The wife may appreciate the husband in a different way . . . Technology has made it easier to stay connected while apart. Olivia Mitchell, a professor of insurance and risk management at Penn's Wharton School, spent nine weeks in New Zealand and Australia last fall working on a research project. Meanwhile, she kept in daily contact with her husband and two children, ages 11 and 15, back in Bala Cynwyd, by e-mail. I knew what was going on in school, where the sleepover was that weekend, what was going on in Girl Scouts.
Some sabbaticals are opportunities just too good to pass up.
Twenty years ago, Joan Rochford couldn't say no when a friend asked if she wanted to go to Europe for a couple of weeks - without her husband and seven children. She needn't have worried. Rochford has been taking European holidays every year since then, sometimes staying as long as a month. Some years she also spent a few weeks at her friend's villa in South America. It was the freedom of not having the responsibility of a family, of seeing something totally different, of being part of someone else's universe.