When Your Husband Comes Home With a New Calling

The phone rang four times before Emma finished her first pancake. This was a Saturday in January of 2012, back when we lived in Orem, and it was the first weekend after David was called as elders quorum president. A man whose furnace had quit. A brother who wanted to know if the church was open for a basketball thing. And one of those calls that's really a long talk about nothing in particular, which David took out on the back step in his socks while my spatula went slack in my hand.

Two women in my ward have a new calling in the house this summer, one her own and one her husband's, and both asked me quietly after church what it's like. I gave them about nine words in the hallway. Here's the longer answer.

What do you say when he walks in with the news?

He came home from the interview on a Sunday evening and sat in our old Corolla in the parking space outside the townhouse for about ten minutes with the engine off. I watched from the kitchen window.

I'd like to say I felt calm about it.

When he did come in he told me standing next to the dryer, and I said "okay," which was the only word I had. Then I went to the closet for a laundry basket I didn't need and cried into a stack of Emma's towels.

She was seven and reading a chapter book at the kitchen table and had no idea. My mind did the arithmetic all at once, the way it does at the end of a bad grocery bill.

Be proud of him the same day you're scared of your calendar. I don't think those take turns. The bishop who extends a calling is supposed to weigh what it does to a marriage and a family, and I believe ours did. It still landed on me the same way.

How much time does it really take?

That changes with the calling, and anyone who says otherwise hasn't lived next to more than one. A bishop's counselor splits the youth and the auxiliaries with the other counselor, sits on the ward council and the youth council, interviews teenagers and turns up at their activities. A Primary president looks after children from eighteen months to eleven years and every teacher who teaches them, plus a pile of paperwork nobody sees. An elders quorum president is usually the most time-intensive of the three, and the number I've seen quoted is 15 to 20 hours a week. David's first spring sounded about right to me, though some weeks he was at half that and some weeks I'd have said more.

The ward matters too, and what the last president left behind. David inherited a binder, which helped. He also inherited a list of eleven families nobody had visited in a year, and a ward full of young couples who moved every eighteen months, so the list never held still. For the first stretch he said yes to everything, including a Tuesday night he later admitted he should have handed to somebody else. By summer he had learned to hand things off. The calls didn't stop. They just stopped being a surprise.

Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work.

Doctrine and Covenants 4:3

I used to read that verse as being about him. Now I read "ye" as the house, because the one with the phone in his pocket wasn't the only one answering.

What did we actually do about Saturdays and the phone?

Saturday morning used to be the one stretch the three of us had together. Pancakes, cartoons for Emma, no plan. By the second weekend of the calling it had turned into David walking circles in the yard with a phone against his ear while Emma and I decided whether to wait.

One night after she was down we sat on the bottom basement stair, which is where our serious conversations tend to happen, and I asked what I'd been rehearsing for days. Did he have to answer every call on Saturday morning? He didn't know. He asked his bishop that week, and David came home and repeated it to me word for word, because it had surprised him. "Noon. Unless somebody's bleeding or about to be evicted, it can wait until noon." Then the bishop asked how I was doing, which David had not expected either.

I think about that answer more than I think about the verse, because a bishop that sure of himself is probably the main reason our rule worked, and I still can't tell how much of what we got was ours and how much was luck.

From the time we got up until we'd eaten, David's phone lived in a mixing bowl by the toaster, and he could see who was calling but wasn't carrying it around. Anything short of a crisis got returned by late morning. The first few weeks he glanced at the bowl like it was a pot about to boil over, and it got easier.

Church leaders have said that husbands and wives are to put each other first, and I keep this taped inside the cupboard door where I keep the flour, which is where I'll see it with my hands full. President Boyd K. Packer said:

The ultimate end of all activity in the Church is to see a husband and his wife and their children happy at home, protected by the principles and laws of the gospel, sealed safely in the covenants of the everlasting priesthood.

I copied it off a handout years ago and never wrote down which talk it came from.

We kept Thursday night as well. David was working long engineering days at the time and I'd decided that once Emma was in bed we'd sit on the back patio for ten minutes with a mug of cocoa, whatever the weather. The calls could still come. What I asked was that he tell me when he sat down whether anything was waiting, so I wasn't guessing at his face.

The spouse nobody calls

David got a calling and a handshake and a binder, and I got a pew with Emma and a zip bag of crayons at 8:55 on Sunday mornings, because his presidency met at seven. There's no title for what you do at that point. You find the pencil, you smile at the sister who says "it must be so hard on you," and nobody ever follows that with a casserole.

I felt lonely, and some of those Sundays resentful. Part of that I never told David, because I was trying to be a good sport, which was my problem and not his. I wrote in my journal once that I was "managing it fine," read it back the next week, and laughed out loud at the kitchen table, because who writes that in a journal.

Tell him before it hardens, and if it keeps going tell the bishop, because that's one of the things a bishop is for and the good ones want to hear it. Those years were the messy middle of our marriage in the most literal sense, and I have a post called The Ministry of the Messy Middle if you'd like company in that kind of stretch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I expect in the first weeks after my spouse is called?

More phone calls than you planned for and a husband whose head is at a meeting during dinner. For us it was a month before David stopped saying yes to every request in the first minute. Talk about it early, before the first Saturday goes sideways.

How many hours a week will an elders quorum president serve?

The figure I've seen is 15 to 20 hours, and David's heavier weeks matched it. The size of the ward and how tidy the last president left things change it a lot.

Is it normal to feel lonely or resentful?

Yes, and I'd say so out loud to your spouse, since a spouse has no title and the feeling is easy to hide. If it doesn't ease, tell the bishop. He would rather hear it in month three than year two.

How long does a calling like this last?

Church guidance puts it at roughly two to five years for something like elders quorum president, though it varies. David was released in early 2014 after two years, and I had been counting more closely than I'd admit.

Do I have to give up couple time to support my spouse?

You shouldn't have to. Pick one or two stretches, like a Saturday morning or a few minutes on the patio, and agree on them out loud. Let everything else flex.

We moved wards the year after David was released, and I still check the calendar on the first Saturday of any new calling in the house. If it's yours this month, start with the phone and the bowl.

with love, Melissa