Do You Like Your Job?

This is what my morning looks like.

Alarm goes off at 5:45. Pitch black room. Usually, Pirate Boy has stuck his foot in my back or something. Wake up Oldest Son. This is a PROCESS. A thirty-minute PROCESS of going back to his room time and time again. "GET UP!" He has to catch his commuter bus (takes him over and hour om a bus to get to school).

Wake up Girl Child. Less of a process.

Wake up Pirate Boy. This is a process. Akin to Dante's Third Circle of Hell. Pirate Boy is not a morning person. Wake him too quickly or not gently enough and you enter the World of the Whine. Dress him while he is asleep. Carry him to bathroom. Make him pee. Make him brush teeth. Fix him a frozen waffle (such a cook!), OJ (the kind with calcium in it). Make him lunch. Pack his backpack. Get two dogs up and leashed. Walk to bus stop. Wait in cold for the bus, wave bye-bye, come home, sit down to write.

Well, today, there was also washing dog bowls and taking out recycling. Which makes me smell like a barmaid (my recycling has all of Pop's beer bottles in it--a LOT of beer bottles). And today . . . as I was doing some of my usual stuff, and a half-empty bottle of Bud spilled on me, and I SIGHED at smelling like hops, Pirate Boy looked at me and said, "Do you think you have the worst job in the world?"

"Nope. I have the best job. I get to be your mom."

"Yeah, but some of your job seems disgusting. Like when someone's sick and throws up. I wouldn't want that job."

"Can't say I love when someone pukes."

"A lot of the stuff moms have to do is gross."

"I'm just glad you don't wear diapers anymore."

He laughed and off we went. But on the way to the bus stop, I felt the need to tell him five times how much I love my job.

But in fact, the activities of daily living, and the stuff of being a mom? Lots of fringe benefits. Kisses, hugs, joy. But . . . yeah. Sometimes it's . . . gross. Or at least tiring.

But then I get to write. And words are my thing. It's how I think, how I process the world, how I blog.

When I quit my job as a f/t editor years ago to be a freelance editor and writer, I did it so I could have the best of both worlds. Mom and writer.

BEST of both worlds is kind of a misnomer though. Because no matter how you structure it, you do the WORST of those two jobs, too. Late invoices, clients who evaporate, proposals that somehow aren't working. Cleaning up after dogs and kids. LAUNDRY. Crap, all that laundry.

But in the end, Pirate Boy, yes. I like my job.

Love it, even.

How about you?