This was an original post for LA Moms Blog on 6/9/2009. LA Moms Blog was acquired by Technorati, so I publish my archives here on Fridays.
Two Fridays ago, while on vacation, I got a phone call telling me I was laid off. There’s some comic irony in that occasion, I know. I was working full time on a reality show (to be named somewhere else, some other time, perhaps if you see me in person or email me I’ll tell you what it was – see, they lost some serious publicity when I got laid off!) and blogging in my “spare” time. The hours after work and before bedtime were filled with dinner, bath time, chasing, and general kid-related activity; weekends, as usual, consisted of laundry, outings, and exhaustion.
These days I contemplate a part-time daycare schedule, and I just spent a full day as a SAHM – my first in a year. It was refreshing in an odd way. I had come to think of myself as not cut out for the SAHM thing. It seemed like an admission of failure, as does anything parent-related that we do less than perfectly.
In the months of full time work I had let my other responsibilities pile up. On my first day of unemployment I made a list of the things that I now had time to tackle. The list is three pages long. Unless I am unemployed for long enough to contemplate a serious lifestyle change, I can see that this list is laughably unrealistic. However, it being a list, it comforts me. Most of the items are blog-related, entwined as I’ve become in the blogosphere and all it offers me. Other things to do are the usual: laundry, bills, family paperwork, errands, and personal projects I’ve been wanting to tackle.
Today it struck me that those things will always be there. The fleeting part is my family. My older son was home sick with me today, and by “sick” I mean “miraculously better after a morning visit to the pediatrician’s walk-in hours and bouncing off the walls and saying ‘Mom! Come look at this!’ every five seconds so that I can’t actually get anything done.” I mentioned it to my friend on the phone today. “I’m home here with a sick kid and trying to blog but I’m not succeeding,” I told her.
“So don’t blog,” she said.
…?
“Don’t blog while he’s there,” she clarified.
Well. That was an easy answer, and obviously one that should have occurred to me. A sick day for my kid is a sick day for me, and by “sick” I mean play longer in the bathtub, create a solar system on the living room floor using balls of different sizes, watch a bunch of movies snuggled on the couch, fold sheets together, and read books about space. There’s no sick pay besides the hugs and kisses and smiles and goofball jokes of a four-year-old, but those are pretty good supplemental compensation.
And my list will be here tomorrow.
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