Working From Home, A Partner’s Perspective

My husband, Bryce, has intermittently worked from home for that past eight years. He’s been a WFH start-up founder twice, and now works as a senior developer for the “distributed by design” team at NodeSource. I have been home with him all this time, either because I was working only part-time, or as a full-time stay-at-home-parent.

After all these years, we’ve learned each other’s rhythms and weekday habits, synced our home and work calendars, and figured out how to make WFH work well for our family. As with every lifestyle, there are benefits and disadvantages, but in our case, we’ve found that the good far outweighs the bad.

My favorite results of Bryce working from home are:

1. He is around to help with kid/house chores if necessary. Occasional school drop-offs and pick-ups, turning the oven on to preheat, taking the dog out, moving laundry from the washer to the dryer — all of these are realistic requests that make my life easier, that would not be possible if he were at an office all day.
2. He gets to witness my day-to-day life. Although I’ve worked part-time for most of our marriage, I’ve been the primary caregiver for the kids the whole time, and the person who oversees all the household needs. Bryce observing firsthand the overwhelming tidal wave of minutia I deal with all day has really increased his ability to understand me. Also, he offers to help around the house a lot more!
3. His work is right here, in our house! So when he has a deadline, or a release, or an emergency, he does everything he needs to do, any hours of the day (or night) just a few feet away from our kitchen. He can still eat dinner (however quickly it needs to be) with us and put the kids to bed, and I can still hug and kiss him.
4. I get to witness his daily life, as I wrote about in detail, and am able to sympathize with him in return.
5. We can travel easily. Bryce has working from home down to both an art and a science, and can pretty easily duplicate an ideal work environment anywhere — my parents house in Edmonton, an Airbnb in San Francisco, or a hotel room in Boston. This means that we have the flexibility to do what we’ve always wanted to — provide our kids with real-life experiences in a wide variety of places. Our only restriction is the kids’ school schedule.
6. We spend more alone time together. Our kids’ schedules are busy, and we don’t often spend much quality time, just the two of us, during the evening and on weekends. But when he’s working from home, we can steal some quiet moments with each other a few times per week. We walk to a quick lunch date, watch an episode of the Nerdwriter, or just enjoy our ramen and bubbly water in his office with some adult conversation.
7. He isn’t frustrated all the time about dealing with traffic, and doesn’t waste hours per week on commuting. His commute is about 16 feet.

The “not so great and kind of annoying things” list is shorter, but worth mentioning:

1. Bryce has to go out of his way to get human contact with peers and friends. Staying in his pj’s all day became a nasty habit very quickly. One of the reasons we moved to Portland is because we have a lot of friends here (specifically many who work from home), and the tech community is tighter-knit, so he’s had more opportunities to socialize. But it takes effort to not become a hermit!
2. I cannot sing Whitney Houston and Salt-N-Pepa songs at the top of my lungs all day because sometimes, Bryce has to take calls.
3. Bryce’s work is always there. ALWAYS. THERE. He’s grown pretty disciplined about closing work tabs when work is done for the night, but sometimes that little Slack ding is just too tempting.
4. As my 13-year-old said, “it’s really annoying when we’re home and we just want to eat and talk and watch TV but Daddy has to be on a call so we have to be quiet or go upstairs.” Needless to say, summer break is challenging, and camp is a requirement for family harmony.