Affiliation:
1. University of South Florida, USA
2. Kent State University, USA
Abstract
“It's Just a Part of Life” focuses on career and personal challenges as two couples (Maria and Brad; Sara and Alejandro) deal with anticipated and unexpected disruptions in their lives. These couples experience events and opportunities including returns-to-work after laborforce gaps, job changes, geographical relocations, infertility, unplanned business trips and workloads, and sleep deprivation during early child rearing years. As they devise strategies for managing these stressful situations both individually and collectively, they adapt to and transform their new normals by enacting communication resilience processes. Throughout the case, there are episodes in which they, and the children (Eden and Lucy), perform the five processes: crafting normalcy; using, maintaining, and creating new networks; backgrounding negative feelings while foregrounding productive action; utilizing alternative logics; and anchoring identities. They enact resilience for themselves and others, for the present and the future, and by reflecting upon their pasts.