I’m washing dishes when I hear, “Show Daddy.”
I know this has something to do with Oren’s clothes. My wife enters the kitchen first, as if to announce an honored guest. Oren follows. He is wearing a buttoned shirt with vertical red and blue stripes, dark blue corduroy pants, and blue socks. I selected these clothes myself, rummaging through nearly empty dresser drawers, but even I am a bit surprised at how much older he looks in those clothes. My wife says, “Doesn’t he look like a little man?” Oren stretches his arms in the air in a grand ta-dah gesture. This untucks his shirt and exposes the front waistband of a diaper, diminishing things a little.
Four-year-old Siena is dressed casually in a white tee and blue jeans, barefoot. She says, “He looks like he’s going to a meeting.” My wife laughs and asks Oren, “Are you going to a meeting?” and “Are you a CEO?”
“I’m not going to a meeting,” Oren says. He doesn’t likes this idea, doesn’t recognize the compliment. “I’m going to play on an adventure,” he says.
I know why Siena said what she did. Going to a meeting is why I get dressed up. In fact, it’s nearly the only reason I ever put on a tie and jacket: client meetings, professional events, teaching. I used to worry that my children would get anxious by my professional wardrobe, as though business dress were some kind of Pavlovian precursor to being without a parent. But now they’re both old enough to grasp the less emotional truth that I dress up for work-meetings (whatever those are). Oren, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a miniaturized dress-casual model from a J. Crew catalog, is going to a meeting. Siena, who looks more like a girl from a promotional candid in a Disney Cruise brochure, is having fun. Oren doesn’t want work. He wants play. He wants adventure.
Almost every book with advice for home-office workers suggests showering and dressing like everyone else, not just donning yesterday’s shorts. In my experience, however, there isn’t a single work-at-home individual who ever dresses up. Even video conference participants know the camera doesn’t see what you’re wearing below the edge of the desk. Dressing up simply makes no sense. The casualization of the public workplace is taken far more seriously, and sometimes to secret extremes, by those who traded in their cubicles for entire houses. Under-dressing is a perk, an aggressive compensation for all of those social exchanges we’re missing.. So when I actually have browse my closet and meet people, it is a little bit of an adventure.
Oren has it wrong, thinking that work and play are contradictory things. I like playing businessman.