What They Don't Tell You About Working With Your Spouse With Meagan Jepson
In an effort to make sure that you're always getting the best of the best in business advice, resources, and life, I occasionally bring in a guest blogger who's an expert in their field to give you some content that they're super passionate about. So keep reading for beautiful advice on working with your spouse from Meagan Jepson, an amazing photographer, editor, and half of the Jepsons duo!
A lot of people romanticize what it might be like to work from home with their spouse, but today, I’ll pull back the curtain (because when you work with your spouse and have toddlers, privacy is a unicorn anyway) and tell you what it’s really like.
Here are 10 things nobody tells you about working with your husband.
1. Let’s just cut right to the cheese...I mean chase. Your house will likely be full of methane gas. If you don’t know what I mean, Google it. I just can’t make myself say it on the internet.
2. Both of you might forget to brush your teeth in the morning. Don’t worry, it cancels out (it doesn’t).
3. If you don’t put on a bra for the day, prepare to be mauled - even ten minutes before a webinar. Hey, you’re the one who didn’t wear a bra for a webinar.
4. You might need all hands on deck to attend your baby’s poop-maggedon...in the middle of YOUR day to work. Be sure to check your entire body for poop before touching your laptop again.
5. You’ll forget what your household roles used to be. Probably a good idea to assign those tasks. Otherwise, your house will look like a hurricane blew through (or let’s be honest - toddlers), and you’ll all starve.
6. You’ll forget what weekends are. They’re basically another day with the kids - but at least you can play man-to-man coverage instead of zone. If you have more than two kids, that’s on you.
7. You’ll forget there’s a world outside. You might spend a whole week in the house without going anywhere. When you do go outside, a trip to Chick-Fil-A during peak hours is eye-opening. And Target…? OHMYWORD IT’S A WHOLE NEW WORLD!
8. It’s possible you might each have a margarita in the middle of the workweek at noon. Because the kids are with their nanny for the day. And you’ve become enablers. And because you can.
9. It might not always be like Jim and Pam Halpert. But sometimes, it is. It SO is. Wow, that show is gooooood! You know this because you watch a lot of Netflix together (and you own all nine seasons of The Office).
10. You might wonder what it would be like to have a ‘real’ job, or better yet, if HE would have a ‘real’ job again. But then you look at the life in front of you and decide, “Nah, this is perfect.”
So how do you work with your husband?
Nearly every time I tell someone my husband and I are business partners and we both work from home, I almost always get one of two responses.
One: “That’s so cool!”
Two: “I could NEVER do that with my spouse. We’d kill each other.”
Well, to be honest, both are true. But to be REALLY honest, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
See, Adam and I have been working together since we got married. We tied the knot in 2011, and a month after our honeymoon, we started working in college and youth ministry. Together. We had to raise support for our income - a rather daunting task for us - and we walked to the Penn State campus together to meet with students and be part of all the various activities that go with campus ministry.
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We loved our job, and we loved doing all of it side-by-side.
About the same time, I started my part-time wedding photography business. Adam was often my second shooter. He had no idea how to use a camera, but he dove in head-first to support me and my lofty aspirations (I almost never do anything half-heartedly...overachieveritis).
Eventually he forced himself to shoot in manual mode and started asking me questions. And one sticky Saturday in July, he started nailing it. I remember looking at the back of his camera and doing a double-take. My smile got SO BIG...and I might have punched him…
I eventually decided to give up formal ministry and work on my business, but Adam had always thought ministry would be his career, so he stuck to it. In March of 2014, right after we had our sweet baby girl, we found out that Adam’s position would be discontinued that fall. The church graciously gave him until June to find another opportunity, but that summer was still spent on our knees in prayer, feeling so many different emotions. Fear, anxiety, helplessness…but all of it TOGETHER.
The fall came, and Adam was offered a full-time position with a local church where we had done off and on youth ministry since our college years. But after two years, the position was reduced to part-time, Adam became burnt out, and we ended up back in the same boat with a little less stamina - and one more baby - than we had two years earlier.
Now what?
One day, when his ministry job was winding down, Adam walked in the door of our sweet little home that was now full of boxes. I greeted him with a calculator in my hand and tears in my eyes. I said, “I think we can do this.”
His famous last words?
“Teach me.”
For a few months prior, while pregnant with our son, I’d been learning how to scale my business with private photo editing. We figured that if something happened with Adam’s job again, we would sell our house, get out of debt, and move to my hometown of Lancaster, PA. Truth was, Adam was ready to try something new. We both agreed we would take our life partnership to a whole new level and Adam would become my business partner too.
It worked.
When Adam's job ended and our newborn son was still wrinkly, we moved and Adam started taking clients. He took a placeholder job as a painter, and we planned that he would quit in April 2018. That was last year - he quit 3 months later, exactly one year ahead of schedule, in April 2017.
So what’s it like now?
Our days are full. Full of dirty diapers and food boogers stuck in our hair. Our heads are full of peppy children’s music and big dreams for our future. Our inboxes are full of emails from our amazing clients, both brides and photographers. Our laptops are full of beautiful images. Our van is often full of everything but the kitchen sink, traveling back and forth to State College, PA where it all began--still one of our favorite places on earth to visit. Our house is full of toys, dog hair, and farts (because let’s be real...we’re people and we live there...but we still try to blame two of those three things on the dog).
It’s not perfect. We fight. I make Adam feel small, and he has selective hearing. We’re normal. On days when he has the kids, sometimes he just doesn’t feel like it. On days when I have the kids, I sometimes catch myself wondering, “WHERE IS ADAM?!”
Most days I don’t wear makeup, but I do I wear the same clothing I’ve worn two days in a row, and I forget to brush my teeth in the morning. Pretty sure Adam never brushes his teeth in the morning. Oopsy. He does most of the cooking these days, and I do most of the cleaning...well, when I do it.
Our days are full. Full of mess and toddler squeals. Good food. Laughter. Trials and hurt feelings. Apologies and forgiveness--always forgiveness. Full of ideas and big dreams. Hobbies and experiments. Intimacy and drought. Forbearance. Weddings. Photographs. Our babies. Our love. Our God.
Together.
A little more about Meagan:
We are Adam and Meagan Jepson--wedding photographers, private photo editors, and adventurous homebodies. Meagan keeps bees, Adam brews beer. We both like tabletop board games...but Adam is kind of obsessed. We are former youth ministers who turned our desire to be at home into a thriving photography and editing business. You might find us hanging out behind the camera with one of our amazing bridal couples, grinning at all the pretty on our laptop screens while editing for one of our talented fellow photographers, getting dirt on our jeans in the garden, or hiking with our two munchkins and one furry brown dog. Most of all, we love being together, which makes what we do as a team all the more amazing.
Grab our free guide to "4 Steps to Become a Private Photo Editor" if you are interested in how to become an editor like us!
Freebie: the-jepsons.com/4steps
Connect with Meagan:
Website: www.the-jepsons.com
Instagram: @meaganjepson and @adamgjepson
Facebook: @theJepsons
Pinterest: @meaganjepson and @adamjepson
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