pink slips, or the lack therof

Funny how what you fear the most meets you halfway (eddie vetter, poet laureate), and sometimes, if you're willing to stare it down, it actually retreats. Two weeks ago, I'm driving home from work, looking forward to a trip with Mr. R to Virginia Beach, and he tells me he's probably going to be offered a). a severance package or b). the opportunity to apply for a network engineer job within the company. In one week. I thought I was going to pass out I was so frightened. I think I said something like, "Now? With the baby coming?" I slept very little that night, but we were both determined to chin up and enjoy our last getaway before baby, though I can't say I really saw his chin go down.
We spoke very little on the way down (invariably, I fall asleep in the car), but when we arrived and settled in for a seafood dinner on the boardwalk, he opened up about contingency employment plans, and I reciprocated with a clarification of my fears: uncertainty, not lack of confidence. As we spoke about new starts, I felt the familiar spark, and I heard it in his voice as he described his discontent with Corporate America and the American Dream as we've come to know it. He has ideas for starting his own business, and still enjoys fixing cars and would be very content doing just that. I came away realizing my sense of safety was misfounded, so I began shifting it off of his employer and onto his own shoulders.
And I slept that night.
In the days to come, thoughts of the pink slip were amazingly optimistic. I felt brave, excited, and not fearful in the least. On Tuesday, he thought he might want to be a teacher. On Wednesday, it was laser tattoo removal. Thursday, auto mechanic. On Friday, I surprised myself and told him I thought he should fore go the network engineer option altogether and just take the package. Mentally, emotionally, we had lept.
This morning, he had a late start. He was in the addition, working on his laptop, and I was upstairs getting ready for work. I heard him talking, assumed he had dialed into a meeting, and went about the business of blowdrying my hair. I had the strangest thought about how retirement plans are essentially Ponzi schemes, and I couldn't wait for him to finish his call so I could discuss this profound observation with him. So, he came upstairs, and I blurted out my Ponzi nonsense, and he said, "they didn't offer me a package." Totally out of context, this hit me like a brick, and then as my Ponzi-focused brain reversed direction and put his statement into the proper context, I felt the fear again, thinking he had lost his job and his employer had just stiffed him on 8 month's of severance, to boot.
Turned out, they did not offer him the option but rather told him he was being reassigned, effective immediately. As he relayed this to me, there was no spark in his eyes, there was a resignation - one which I felt, too.
It's time to move on, that much we know. I said joyful invocations all day for his continued employment, but the experience reminded me that I would work two jobs to keep him from selling his soul to the highest bidder or to keep me feeling "safe." It taught me that I still have a few risks in me. Last week, he said the most secure 8 months he would have ever had with the company would have been the 8 months of severance, and he was absolutely right.
Safety is an illusion.