She Resigned One Day Before Her Whole Team Was Laid Off

 My wife handed in her resignation on a Tuesday. The day before that, her company called everyone into a room and announced that the client contract had ended, there would be no extension, and the entire team was being let go with two months' notice.

She'd already signed with somewhere else. Three rounds of interviews, offer accepted, EP application in motion. One day earlier and she'd have been sitting in that room like everyone else, suddenly job hunting with no plan.

I've thought about that timing a lot since. There's no lesson in it. She just got lucky, and I'm aware of how thin the margin was.

She Was Here Before I Was

People assume I brought her to Singapore. It's actually the other way round, sort of.

Around 2010 she was studying in Korea when a placement opportunity came up, and she ended up here teaching design at a primary school. From there she moved into the design team at a Korean construction firm and stayed about two years. Then living abroad alone got heavy in the way it does, and she went back to Korea.

That's where we met. Then in 2020 we came out here together, me on an Employment Pass, her on a Dependant's Pass.

So when we landed, she was returning to a city she'd already worked in a decade earlier, except this time with no work rights of her own and, fairly soon after, pregnant with our first.

The Years That Were Hard to Watch

Between Korea and coming back here, she'd built a real career. Project manager at an exhibition company. UI and UX designer and marketer at an app company. Then a graduate degree in design management, and after that, marketing at a pharmaceutical company.

Then Singapore, pregnancy, a newborn, and no job.

She did work in stretches. Design and marketing manager for a Korean mart that was opening here, until she left to give birth back in Korea. Art academy teacher after we returned. Then interpreter and designer during the construction phase of a large Korean automotive group's new facility here, all properly on a Work Permit.

But between those, there were long gaps at home, and those gaps did something to her that took me a while to properly see.

She is not a stay-at-home person. I don't mean that as a judgement about anyone who is, I mean it specifically about her. She needs to be out, talking to people, in the middle of something. Stuck at home with a baby in a country where she couldn't legally work without sponsorship, she got quiet in a way that wasn't like her.

She told me later that the thing that unsettled her most was realising she'd stopped knowing what was going on in the world. AI was suddenly everywhere in conversation, and she felt like she'd missed the start of it entirely while she was at home.

How She Actually Got Back In

The route back wasn't LinkedIn or a recruiter, at least not the first time. There's a Korean community chat group here, and a headhunter posted about a role that needed a Korean speaker. She applied through that. September 2023, back working, on a Work Permit again.

It turned into the best stretch she'd had since we moved. Marketing, working on the Korean market, and crucially a team of genuinely good colleagues. Drinks after work. Dinner out on a weeknight. She came home with energy rather than without it.

I remember noticing, a few months in, that she just seemed more like herself than she had in years. Whatever the salary was, that part wasn't really the point.

The Business Plan That Turned Into a Job Offer

The recent move started as something else entirely. She wanted to try running her own thing.

The catch is a rule a lot of people don't know until it applies to them. If you hold a work pass here, you cannot hold a second job or run your own business alongside it. Full stop. So the plan was to resign, move back onto a Dependant's Pass, and start something from there.

While she was preparing to leave, a role came up that looked good enough to at least look at. She applied. Three interview rounds. She passed all of them, and this time the offer came with an Employment Pass in her own name rather than a Work Permit, and a significant jump in salary.

Then the layoff announcement landed the day before her resignation. So the business idea is parked, at least for now, and honestly given how that week went, neither of us has any complaints about the trade.

[사진2 들어갈자리: alt/title 텍스트 "family dinner table on a weekday evening at home"]

Why Dual Income Didn't Change Our House Much

I expected both of us working full time to reshape everything at home. It barely did, and the reason is that our routine was already built around having a helper, and had been for years.

She does the school run both ways. Breakfast and dinner for the girls. Cleaning, laundry. On weekends she cooks for all four of us. That structure existed long before my wife went back to work full time, so there wasn't really a transition to manage.

If anything, I suspect our helper finds it easier this way. Both employers out of the house during the day, so she handles mornings and evenings around the kids and has the middle of the day to work at her own pace.

We do still participate, and I want to be clear about that because I've seen households where the helper becomes the entire domestic system. The girls clean up their own mess, that's non-negotiable. Anything heavy, high up, or genuinely unsafe, I do it, not her. If something's unpleasant and we can handle it ourselves, we handle it ourselves. She's lived with us a long time and it functions more like a household than an employment arrangement.

The Only Thing That Actually Gets Hard

Kids get sick. That's the pressure point, and there's no clever system that fixes it.

Hand, foot and mouth disease. Flu. Anything requiring a proper isolation period at home. One day is fine, our helper manages. Five days is not fine, because that needs actual parental leave from actual jobs.

We alternate. Three days her, two days me, roughly. I've become slightly obsessive about not getting sick myself, mostly so my leave stays available for the girls and for family trips rather than getting burned on my own flu.

Singapore is genuinely reasonable about this, which helps more than people from other work cultures might expect. Nobody interrogates you about leave. In a meeting someone says he's on annual leave, or he's on MC, and the response is just, fine, we'll pick it up next time. No sighing, no implication you've inconvenienced anyone.

What She Actually Got Out of It

The salary matters, obviously. The Employment Pass in her own name matters too, both for her and for how our household looks on paper.

But the thing I'd point to is simpler. She's healthier. She talks about work at dinner. She has colleagues she likes and a version of her week that isn't entirely defined by our children.

And weirdly, we're better with the girls now than we were then. When we're with them, we're actually with them, because there's a clear line between the day and the evening that didn't exist when one of us was home all day feeling stuck.

She'll probably still try the business thing eventually. She hasn't dropped it, she's just holding it. And after watching the last few years, I've stopped assuming I know what her next step is going to be.

Related reading:

Five Helpers in Four Years: What I Actually Learned About Hiring Domestic Help in Singapore

The Three Months I Spent Terrified My Employment Pass Wouldn't Get Renewed