Addicted to Work - or A New Theory of Quantum Physics

The issue for this week is: "Work, how important is it anyway?" When my husband and I decided, rather suddenly and at somewhat advanced age, to have children, we also decided to scale down our spending and find ways to earn money that allowed us to spend as much time as possible with the kids. For our first child, my husband served as the primary caregiver while I worked full time but telecommuted for half of the week. This worked fairly well, at least from my perspective, until the birth of our second child, when my husband decided that it would be better if I were the primary caregiver because he is a. chicken and b. smarter than I am. He immediately got that the squirmy, yowling thing was the full fruition of the mothers' curse: in this case a child just as active and fearless as he himself. Our first child, sweet, quiet, and reserved as she is, had fulfilled half of the curse with a cache of stubborn willfulness that even rivaled my own, a second generation mother's curse, along with my trademark insomnia - a trait it turns out that our two little darlings share.

Now I knew, at least theoretically, that being a stay-at-home parent was hard work when it was my husband's job. But really, raising children is hard work! Furthermore, just as that tired old adage purports, it is thankless. I got a lot of gratification from my work. And frankly, I miss it. Now my husband comes home with all the kudos, proud of himself for figuring out how to leap middling porch railings hauling burglar bags of tile in a single bound without throwing his back out or getting arrested (long story). But good as it is being a hero to the infirm and not-too-handy, he misses the kids. So now we're working on finding employment for me that can be conducted mainly between the hours of 8p and 2a (preferably something other than pole dancing - for which my time, if ever there was such, has passed). When I related this to my therapist, along with my time-stretch theory (my time stretches to accommodate the demands on it - usually through one less hour of sleep or so), she said I was supposed to be working on shrinking my platter to a salad plate and, in debunking my junket into quantum physics, that plates did not function well with hinges. But I think she was just overdue for her dinner, thus her fixation on plates.