I have a bee in my bonnet tonight. This will not be one of my more well-structured blog posts and that’s because I am tired and irritated but here goes:
I may only “work” part-time but for those of you who think it’s not enough: you try to plan for two classes, communicate with nearly 200 students, manage two TAs, know your material well enough to teach it to someone else, take garbage from “real” profs, find freelance work, do freelance work, feed, clothe, entertain and bathe two small children, volunteer at church so you can teach your children it’s about more than sitting your bottom in a pew once a week, keep your living room clean enough that no one breaks their neck on errant Legos and also act like an adult companion to your husband once in a while. Sound like enough? Sound like a job yet?
No one said anything particularly pointed this week but there has been an undercurrent to a couple of conversations that made me feel as if people just don’t take some parents seriously. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m being too sensitive. I don’t think so though because I’ve felt this on and off ever since #1 was born. Occasionally, people say things like, “well, I know you must be busy with the boys and all” but the tone of their statement suggests is that if I was a real woman, I could take on whatever they want me to take on. I get the impression that some people really, truly have no sympathy or understanding for the life that is “the family”. In fact, my friend who recently adopted the child I wrote about in “Toasting Diversity” said as much to me as we were comparing notes on school preparations. She happened to call on a morning when my husband had taken the boys out of the house so I could do some work for school. I was distracted and said as much, explaining that I was in work mode since I had a quiet house for once. She told me that if I had said that to her a year ago, she would have told me to suck it up and pay attention. Now, she completely understood that 90 minutes without anyone needing a juice box, cheese stick, nose wipe, fight break-upper or reader of Curious George was precious.
This isn’t just directed at non-parents, by the way. This is something I get from people who’s children are older than my own and people who work full-time and see part-time parents as not having a real job. It comes from women who never worked while their children were small and don’t understand that part-time employment is not the same thing.
Most of the time I sense people are pretty respectful of the plight of parents. This is just one of those weeks when I had the sort of exchanges that remind me that there are still people out there who think parenting is a nice hobby.
