Keep Out

I was catching up with a high school friend, hearing about her children, her house, her new community, her job. “I have the best job,” she told me, “because my kids don’t feel that I’m working. I’m always done before they come home. My work doesn’t spill into the evenings or vacation time. When I’m with my family, they’re the only thing on my mind.”

There was so much truth and so much sensibility to her definition of a “good job” — a job that your children don’t feel — that I carried it everywhere I went.

I didn’t want my family to feel the weight of my deadlines or the pressure of grids that caved in due to unforeseen holes. When my computer was off, I wanted to be fully absorbed in Labels for Laibel or Curious George or the intellectual delights of Spot It. As I cut up chicken or poured drinks, as I waited outside the dressing room or dentist’s office, I wanted to focus on my children’s triumphs and dilemmas — not the budget negotiations that had occupied my morning. I never wanted the conversation at our Shabbos table to bring me (or our guests) back into the magazine world.

I wanted to be that mother who was fully focused, fully present, whose consuming job submitted obediently to the boundaries of family time. And I still do.