Archive for the ‘jobs around the house’ Category

A Lawn on My Mind

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Oh, it’s so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m actually publishing this in my blog.

I bought a lawnmower.

I’m so ashamed! For years I looked askew at those men who woke early on weekend mornings, an hour before the ordinary and righteous people of the world stopped sleeping in, and in ragged cutoffs and loosely laced tennis shoes marched patterns on the grasses, the noise of their infernal machines scaring away the birds. I could never understand their longing for the perfect edge, or the wet confetti that stuck to their legs; that grassy smell mixed with exhaust, or the sweat that accumulated in their armpits; the perfection of accessories and specialized tools no other vehicles ever require, like the blade sharpener, the waste bags, the hard black plastic spoon; or worst of all, the weekly devotion to the seeding, wetting, weeding, and heading of a hundred thousand living objects destined to grow back.

This subculture of worship is so alien to the child, the student, the renter, and the condo owner that never once was I offered membership. Instead and unexpectedly, I got thrown overboard from a sinking economy, dashed upon the rocks of my mortgage, and stranded on an island in a sea of greens, worried about the vegetative tide. My new friends at the hardware store were sympathetic, especially when I couldn’t speak “acres.” They talked to me about mulching blades and car engines. They sold me a gas can. And that weekend I collected sticks and rocks and toys, a fatherly mix of Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus, before filling the tank and pumping the choke and yanking the string. (Naturally I spilled gas everywhere and couldn’t figure out the safety bar.)

In my early twenties, I joined the Sierra Club and spent 8 days in the Arizona desert. Every day away from civilization I learned just how unnecessary and even trivial certain amenities can be: television, phone answering machines, laundry machines, even toilets. I discovered that we don’t need these things to survive and live well and simply. I missed my friends and family, and nothing else. And so I try to tell myself that mowing the lawn really isn’t necessary, that if I can give up flush toilets I can sure give up cutting the grass. I even try to explain this to my Sunday-morning neighbors, all of us like synchronized swimmers with our machines, but of course they can’t hear me over the noise.

I miss the desert.

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Double Daddy Dooty Duty

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

When my workload is lighter than usual, “work-at-home dad” becomes just “at-home dad.” I become the house husband, a man with an apron (or at least a dish towel) who wanders from room to room picking up after the children.

Less work is no justification for taking a vacation. If anything, I pick up all the slack — I didn’t know there was any slack — and pull double daddy duty: cooking, laundry, cleaning, quality time with the kids, errands. My career, I’m afraid, might be little more than a retaining wall holding back an avalanche of family obligation. Knock away one billable project brick, and suddenly I’m heating leftovers, shoveling snow, and empting the potty. It’s all dooty duty, when I’d rather be working.

I see clearly that the choice facing all working parents — (a) find a job, (b) raise your children — is not a life choice. It’s a day choice. Guilt or gumption gets us out of bed, and we struggle between answering or ignoring the screaming alarm in our room, or the alarming scream from the other.

I don’t believe that our careers are an excuse to ignore our kids. Nor do I believe that playing with kids is a good way to procrastinate at work. The choice is both real and constant, and the parameters of choice can change when we’re not looking. Maybe there is no best choice. Maybe the best we can hope for is that today’s choice is a decent one. It’s all just a game of dress-up anyway, no matter what.

Suppose, just suppose, that instead of spending valuable time to take my kids to the science museum or the aquarium or the play space, I use my time looking for work that takes me even farther my away from them. Does this make me double the bad parent?

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Blownership issues

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

When I purchased one-third of a snow blower this weekend, I found myself stumbling across yet another line, the division of “self” and “neighbor.” I’m already blurring the line between work and play, office and home, kids and grown-ups, fun and responsibility. Now my neighbors are sort of like business partners.

I was always against snow blowers in principle. They’re loud, they use gasoline, my kids are justifiably scared of them, and shoveling (when done properly) is both healthy and more precise. This particular model, with its monstrously orange snow-eating mouth and a weight of over 250 pounds,  looks and feels too much like farm machinery than a household convenience. But when your neighbor approaches you with an idea — hey, let’s go in on one together, shall we? — and then it snows like crazy, how do you say no?

Generations ago, neighbors were automatically colleagues if not friends. Like college roommates today, homeowners and their families shared more than just a street or street corner; they shared their lives and their gossip. But soon our fences weren’t designed to keep only our animals in; they kept us in, too. Had you spoken with me only five years ago, I knew almost none of my neighbors — and remember, I work at home, so not getting to know my neighbors would be like an office worker throwing a tarp over his cubicle.

I immediately perceived an advantage, anyway. Because I don’t commute to an office, I don’t have to shovel and defrost at five a.m. I can hurl the minivan into the street, drop off the kids, and return home to manage snow at my convenience. So while my neighbors might compete for “blownership” first thing in the morning, I can use the machine whenever I want. But then I realized that my neighbor — the guy who had the idea in the first place — is a working dad-at-home, too.

