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.