I’m thinking of leaving my wife….

Galaxee. Best wishes for you and the hubby. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And you'll both be euphoric attending each other's commencments. (Get the gear, do the walk, you earned it. I'm still basking in the glow of my second masters. Attended twice; convocation AND ceremony.)

When you're both done, things will so be open for you both. The world will be your oyster.

jhinton. This can be done short term. No more than a few years at most. But it's not a permanent solution. So if you decide to do this, you should then start to think of your next plan for AFTER the current situation.

 

Actually, you are a lot better off than described. If there is any reason you need to get together at an oddball time, it would be very easy to do that. It's being available when the car breaks down or the tree fell through the roof that can be the difference between too far and close enough. That little factor can make a big difference.

 

The wife and I have a vaguely similar situation. I'm doing my PhD in London, her office is located in Toronto (2 hours away). They let her work from home most of the time, but about 1 week a month she has to be in, for which she stays with her parents. In the summer they really ramp up so for 2 months a year she rents a place in Toronto and goes in every day. It... doesn't work so well. It's really stressful to be back and forth all the time and not really know what home is. The summer months she doesn't "bring home" any money after the cost of renting a second place and eating out quite often (since I generally do the cooking). We've got 2 years* of this left, and I think even that will be pushing it. After that, the plan is that we both move to Toronto, or I find a job in London that pays enough for her to quit (or at least enough for her to quit her high-paying dream job and take any old job). If it's important to make it work, you guys can make it work.

* - grad school time. No relation to actual time.

For the out-of-the-box suggestions: Can you get another job doing consulting or telecommuting work from home? Do you need a job at all -- can you both live on just her salary? How different is power plant engineering? Can you learn that on the job?

 

It's her dream job because it has so much flexibility: for most of it, she can work whatever hours she wants from "home", wherever home is that week. She even as a pair of "Work PJs". If/when we move back to Toronto, it will really be her dream job, because those semi-regular trips into the office won't be so painful. However, the constant back-and-forth is exhausting, and it's really cramping the flexible style that is one of the job's main features. It's also causing some issues when she stays with her parents for a week at a time. We can keep this up for another 2-3 years while I finish off my PhD, but after that we've got to settle down somewhere, together in the same place. The ideal situation would be that I find a job in Toronto and she keeps her dream job (which is especially dreamy when one considers the benefits to child-rearing that working from home offers), but if I find my dream job somewhere else and if it pays substantially more than her dream job, then, well...

 

If that's the long term plan, then I think the temporary move to the cheap apt during the week is your answer. You'd save on gas from the commute and from biking to work. If you two think you can handle the apart time, then that's your answer. And if you find after a few months you can't handle it, then you can always give up the apt. and go back to the old commute.

My Dad did this while I was in high school and college. (I'm the oldest). It's not like we had a lot of quality time with him when he was home during the week. Mostly dinner, then he read the paper and we watched TV when he worked local. We had homework. The only time anyone had to do anything was the weekends anyway.

 

I wouldn't consider working from home and child-rearing to be compatible... at least not with the very young ones. I worked a job that was exclusively telecommute and one of my coworkers had a baby, but kept "working" (i.e. collecting paychecks). Our small team of people basically had to do all of her work for her because she worked at most 1 hour out of each day. The company went out of business before we really were forced to confront her about it. Children need constant love and attention!

 

If this is for a very short time just to pay something off or put money aside for the future then...ok. But my gut tells me you either both need to move or learn to live with less. Hindsight will never have you wishing you had spent more time at the office or more time on the road. You will wish you had spent more time with the ones you love.