It was also his idea to keep the snow blower in his back yard. With a tarp over it.

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Single Dad for a Week, Again

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Once again, my wife is traveling for business. She’ll leave me alone with the kids, along with whatever support network I build, for four full days. On the fifth day, we’ll intercept my wife in Montreal. It will be the first time I’ve ever flown while outnumbered by my kids.

I’m starting to focus on the kinds of details that will make the days pass more easily. I can prepare large meals and lunches in advanced, wash kids’ clothes (especially pajamas), and even record some appropriate television content for those desperate moments. I’ll start writing down the events and demands for each day in advance, on paper, and refer to these “cheat sheets” all day long to make sure things get done. I’ve also mastered the timekeeping and note-taking functions on my mobile phone — alarm clock, countdown counter, text reminders — because I know I’ll get distracted.

My weeks of single-parenting always seem to end with greater disruption than I experienced during the weeks themselves. That’s because a week of rigorous effort creates a controlled environment, something much more rigid than what my wife and I create together. It is, perhaps, a more accurate glimpse at who I am as a parent, because it’s all me. I even enjoy the challenge, because I know when it ends.

It doesn’t take much to appreciate just how much easier dual-parenting is over single-parenting. Still, I embrace the reminders. Appreciation is good.

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Driven to Disruption

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

When you work in an office, having a sick child means staying home. Probably you can’t get any work done at all, even if you wanted to, because everything and everyone you need is someplace else, where you can’t go. When the child is quietly eating Saltines, you join him. It’s like having a mobile phone with no connection. You might pick up the phone and look at it, but it has no bars, so you put it down. Simple but frustrating.

When you work at home, having a sick child means, well, working at home with a sick child. You might have to take care of the child throughout the day, but your work is … right … over … there … and within reach. If you can get away with it, you can work. When the child is quietly eating Saltines, you make a quick phone call, do some research, or lick an envelope. These oasis moments are far too brief to be satisfying or productive, and so you feel forced to leave yet another half-finished task in your wake. It’s like having a mobile phone with a lousy connection. You pick up the phone and see one bar, and so you risk making the call, only to get disconnected in mid-sentence.

We who work at home can cope with disconnection. We accept distraction as a job choice. Disruption is an integral part of our career path.

Men who work in offices definitely hear the Siren song of successful telecommuters, but even those without children suspect working at home is practically impossible. They visualize getting nothing done, admitting the house itself would be a distraction: the refrigerator, the television, the laundry, the lawn. Yeah, maybe these guys could close the door and pretend they’re in a tiny quiet cubicle, but remember: I’m raising kids. Raise kids, raise the stakes. I have a moral and biological obligation to attend to these “distractions.”

In the end, for me it’s all logistics. Can I grade papers during nap time? Can I type with one hand and bottle-feed with the other? Can I seal deals while sealing Ziplocs? The work-at-home dad performs superhuman feats of imperfect balance, providing everything and anything, all at the same time, while being bombarded with utter unpredictability. My wife sympathizes with me when the kids don’t nap, barf on my iPod, and hide my shoes, but my clients aren’t nearly that sympathetic. No, I have no choice but to make it ALL work.

The only sure-fire way to disrupt a work-at-home dad is to make him an out-of-house dad for the day.

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Daddy’s Little Employee

Friday, January 25th, 2008

When my daughter Siena was born, and the house around me began its irreversible transition into the cluttered quagmire of parenthood, I made jokes about training her to wash dishes, mow the lawn, and mop the floors, all before Siena was one month old. “Enough laying around,” I teased while holding her sleeping body. “It’s about time you started to pull your weight around here.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when shortly after she learned to walk she began emptying the dishwasher. Like any nervous parent I watched as she extracted cutlery from the basket, but then she handed it to me to put away, one piece at a time. Soon she pushed me away, having realized that she could drop forks and spoons into the drawer without my help. Naturally I cheered her on, fetching the camera with visions of email messages sent to my family. The caption: “Siena, finally doing the dishes.”

This was only the beginning. Like a work-at-home Tom Sawyer with a fence to whitewash, I appointed myself Siena’s manager and asked myself how I could leverage her natural abilities to add value to my workplace. The possibilities were endless. Thanks to her skills with in-out games, her desire to play with water, and an uncanny knack at destroying things, I’ve employed my daughter to organize my books, get stains out of my shirts, and shred important documents before trashing them.

All parenting books talk about involving your kids, but so few of them have figured out how to monetize that involvement. Boy, did they miss the boat. I mean, for more than a year Siena has shown a huge affinity for talking on the phone. If only she knew how to write down messages….

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