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Sparkle (0)
We were driving to a friend's house when my daughter suggested that we move to the beach, much in the same tone she uses to suggest that we have pizza for dinner or watch the Muppet Show before bed. Low-impact decisions. I explained about house sales and finding a new school and new doctors and new friends in this new location, and finally, she agreed that maybe it wasn't very realistic. Especially because her father's job was back here in the city, three hours away.
A few moments later, she came to a new idea: Daddy could get a different job. He could work in a restaurant (when I pointed out that he doesn't even cook at home, she assured me that "we could teach him" as if she is a mini Cat Cora). There are a lot of restaurants at the beach, I agreed, if the man first took a few cooking classes. "What would I do?" I questioned.
"You'd just be a mum!" she laughed, as if the idea of me working was as bizarre as eating sand. Her dad could easily become a chef with a few instructional lessons, but her graduate-school-educated mother was best at cooking, cleaning and building Lego towers.
Um ... by the way, I do work. As in, I have a job. Right now.
Although, I'm aware that I downplay my work both to the twins and to my peers. I label myself a SAHM. On one hand, it's more honest. I work mainly between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., after the twins are asleep. I have more in common schedule-wise with SAHMs and am available to volunteer at my kids' school or shuttle them around to activities. At the end of the day, almost every SAHM I know does some work, whether it's running a small baby gift business on Etsy or doing some freelance Web design for a couple of dollars a month.
But I think I'm also squeamish about having the twins perceive that I'm not there for them 100 percent. I loved knowing that my mother could be at school to pick me up if I felt sick. I liked that she would volunteer to chaperone field trips or work on the PTA. It's guilt that pulls two ways -- I feel like I'm not contributing enough to my family, because I'm not meeting my earning potential and I'd feel guilty if I went off and worked full-time (hell, I feel guilty for the two afternoons a week they go to Grandma and Grandpa's house so I can churn out a few articles, and they are with their grandparents, having fun. By the way, thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!). I fear I may have done too good a job not only tucking my job time-wise into the darkened nooks of their lives, but also tucking the very existence of my job into those same unconscious nooks.
I have no desire to work full-time. Our original plan was that I would continue to work, and my husband would stay home with the kids, but once we started fertility treatments, that idea changed. One night, as I held a needle over my stomach about to give myself an injection, I looked up at him and said, "By the way, you realize that this means that I'm going to be the stay-at-home?" I was not going to go through needle-sticks and have him get the daytime shnuzzles. He generously acquiesced without argument, and the rest is history -- the treatments worked, we had the twins and I got to stay at home.
In all other facets of life, I have to behave within a workplace frame. No matter how much I love a job, there are expectations that I also despise. I loved lesson planning and teaching, but hated grading and meetings with parents. I loved dishwashing the coffee cups and hated filling out the paperwork. Parenting has been the first thing I've done where I am 100 percent my own boss. Yes, I need to do certain things for a short period of time -- for instance, as much as I don't love wiping asses, it's a finite task, unlike grading, which was there year after year after
