Parents’ opposite schedules can be blessing for family life, obstacle to couple time

Lifestyle feature for The Commercial Appeal

Nov. 16, 2010

At an hour when most people are settling in for the night — the children put to bed and an anticipated DVD slipped into the machine or a glass of wine poured — there are those who are donning FedEx identification or police badges, kissing their spouses goodnight and leaving for work.

Angela and Aaron Feathers are one such couple. Angela owns Evergreen Montessori in Midtown, and her husband, Aaron, is a police officer working the 11:30 p.m.-7:30 a.m. shift Downtown. It’s a schedule they have adhered to since 2000.

“They’ve grown up with him coming home, trying to help with breakfast and then shoving us all out the door so he can go to sleep,” Angela said of the couple’s children, ages 10, 8 and 2-year-old twins.

The tasks involved in running a household, running a business or holding a job can often be overwhelming. It can take a village, yet sometimes that village is not on task at the same time. And that, it turns out, is not always a bad thing, depending on the work schedule. The police force rotates days off, so Aaron may have the weekend off one month, but not the next.

“It works,” Angela said. “During the week it works. On the weekends, if he doesn’t have those days off, the children are up at 8 o’clock in the morning at the latest when he’s coming home. But he has to sleep, so he misses birthday parties or whatever they have to do on the weekends. Or he’s up chugging gallons and gallons of coffee to participate in whatever we’re doing. So that’s when it is the hardest.” … (read more)