The Shortest Commute: Dual-Telecommuting Couples

My husband and I both commute to our respective jobs - he is a computer systems engineer; I write history textbooks - in our bathrobes. One of us
balances our three month old on one hip while the other manages our three year old and carries the full coffee mugs into our shared home office. This is how we begin our day. We are a postmodern family.

There is no word, no catchy jargon, no simple abbreviation for a dual telecommuting couple. In fact, I know of no other family in which Mom and Dad work from home as full-time employees for separate corporations. We never confuse our voice mail messages.

For my husband: "We need that data extraction routine. Can you help us with the legacy system conversion as well?" Beep.

For me: "Henry VIII doesn't seem quite real in the passage on page seventeen. Can't you make him less evil, more humane as he orders Anne Boleyn's
execution?" Beep.

When acquaintances learn that we both work at home, the men issue a low whistle or wink (implying what? There isn't a code number in my husband's time
tracking software for *that*) and the women usually pull me aside and ask, "How can you stand it?", as though living with my spouse twenty-four hours a day is agonizing. Aside from his incessant experiments with gadgets--PDAs, telephone headsets, Post-it note glue--and the compulsive need to use our color copier to enlarge every photograph of our kids and place each one on the wall with (guess what?) Post-it note glue - working with him is better than dealing with the manager in the office who hogs the air with her perfume or the long-suffering secretary who acts like she's lifted her leg and sprayed the copier, declaring it her turf.

The biggest beneficiary in our family has been our older son. In contrast to the busy lifestyles of most dual career couples, we have worked around our son. He crawled around our office as a baby (his favorite snack was power strips) and played with an unplugged keyboard. When he has a problem one of us is there for him, and we have seen all of his milestones. When my husband goes on rare business trips, our older son complains that he "needs both parents for it to be right here." I like that this is his idea of normal. Because we don't need to pay for full-time daycare, we have been able to afford part-time, one-on-one babysitting for our son in our home. While it's hard to shut the office door and work, in an emergency I can measure my response time in seconds. Our three month old has benefited as well. Our flexible schedules have made the first eight weeks of having a new baby much easier, and though balancing a preschooler, a baby and a job is hard for us both, it's much easier to do it in our home where no one cares if we haven't showered, where spit-up is a shoulder fashion accessory, and where we I have become the Olympic-level champion of the "New Mother's Biathlon"-nursing and typing.

Lately I've considered the broader implications of our lifestyle. What if every family had Mom and Dad working from home? The tangible positives for the family would include more hands-on time with children, less money out of pocket for transportation, professional clothing, meals out, child care costs, and even medical expenses as stress-related illnesses would decrease. The environment would benefit from less car usage and fewer tax dollars would need to be spent improving roads. Our respective companies see a bottom-line savings, as would any company: less overhead, near-zero absenteeism (even when ill we work from bed with a laptop), and greater employee loyalty.

And what about the children? As children of the 70s and 80s, my husband and I both experienced family fragmentation after divorce. Telecommuting may
not directly prevent divorces (and may cause a few), but the increased time spent with children in a single or dual parent family could only help to give
each kid a stronger sense of love, security, and accessibility to the most important people in his or her life.

As a couple, we've grown stronger working together. I have a healthy appreciation for the tremendous thought and analysis that goes into seemingly simple computer programs. As I listen to my husband struggle with a client over database designs, or work with teammates to make programs as user friendly as possible, I see how much he invests himself in the quality of his work. At the same time, my husband respects my approach to history and my need to connect the past to the present through lively and engaging prose. We see each other's work from start to finish, and cheer each other on through every project. At the end of the day we don't talk about work because we've been there. Done that.

Instead, we focus on Ben and Reilly for the rest of the day, cook dinner, play, and marvel at the good fortune we've carved out of life. Now, with three years of
working together under our belt, whenever someone winks, I wink back. And when someone looks at our shared office and asks, "How can you stand
it?", I look at my husband holding our older son while he plays at the keyboard. To my untrained eye, the product of his random typing looks a lot like my husband's Java programs. I reply, "Oh, we muddle through."