Half Dozen

You know what? Sometimes I can take it. Sometimes it keeps me awake when I should be sleeping.

First of all it starts with money. See, I'm the CFO in our family venture. Lars doesn't do well knowing about profits and losses. There's only so much a nerdy scientist can handle when it comes to losses. Oh, he'll take the profits. He'll take the profits, even if that means being awake from 1:00 a.m. until 5:47 a.m. with a screaming baby who wants nothing but booby snacks and not some BPA-free, latex-free almost-as-good-as-the-breast good-for-nothing contraption because her mama is away at work. He'll take the profits but he could go without the losses.

Mostly, though, you can't make profits out of spending $93.81 at Trader Joes. At some point you're gonna have to write that down in your check book registry as a loss. You gotta write it down even though it is food that is going into your body, like Scandinavian Blend Half Light Half Dark fair trade coffee, so that you can go to work and have energy to make the profits. You just can't spin that $93.81 into a profit. That isn't the kind of math likes to do.

Instead, I stay up late doing clandestine bill-paying, check book reconciling, and down to the penny financial planning for the months to come. It has to be clandestine because Lars feels awfully pukey when he knows I'm hunkering down to manage that money business.

Recently, I took 10-days off of work to manage some family priorites. We learned a good financial lesson from that 10-day Family Management Episode. Primarily what we learned is that I can't take any more time off of work, like ever. I made the mistake of telling Lars that we needed to tighten our belts the next couple of months to make up for that Family Management Episode.

Lars got a bit squeezy in his chest and started blinking his eyes like he was watching a ping-pong match on fast-forward. Of course, everything is fine, it always has been and it always will be. I just can't take time off of work, that's all. That's okay, cause braces and other miscellaneous orthodontia are way better than Disney World.

Then on top of the Family Management Episode putting the near-final wrench in our Disney World and Operation Home Addition plans, Lars' work is going through a little something. Pfarma recently made plans to acquire another major pharmaceutical company. That acquisition is slated to take place in September. Included in the acquisition plans are plans to lay-off 19,000 workers. Lars was kindly notified that lay-off decisions would be announced by December.

Between the two big hits (okay one is only a potential hit) we've made some spending decisions. For example, in honor of the kids first day of school we did . . . nothing. In the past we have taken them clothes shopping where they could each pick out a brand new outfit. This year not even their socks were new. We haven't dined out in a month, not even for a Slurpee or a bagel or a chai tea latte. For the recent round of birthday parties, blessedly all for girls, we made hair bows here at home with supplies we keep on hand. In short, I have every penny accounted for and spoken for. There's little elbow room, and if all goes according to my evil plans then we're going to ride through this without a scratch.

Of course, we're on pins and needles waiting for The Big Announcement from Pfarma. I suppose this is what many other fellow countrymen feel like, all pins and needley. You wonder to your pincushion self, "what can I tell my spouse?' or 'how do I get the kids on board?' or 'do I take on more hours at work, thereby paying the nanny more, thusly decreasing take-home pay only to make a couple hundred extra bucks not to mention more time away from the kids?" I suppose this is what most of us are going through. It makes the line between what is important (kids, health, marriage) and what seems really important (fiscal health) get very blurry. Where do you draw that line? Isn't one more important that the other? Isn't money just a thing? And yet, we have to be on solid ground at all times, we can't risk spillage on the financial end. The first day back at school for the kids Lars and I dropped them off inside their classroom with many kisses and much fanfare. Then, as soon as their classroom doors were closed I rushed off to the clinic in the barrio to fill in for a midwife who had emergency gall bladder surgery. Originally, I had requested the day off but I was feeling ansty to bring home some unbudgeted profits, so I made a couple extra bucks and was able to sock it away as cushion, but in doing so caught some flack from a friend for working on their first day and disappointed the kids.

Working motherhood sucks sometimes. The work-life balance is always just beyond my fingertips. Is there a real cost in not picking up a few extra hours here and there? Sometimes, a lot of times, I just don't know the answer and this is what keeps me up at night.

But not my husband, nothing keeps him up at night. Oh, to be a man.

And then again, maybe tomorrow, we'll come into a modest sum of money. If that happens, I plan on sleeping well and keeping my lady parts. Lord knows, we only need one man in this here family.