Unemployed

My friends who are, like me, unemployed by choice and charged with running the household and managing the kids' schedules, don't like it when I say I'm not working this year. "You are working, just not for pay," they say. Well, that is true, but the work I do now is the same work I did last year, except I don't do a full-time job on top of it. And I really just want to use the word "working"to describe paid employment because, in the vernacular, that's what we understand working to mean.

So I am not working, and that is a challenge for me. As I've said before, there was a wholeness to my daily life when I was teaching. And now, without the students and the literature and the colleagues and the institutional insanity of a large public high school, I feel a bit, well, broken. Just as I expected this melancholy this fall, with everyone else returning to school but me, I know too that this is temporary. I will work again when it works for the whole family.

A note on that: working for the whole family does not mean that my decision to work has to have no effect on the family. It sure did change everyone's lives, especially Scott's, and it will again, and that's okay. Not everyone has the partner I have, who is willing to bend an already crazy schedule of twelve hour workdays, an hour-long commute each way, and a heavy travel load into something accomodating of another's career aspirations. But I am a lucky woman -- I do have that man.

Anyhow, I guess I have just what I thought I'd have now that Eleanor and Ethan are back in school. I have a lot of time with the dog, which is mostly good. She definitely loves me the most now. I have time to have lunch with friends. I have time to read for pleasure without falling asleep, time to blog, time to get to some old projects. I have time to cook again, which is satisfying of that mother instinct. We eat fresh vegetables every night, dessert that's never from a box, and even homemade bread. Unfortunately, there is also time for obsessing about the tidiness of the house, car, yard. These domestic things, which I take some satisfaction from, are not worthy of that much of my time, but they pull so hard on my attention. Betty Friedan had it right -- the tasks of running a home expand to fill the time available. I did them all last year while working full-time, so why do they want to take so much more time now?

So I resolve each day to resist the errands and relegate them to Fridays alone. One morning of Target, Costco, and Borders is more than enough to sustain our suburban existence. I resolve to let the floor get (just a little bit) dirty. I resolve to blog, read, walk, lunch. I expected this tension to surface when the summer ran out and the school year commenced. It is, in that way, frustratingly comfortable.

What I did not expect this fall, though, was the urge to explain my unemployedness. And yikes, is it fierce. It happened several times in the last few days. On Thursday I had lunch at school with my English department colleagues. I met a new intern and immediately launched into the "moving to Belgium, husband constantly out of town to transition into European client work, have to travel to Belgium to find a house, find a doctor for Eleanor, etc." speech. (I fear that it may sound defensive, now that I put it to paper. Or screen. Whatever.) I repeated it to a former student that afternoon, my son's teacher on Friday, my 93-year-old great grandmother on Saturday night, and to countless neighbors at our annual block party just last night.

Frankly, I am disturbed by my need to explain. It is rooted, I am certain, in my desire to be a professional woman with an identity apart from the household's. (I love our family's identity -- nothing has brought me greater joy than my family. But I like to have my own slice of selfness, too.) It also comes from the shame of the socioeconomic privilege that affords me the chance to essentially work or not without affecting the family's bottom line too much. I suppose a little bit of me wants to emphasize, too, that I did not burn out or flunk out (or get booted out of) my noble profession. It was my choice, I want to say to the neighbors. And it maybe was not my first choice for this year, either.

But if I write more about this, my dear husband, who is in Cambridge right now, will call and say for the umpteenth time, "Maybe we shouldn't move to Brussels. Maybe we should stay here so you can work." And I will have to explain to this true gentleman, this amazing man who has picked me to love, that a year of the tension of time and explanation is a small investment toward a future of adventure.