An early morning for me

I woke up this morning at 3:00 a.m. in a panic. School has started, and the work I do from home has picked up. I was compelled to get up in the early morning in order to answer the voices that hound so many of us, saying “What a phony! Soon you will be found out for the fake that you are!”

I assume that this inchoate fear is what drives most people to perform. Perhaps there are some out there who do what they do (for money) simply for the love of the thing, but I think most of us operate due to peer pressure and raw fear. Fear of not having money to pay the bills, fear of looking dumb or incompetent.

I am blogging about this because I was struck by how I still have such anxiety performance when I no longer “work.” My paying job is 5 hours or so a week, more when I get special assignments. My real work is running the house, taking care of our daughter, etc. And yes, I do have anxiety about that, as well, but not as much (well, perhaps my insomnia is due in part to the fact that I forgot a dentist appointment today, despite the fact that it was on TWO different calendars *sigh*).

This is not yet another droning voice added to the din of conventional wisdom which believes that housework isn’t real work. In fact, I feel my work in the home is more real that my career used to be. I think most people would admit, if you got them sufficiently inebriated, that their jobs are pretty pointless. Perhaps it is my generation, being that I am 33. Us GenX’ers don’t seem to find a lot of job satisfaction, I hear. I find that doing dishes, cooking from scratch, and taking care of a toddler is at least as rewarding as teaching college students, oftentimes more so.

A lot of women of my SES and educational level say that they could never be a stay-at-home mother, because they would be too bored. Leaving aside the fact that no adult with a library card and Internet access could possibly be bored for more than a few minutes unless they were boring to begin with, I think what they mean is that they would be terrified of not having the structure of a job. It is truly frightening to face day after day without having someone tell you what to do. We Americans don’t have a lot of experience with this. More on this later.

Flylady Marla Cilley has made her career helping American homemakers kick themselves in the pants, and God Bless her for it, too!

My husband calls, so I must off.

~~Blessed Wife