under "occupation" I usually write "dilettante"

Wade comes home from work at night, and after we talk about his day and the kids' days, he says, "How was your day?"

And I say, "Eh. Fine." And then I struggle to think about what exactly I did all day. Usually I come up with really thrilling things, like I BALANCED THE CHECKBOOK or I WENT TO THE GROCERY or I SPENT AN HOUR ON HOLD WITH THE INSURANCE COMPANY.

It's a wild life, mine is.

For six years, I've had a child with me almost constantly; before that, I worked, more or less full-time. Because I was an academic, a large part of my "work" was reading and writing and THINKING about things; I loved that and I miss it. I've always had something to DO, something more than just cooking and keeping my house clean, and I never really minded the housewife things because they weren't my JOB.

I used to think about how GREAT it would be just to have TIME--no deadlines or office hours or feeding schedules. Now I have time, and I don't know what the hell to do with it.

I take the boys to school at 8:00 and I pick them up at 3:00. In between, I clean up the house, start laundry, load and unload the dishwasher, think about dinner, pay bills, fill out forms, and make appointments. On Wednesdays I have coffee with Christa. I read some, and I write some. And then the day is over and I don't really know what I've done.

This morning, at our coffee date, Christa was talking about wanting to work LESS, to be home more with her children in this last year before they are both in school full-time. That's funny, I said, because I want to work MORE. We talked about how our mothers both played tennis when we were kids, how that was part of what you did when you were the stay-home mom. "You could play tennis," Christa said.

"Maybe," I told her, "but honestly? I would feel guilty about playing tennis while Wade was working a fifteen hour day."

"Yes," she said.

I'm not ready to go Back To Work in any traditional sense; my family isn't ready for me not to be here, at home, taking care of things. Twice in the last week I have left the house without my cell phone, and when I realized that I had been out of touch (once for nearly the ENTIRE school day) I panicked. What if someone was hurt? Or sick? My job is to be there.

No one was hurt. Or sick. And I'm always here, more or less.

For literally years, Wade has been saying, "You should go on vacation! Go to Minneapolis and see Cheryl! Go see your parents! Go see your brother! Leave the kids with me!" He has always been serious and sincere, and I've always agreed that yes, I should go, and yes, I will go, but I've never gone. When my friends and I started planning our trip to Kansas City, Wade said, "GO! I'll take two days off work! It's fine!"

He can't take two days off work; he's busier now than he ever has been. And it is fine, and he will do fine with the boys, but as I race around today trying to get everything ready for him (making lunches and writing out phone numbers and drawing little maps of the schools so he knows where to FIND the boys when he goes to get them and charging my cell phone JUST IN CASE someone calls me first) I am shocked by the amount of stuff I do around here.

My job seems to be to Know Things, like where the After Care room is and who takes what medications and how many pairs of pants each boy has. I need to remember to leave Wade a note about milk money for Charlie; I need to be sure to have him check each boy's folder after school for homework. I need to be sure all three of them have clean underwear.

This is what I do all day, and while it doesn't take seven hours, someone has to do it. I am incredibly grateful that we are able to have me do this, all the time, without worrying about how we will pay the bills. I know that for my family--my family, not necessarily anyone else's--this is the best choice. But recently I've been thinking that I want something else to do, something that will challenge my mind and give me something to talk about at the end of the day, something more than shopping for shoes or playing tennis. I'm looking right now for some small kind of work, because even though I know that I do a tremendous amount here, even though I know that what I do is valuable and valued, I need something more.

"If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays," Leslie Stephen wrote in 1865, "the best practice is to be at work on some profound study." I think I'm searching for the Profound Study that will give me some respectability while I do nothing all day. But first I have to move some laundry and dig up some milk money for Charlie.