Dear Claire,
The joke around our house is that your dad here fancies himself as the western hero he was named after, “Shane”, the movie icon. A loner, an outsider, a tough guy with a gun, a man’s man who’ll save the town if he has to. Your Mother (YM) sees me as her little house wife “writing” all day from home as she goes to work, leaving me to talk on the phone and send catty emails to my “girlfriends” (your Uncle Jordan and Uncle Duane, my “business associates” who also share the same work-from-home predicament I’m in).
It’s hard for me to argue this point right now. Yes, we are currently living off of her maternity leave monthly income. See, I’m currently working FULL time on my writing and filmmaking career, so ... not a lot of income from me these days. And yes it’s true that I do most of the cooking and cleaning around the house because a) I’m home all day and b) I cook and clean better than she does (because your mother is lazy and doesn’t pay attention to details, she refers to herself as a surface cleaner only). That and having a dirty house drives me more nuts than her, this is after all my “office” areas.
So, this morning she threw the gauntlet down - I would call this a smack down. She taped this article to the bathroom wall across from the toilet where I start my day with 30-40 minutes of sit-down reading, or research as I like to call it. It was a printed out article from a copy of Housekeeper in 1955, something a friend emailed to her, something she wrote on the top of with “Shape Up or Ship Out”.
To read this in her persecutive, please replace “he” and “she”, “Husband” to “wife”, and vise versa (ie the title would read “the good “work”-from-home-husband’s guide”):
As a work-from-home Dad and husband, all I can say to her is “ah, good one. you wish”. Then, a few moments later .... “Hey, did your maternity cheque come in because I need twenty bucks to go see a matinee with Duane. Research purposes.”
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