble agreeing on what ‘balance’ even meant, much less achieving it,” Matt said.

“I also had to explain to Matt that I was alone most of the time, responsible for bringing up our children,” Kristen said. “I could include them in volunteer work, but I couldn’t be with them — guiding them and caring for them — if I was out doing some full-time job.”

As the children grew, however, they wanted to get involved in athletics and other activities that came with expenses. Kristen and Matt had another one of those talks. Matt explained that some of the children’s extracurricular activities were stressing the household budget beyond its capacity and that something had to give.

Striking a Balance

Not wanting a day job, which would have taken her away from the children, Kristen found a compromise that helped. She took over a paper route, delivering a daily newspaper. For eight straight years, Kristen would leave home in the middle of the night to deliver newspapers door-to-door while her husband and children slept. During the day, she was back volunteering at the schools, serving the homeless, and tending to the needs of various Catholic parishes.

“That worked for us,” Kristen said. “It addressed some of the financial issues Matt was worried about, but did not take me away from the family because everyone was in bed.”

Today, Kristen and Matt’s children are grown and all remain loyal, practicing Catholics. Kristen is proud of the way her children stand up for their faith, even aspects of it that aren’t always popular — like opposition to birth control, abortion, and embryonic stem-cell research.

Kristen isn’t certain whether they’ve embraced her love of Catholic social service and voluntarism, and believes that only time will tell.

“They all have grown up volunteering, and I know that planted a seed in them,” Kristen said. “They’re all charitable. They stay in touch with us, and I know they value the Church.”

With the children grown, Kristen and Matt have continued working through their differences regarding Kristen’s full-time and overtime voluntarism. They’re finding middle ground.

At Matt’s suggestion, the two attended a Marriage Encounter weekend. There, the two were able to share at a deeper, more intimate level than they had in years.

“I have often felt like the bad guy in this conflict,” Matt said. “I have felt like the guy who was telling his wife and children to do less good work. But after Marriage Encounter I felt like Kristen understood. And I understood things better, too.”

What they both learned was that it really wasn’t the volunteering that was upsetting Matt. It was a feeling on his part that Kristen wasn’t putting enough into their relationship.

“It’s very true,” Kristen said. “He would come home from a long, grueling travel schedule, and instead of coming home to a warm meal and a welcoming home, he usually found an empty home and a wife and kids who were off making other people comfortable. There was some neglect of the relationship.”

“And that went both ways,” Matt said. “I wasn’t very intimate or sharing when I was around. I was pretty standoffish and distant. I can see where the family wasn’t always excited about dad coming home.”

The two regularly attend the sacrament of reconciliation, which has helped them reduce selfish behaviors and strengthen their marriage.

More interested in her marriage than ever before, Kristen of late has cut her voluntarism in half, doing those things that won’t threaten the time and attention that should go into their marriage.

“I say No to some things,” Kristen said. “I’m being more selective, now that the kids are gone, and putting forth an effort to moderate. I want to serve, but I also want to make time for my husband — for us as a couple. If we aren’t strong, then neither of us is in a good position to give.”

Kristen plans to occasionally accept substitute teaching jobs that pay, in order to alleviate some of Matt’s tensions about finances.

“Although finances are a challenge for most families, this conflict has never really been about money,” Matt said. “From my perspective, it has been about excess. It has been about wanting more of Kristen’s time for the family and the home. At the same time, Kristen is a very unique and special woman. We have amazing children because of her charitable approach to life.”

Kristen understands that she can be obsessive, failing to moderate her behavior regarding Catholic and other volunteer activities that she values. Matt realizes he may be a bit too pragmatic, wanting more order and stability than God has in store for him. As Kristen has worked toward balance and moderation, Matt has ventured a bit into Kristen’s world, working less and spending more time enjoying some of what she does. They talk more, laugh more, and play more than ever before in their marriage.

“I volunteer now because I love being with my wife,” Matt said. “She may be serving soup at a homeless shelter, but now I feel like she’s centered on us. When we both managed to put our relationship and God at the center of our world, everything started making sense. Everything took its proper place and came into perspective.” C

Wayne Laugesen writes

from Colorado.

You Know You’re Volunteering Too Much If . . .

. . . your children joke that they need to sign up for Meals on Wheels

so they can see you, and it’s more than a joke.

. . . you only say No when there’s a conflict with another volunteer activity.

. . . you have ever apologized profusely to an organization because

you had to go to a family activity.

. . . your off-hours are more exhausting than your on-hours.

. . . you ever had to pull out of a major volunteer duty, causing problems

for others, because you said Yes too hastily.

. . . costs for activities (gas, fees, food, and materials) mean your family

has to scrimp or go into debt for legitimate needs.