My Beautiful Wickedness

I want to preface this by saying that I have the world’s best partner evah. No, really. He gets it. He is not mechanically 50/50 on every task — he steps in and does what is required, no questions asked and no need to point out what’s undone. So this is not about him. It’s about me or rather about my temporary aggravation.

If you’ve been reading along (both here and at my old blog), you’ll know that I work a lot and that I experience role stress — I want to be a terrific totally involved mom and a superstar researcher and an inspiring teacher and a dynamite wife, but the reality is that I can only manage to be fair to middling at all of these things. It’s worst when I am working and Kid is not in school, like this week. You see, my husband’s job doesn’t change — or rather, it changes constantly, so one needs to put up with the reality that he’s a utility infielder. He’s an part-time administrator (terribly undercompensated, in my opinion) and he works irregular hours all the time — sometimes it’s a lunchtime meeting followed by four hours of conference calls, or sometimes he has to host three night lectures in a row, or whatever. Anyhow, it’s supposed to be 20 hours a week and flextime, but I swear it seems like he’s working at least 30 hours a week outside the home.

He usually does at least half of the domestic work around here…but this week, because Kid is home on Spring Break maybe, he must think that I, too, have a vacation. Quite unexpectedly (to me), this week I am taking care of all the childcare, all the housecare, all the “extras” of the holiday, all the guiding of homework/dance practice/piano practice/chores — and also going on and working my academic week too. I didn’t realize how tied up he was going to be and how little assistance he would be able to render because I thought his “busy month” was last month during a peak recruitment period for the college. But no. (This indicates how good I have it most of the time…this is a temporary deviation from the normal pattern.)

I’ve found out each morning that the day ahead is just impossibly busy for him and that his “big boy job” (as another blogger refers to her husband’s employment when his new work suddenly takes precedence over all she’s been doing to support them for the past five years) is going to leave me holding the household bag. Yesterday, he had a morning meeting and then a lunch with an outgoing fellow at his center, and then some other stuff. About 5 hours. Then I cooked dinner, did the dishes, and played with Kid while he holed up in his office to use the Internet and decompress. Today, he went in at 9 to work on some paperwork and then he’ll be doing another lunch and then a going to a job talk…for a department he’s not in, just to demonstrate his intellectual engagement…gggggrrrrrr. He should be back by 3. I’ll probably have to cook dinner, then take Kid to her dance class…so again he’ll get some time to unwind by himself.

Meanwhile, I’m going nuts trying to finish up class prep (hey, I’m being evaluated on my teaching tomorrow) and finish grading (more essay assignments! time-consuming mark-up! Yay!) and writing comps questions for my grad students. Kid wants me to play and if not play, then supervise her dance practice, and if not that, then maybe read The Hobbit. All of this sounds like what I’d like to do…if only I didn’t actually need to WORK FOR A LIVING. At my own big-girl job. He is very good at being available for child-care when I’m scheduled on-campus in the classroom or in departmental meetings, but that’s only 20% of my work. He knows this. He’s been a professor too.

I’ll confess to a certain amount of envy. I like talking to smart adults. I’d like to go to lunch. I’d like to hear a job talk. Instead, I’m playing dolls and correcting 2d grade math homework; I haven’t talked to another adult besides him or even been outside the house since Saturday. The most challenging thing I’ve done, mentally, is to calculate how to half a recipe for lasagna. And I’d damn sure like some “me time” that didn’t involve stretching the day by getting up at 5 am or going to bed at midnight.

I know he wants, even Needs to do a good job. I’m pulling for him to turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse or at least a stepping stone to something else he can take pride in. I know it’s been hard for him (who finished his PhD first, who publishes more, who is a deadline-meeting utterly responsible guy) to sit on the professional sidelines without a tenure-track job. I want him to succeed in academia — so much so that I was willing to live without him for a year and do it all last year so that he could get more professional experience. But this week, right now, he and this over-commitment to his job at the expense of his family is driving me nuts. I don’t know how to communicate any of this without making him feel like a loser (afraid he’ll hear “why are you neglecting your family for such a penny-ante job?”) or making it seems like I don’t support him.

Ok, that’s off my chest. Now I have to get down to work.

Edited to add: Ok, I feel like a jerk for writing this earlier today. He came home very energized by his day’s engagements at work but one look at me and he recognized that I was going mad, Mad, MAD. He gave me a hug, produced a cookie out of his briefcase for me, and took Kid to the park where she could eat the one he brought home for her. Then they came back and he got her ready for dance class. Then he took her — no nagging, no pleading, just knew I needed him to do it — to the studio where he endured the hyper-feminine attack that is the Formers (see this post for more details on them). He brought back a great dinner so that we could all enjoy our evening meal as a family without someone having to cook. And then he played a game with Kid until bedtime, when we could all read a story and share some family time before she went to bed. I’m now almost done with my work (it’s only 10:30!) and I’ll do the rest in the morning.

He really is the best. Evah.