Husband and I both own businesses and work from home. He runs a successful video marketing company and I run a writing business. This means we see a whole lot of each other, which is great. We get to each lunch together and hang out together, and we get to talk to each other about the crazy things our kids are doing today, and we get to tag-team on the child-raising so our sons get to spend as much time with their daddy as they do with me.
It’s not lost on me how fortunate we are to do this. I’m very grateful.
We have three sons in school right now. Someone else takes care of them all day, and I’m only responsible for the three who remain at home, which is responsibility enough, since two of them are Dennis-the-Menace-on-steroids twins.
I don’t usually work when I’m on duty with the kids, but lately I’ve been using about a half hour of my time with them in the mornings to catch up on some communication tasks and other things that have been falling through the cracks. And everyone knows that once you start making exceptions, the exceptions start to feel like a rule.
Kids, of course, have made it super easy to work from home. Everybody should try it. Especially if they like walking down the road toward insanity only to see it waving maniacally—already behind you.
Kids actually make it very difficult—if not impossible—to work from home.
For those who are considering this life change, here are some reasons why working from home is one of the most difficult career challenges I’ve ever faced:
1. Their definition of what is important information is terribly skewed.
They want to tell me that they had to go poop and that their poop was dark brown and stinky, but I’ve got an email to send, and then after I send it, I realize I’ve totally used the wrong word, substituted “close” for “clothes,” and there’s no way that magazine editor is even going to open the essay I sent along with my email, because I used to be an editor once, too, and mistakes like that aren’t tolerated from freelancers.
They want to tell me what colors they used to color Elmo in their coloring book; and they want to tell me that the hole in their jeans just got bigger, while they were watching—they didn’t even touch it (yeah, right); and they want to tell me that they would like me to put the baby in his high chair so he’s contained, because they really want to make some snowflakes with the shape blocks, and he’s crawling all over their masterpieces and messing them up.
I know all of this is important in the worlds of children, but seriously. I’m trying to work here, kids. Figure it out.
That’s just for my morning on-duty time. Then comes the afternoon off-duty-I’m-now-working time.
Husband and I have an arrangement—which our sons know about—where the kids will stay out with whomever is on kid duty and will not burst into our bedroom, which is the location of our home office, while the other parent is working. And sometimes our kids do well with this arrangement; sometimes not so much. It’s not unusual that they will come bursting into my room, while I’m on my working shift, to tell me that their friend has come over to play. Not life-threatening information.
Sometimes they will interrupt my work to say the grass is green, which is, arguably, something to celebrate in South Texas. Sometimes they slam in and out of the door—three or four times in fast succession—to say they had a donut right before recess today. They’ll burst in to tell me that they got to play this one computer game at school and they built up a section of blah blah blah.
Now, I do love that they want to tell me all this, because I enjoy talking to my kids as much as anybody else does. But I’m also a writer. And when it’s my time to write, I want to be able to write. What happens when they surprise me with a visit is that I will usually have to rewrite a thought, maybe even all the ones before it, because I require absolute concentration when I’m choosing words for a page. So a five-second interruption just cost me half an hour of writing.
2. They don’t stay put.
My twins are the best escapists around. I have some amazing stories to tell on their application for gifted and talented when they go to kindergarten. They have escaped so many prisons (not really prisons; you know what I mean) in astonishing ways.
For a while, we had a lock on our back fence, which ensured that they were contained in our backyard. And then we decided that they were getting older and maybe we could try something new and see if they actually stayed where they were supposed to stay (this is always a bad idea on the part of a parent), without the suggestion of a lock—and, also, it was really annoying having to unlock the back fence when the boys’ friends wanted to come follow them into the backyard and jump on the trampoline. We didn’t like those friends trampling through the house because they were so numerous.
So we took off the lock. And the first day it was off, the twins escaped into the front yard (I was watching). I brought them back to sit in their booster seats as a consequence and told them that if they were going to break the rules, they weren’t going to be allowed out back. We’d try again tomorrow.
We tried again tomorrow. And the next day and the next day and the next day, and every day, for two months, after that. They would not stay no matter that it meant they would be sitting in their booster seats until lunchtime and wouldn’t be able to go out and play (trust me, it was probably worse for Husband and me).
So the lock went back on.
We know it’s just a temporary fix, because they’re the kids who figured out they could pick their bedroom lock (put in place to keep them from wandering at night and killing themselves with vitamin overdoses or worse) with the prong of a box fan. I’m waiting for them to figure out how to pick the lock on the fence, which will require a more creative solution. At least they keep our creativity flowing.
3. They like to close laptops and press buttons.
My fifteen-month-old is really good at this, because I usually like to sit on the floor so he can see me and come hug me whenever he wants. So, yeah, I know this is my fault. An email I tried to send the other day had an extra “lk” at the bottom of it. I caught it. But proofreading has taken on a whole new dimension now that the kids make it so easy to work.
My twins will randomly walk up and close my laptop, usually when I’ve left it for just a second because I needed to take a bathroom break or I’m changing out a load of clothes from the dryer. And, as it usually happens, they’ll close it before I’ve saved anything, so I’ll have to start over. Or the computer won’t even start up because everything my twins touch turns to dust.
Fingerprint technology would be nice. It would at least delay the twins by a few months, before they figured out how to hack it.
4. You won’t hear anything from them for an hour, but as soon as you’re on a business call, their volume control malfunctions.
This happens more frequently to Husband than it does to me, mostly because I’m a recluse and hide away in my office so I don’t have to see anyone or go anywhere or talk on the phone at all. But poor Husband. Our kids will be perfectly content playing with the wooden structures, be building a track their cars can drive down, be quietly putting together a puzzle, and Husband will see the opportunity to return a quick business call that he didn’t have time to return during his shift. And as soon as he walks into the kitchen to talk, as soon as the person on the other end answers the call, the boys lose their minds.
It’s a lovely, mysterious phenomenon.
5. They need something.
It never fails. As soon as I set my timer for the half hour I’m going to work (because I don’t like to go over that time or it sets an unhealthy expectation for how much work can be accomplished, and before you know it your whole morning is gone), one of the kids will yell from the bathroom that he needs more toilet paper, or someone will say he’s hungry, or the baby will try to crawl up the stairs.
In spite of all this, I still manage to get quite a bit done for my business during that thirty-minute window—on average, I send one email with a few misspellings. It’s about all I can ask, and I’ve gotten used to it. So, kids, don’t worry about your interruptions.
We’re just subtracting it from your college savings. Which, judging by all the work I got done this morning, will be a negative balance by the time you get there.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash)
