I shut the French doors on one side of the room that serves as my office and close the door leading into the pantry to quiet the NPR on Doc’s radio in the kitchen. I remove myself from the Saturday doings of my family so I can write this blog about…my family.
Mostly what I do these days for a living is write. Like a lot of modern couples, one of us works in an office somewhere — Doc — and one of us works at home. It’s an especially interesting proposition in the summer when the girls are around, and on weekends like today.
FD is largely on her phone in her room or the kitchen or the laptop in the living room, a constant but just-audible stream of Top 40 or tween TV dialog emanating from her direction. SD is everywhere, from the pounding of her little feet racing around the house, to loud singing, to well, any kind of noise it crosses her chi-packed mind to make. She’s in and out of my room continually, breaking my concentration. And maybe that’s a good thing.
I frequently write pieces for one of my clients about work/life balance as it relates to people working away from their homes. It’s even more challenging when you don’t leave the house, and the activity constantly invading my mental and physical space compels me to continually take stock of my priorities. I think it’s making me a better person. If you work at home, maybe you feel the same.
The old line is that you should work to live and not just live to work, but of course, for most of us it’s a combination of the two. We derive some of our sense of self-worth from our work, but its primary function is to bankroll our lives.
When SD explodes into my office and to my desk wth some complicated imaginary tale she needs to tell me, it forces me to take a breath, decide if I should really mind the interruption. I invariably make a silent decision to stop my work and enjoy what it is she has to tell me. Welcome back to now, dude. No matter how close to deadline I am, like getting today’s post done for dadinautumn.
It’s another thing her dad is deeply grateful for.
