Home Work

I work from home.

We know this.

I hear comments all the time about how lucky I am to be able to do that, and I agree, and I'm endlessly grateful that it has (as of this blog post) worked out well for me. God, I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying that!

When I worked in an office, especially in my most recent one, I spent five days a week longing wistfully for the weekend, spinning fantasies of working from home in pajamas and fuzzy socks, editing at my leisure without interruption and maybe even starting on that book I've been wanting to write since I set forth that goal at the age of 7, the comforts of home with (bonus!) enough work to keep my brain from atrophying, which it was doing at a rapid clip in my last incarnation as a not-so-glorified proofreader. (Side note: Never make the mistake of calling a copy editor a proofreader.)

The reality is that some of it is actually like that. I am partial to my fuzzy socks. I have, generally, a steady flow of work. Home is comfortable when the dogs aren't obsessively licking their paws and after I get in my daily dose of vacuuming. I cannot focus on anything if there is a strand of dog hair or a speck of dust on the floor, and I realize that doesn't make me sound precisely stable and I don't particularly care. Some people have their morning coffee. I have my morning Dyson.

Recently, though, I lost one of my main (minus the "one of") gigs and I feel obligated to say it was through no fault of my own but due to company cutbacks. (Aah, those. I'm familiar. Once upon a time a bunch of amazingly talented people worked together ... and then New York took over.)

Recently also, my baby became a toddler, which means that the days of two, two-hour-long naps are over and the days of abandoning the laptop to extract the child when she has managed to wedge herself between the coffee table and the couch with an oversized book, or of running to see what just fell in the kitchen, or of saying, "Don't touch" more times than is prudent before I actually get up and move her bodily. Or of cuddling the tears away when she leans over too far in the act of examining her belly button and tips over on the hardwood floor on her head.



Some days more time is spent comforting, cajoling, and containing the stress of knowing, at the back of my mind, that I'm going to be working into the wee hours to meet a deadline because my children come first. Unfailingly, unchangeably, unapologetically.

Not that they haven't always. Alex was in child care from the time he was 3 months old, and the time I got a call from the daycare to say he couldn't turn his head I fled my cubicle like my desk chair had spontaneously combusted and I was next. Meningitis, was my fear. A crick in the neck, it turned out to be.

But wiping snot with one hand and noting structural errors in prose with the other has become a regular day at the office, which happens to contain my couch, my fuzzy socks, my vacuum cleaner, and my beloved family.

Those recent developments (or, rather, setbacks) I mentioned before weighed on me for a while, but not a long while. Like, ten minutes, the time it took for me to hang up the phone and process the information before realizing that Katherine was being too quiet and finding her in the kitchen, happily patting an impressively tall pile of spilled kosher salt into the linoleum. And I knew I had no choice but to roll with it.

"We'll work it out," Steven tells me when I step over the line from stressed to anxious. And I believe him, even if he's just saying it because he needs to believe it, too. We do what we have to do, and we make things work. Sometimes they don't work quite the way we want them to, but then we just head down that path and see what's there. It can't hurt to look, and it may hurt more than you'll ever get the chance to know, not to.

It's a lesson I learned not so long ago, and one I'll keep learning every time something unpredictable happens and I'm forced to reevaluate. I'm tougher than I give myself credit for, more often than not. Or so I've been told by those who know me best.

But yeah, it's nice to work in fuzzy socks, and the spontaneous hugs and kisses from that walking maker of messes when I'm in the middle of a project that's due in ten minutes? That's priceless.

Dead fish and toddler frustration

Since I posted last, Alex's fish died. Again. Only this time there was no smooth cover-up operation, partly because I felt guilty for lying to him the first time and partly because, well, how many times can you replace a pet with such a naturally high mortality rate before (a) the kid notices or (b) you start to feel like you're taking the easy way out because you can't stand to see the kid sad.

And really, seeing the kid sad is pretty awful. I'm sure all parents feel that way about their kids, and I'm sure Alex's tears are not unique in their ability to make anyone who sees them feel like they did when the hunter shot Bambi's mother.

I debated ways to phrase the bad news, ranging from "Finny is no longer with us" to "Have you ever heard of fish heaven?" to "So, about that fish of yours..."

But "Finny's dead" popped out, Band-Aid ripped off, and it was like that time that I actually DID rip Alex's Band-Aid off and realized that that bit of advice is not to be universally employed. Like, for example, when the Band-Aid-covered wound is on the child's FACE and you have ten minutes before you have to take him to meet his kindergarten teacher with an angry red splotch on his cheek that looks suspiciously like a slap mark. Nice.

His grief over Finny was brief but intense, both of which seem to be defining characteristics of childhood emotions both good and bad.

Luckily for all concerned, we left for a long weekend with the Texas family the next day, leaving behind an empty aquarium filled with weeks' worth of fond memories of Finny the Fish (the Second, but you didn't hear that from me). For a while there was a shrine in the spot where the tank used to be, a water glass filled with water and a seashell, a note that was heartbreaking in its earnestness, and a spotlight fashioned from the aquarium lid.


Now that Alex's heart seems to have healed (a couple of weeks seems sufficient mourning time for a pet you've only had for a minute), he's on to bigger and better things. New DS games, for instance, and counting backwards by tens from 200, and jumping up three reading levels since the beginning of first grade. Life is in constant flux when you're six.

Katherine has suddenly grown dimples because, apparently, her face didn't think it was irresistible enough without them. Were I one to be swayed by cuteness, we might have a problem in the coming years. Steven is one to be swayed by cuteness, so we'll see how that shakes out.

We're fully ensnared in Mother's Day Out two days a week now, and the drop-offs are as not-fun as I remember them from Alex's child-care days, and the pick-ups are generally filled with trepidation; the main teacher makes vague accusations like "She had her moments" and "When the mood of the room changes, she gets upset." And I try not to take it personally because these are not judgments on Katherine's 15-month-old character nor mine as her mother. I ask, after all, invariably, "How did she do today?" I guess I should inform her that the only answer I'm really interested in, whether true or false, is "Great!"

I've always been a proponent of the ignorance-is-bliss approach to life. I guess I could just quit asking.

I'm ready for her to start talking more now, and not because I'm paranoid. I know that she will start talking and that one day, if she's anything like her brother, we'll wonder that we ever wanted to rush it. But I do think it would cut back on some of her frustration. She knows what she wants unfailingly, at all times. And she wants you to know that she knows what she wants. And she wants you to give it to her. Yesterday. "More, more, more," she signs incessantly, increasingly frustrated as you play the destined-for-failure guessing game. "More what? More milk? More goldfish? More Fresh Beat Band? More ... patience?"

When you stumble upon the correct more, she rewards you with one of the newly dimpled grins, and you've earned a gold star for cracking the code.

The whole tiring scene, replayed fifty-some-odd times a day, makes me think fondly and perhaps a little revisionistically on Alex's baby days, when he said things like "Mother, a cookie would really hit the spot" and "I would like for you to pick me up now." OK, no, but certainly "Cookie, peez!" and "Up, peez, Mama!"

Katherine just likes to make us work for it a little harder. She is honing her feminine powers.

In the meantime, I just need to improve my guessing skills.