I have an actual job. I am a book coach, and as far as I am concerned, I have positioned it as a full time job. When I am not coaching clients or reading their book chapters, I looking for communities on books, writing, female empowerment or over all just interesting stuff women do as part of my business development.
The living breathing bodies that are my teens, on the other hand, have a different agenda for my time. The full time job of being available for their every whim.
Take Thursday for example. This day took my breath away in two shapes and forms. One, my capacity to orchestrate and juggle intel coming from multiple places at multiple times with a ticking clock all while inserting my card for payment and entering my pin. Money is being spent while discussions are being had about money that didn’t transfer while confirming money would be covered by insurance. Two, these transactions are done in the midst of complaining that one of the charges may not have been necessary should the dentist have not cancelled several appointments that would have cleaned my teen’s teeth versus leaving it a festering cesspool of gingivitis and a cavity hole. This teen being the senior who I kept home for the day for this dental appointment who has informed me she is always asking me to get food because “teens are hungry,” and would it be an inconvenience if we picked up two large tubs of ice cream for the journalism social on the way home from the dentist.
It is only Noon and I am exhausted. Her request was met with a blank stare.
“What do you mean? I have to go back to work!”
“If I don’t deliver the ice cream, there will be NO root beer float sale.”
Now I am understanding I am the critical component of something I never signed up for, which is being sprung on me mere hours before the event, seconds after I managed to do a Zoom call with her college’s financial aid office on my phone while simultaneously opening a Google doc (on the same phone screen) to find her student ID (while stressing my disappointment to the dental office…)
“Fine,” I said. Not for her sake, but the sake of all the kids she had put in this position to be gravely let down if I didn’t get the damn vanilla ice cream.
I got home and had 30 minutes to blaze through some work that was marginally important (because I cannot focus on books when I have that little time), only to leave and pick up my younger teen at school who informed me her headaches were worse.
“What headaches?”
“The ones I have had for three weeks?”
“Three weeks? Like one a week, or like all week?” I ask, hoping this is a 500 mg Tylenol solution.
“Every day all day.”
Fuck. Now my mind is calculating the timing of calling the pediatrician, and an acupuncturist because getting on people’s schedules takes time and this medical situation can’t be messed around with. So what I do is I start mumbling more in my brain but a lot out loud about how Thursdays can no longer be days I do anything for anyone as it is one of my busiest work days yet somehow I have done NO work. Of course I might as well be telling this information to a parrot’s ass because both teens insist that “no one asked you to do anything on a Thursday.” I smile in that strained way wanting to mutilate something with ten thousand hoes and admit “This is true.”
I get her home and do some more mildly important work until we have to leave to do the ice cream run. The whole way in the car I inform my older teen she is not to ask for another thing for the rest of the night. She is to feed herself, and not ask me where my deep hair conditioner is, or have I worn the glitter contour she gave me for Mother’s Day. This is done while I am clicking through option 1, option 3 and option 7 on my phone on speaker to get to the pediatrician to make a doctor’s appointment (and which they finally tell me I have to log into the portal which I do at a red light.)
I finally return home to work for two straight hours only to remember I promised my daughter I would play tennis with her. Having read a string of Google articles about teen girls with migraines while on the toilet, exercise is helpful so I look at this as critically important. We head out with our lidless can of deflated tennis balls because I never got to the store to get more so we end up “borrowing” balls that land in our court from the tennis pro doing lessons in the court over who is side glancing me because he is on to my ball heist.
Finally, I get home to do another hour of work only to remember there was a medication that needed picking up at the pharmacy and if I bolted out the door I could get there in time. I do arrive in time, only to find out the insurance only filled 30 days not 90 because Big Pharma likes to make people on sad insurance feel poor and useless, and that took about twenty minutes of phrases like “Let me get this straight…” to the poor check out girl, only to leave and figure I will come up with a way to trip the system as soon as I feel like my work is done.
Return home to discover the teens did in fact make their own food (“they were starving”) but left the kitchen looking like a pasta bomb shelter to which I tiraded around for ten minutes until they unearthed themselves from their technology long enough to clean, while I went back in my room to work some more. It is now 9 PM.
I finally finish at 10:30 PM. No one else is up. The cat is even asleep. And I pray tomorrow I actually can work normal business hours.
Working for yourself is wonderful. But the time freedom. HA!