How about Green Eggs and Ham?

Somewhere between reading The Cat in the Hat aloud for the 1,986th time and wiping Kuki front to back for the 9,362nd time, mom wondered if, perhaps, the phrase “spending quality time with my children,” was a tad overrated.

Goodness knows she had invoked the cliché for years, using it as an excuse for her supreme sloth and lack of motivation to find gainful employment. “I love shopping at Wal-Mart,” she’d tell herself, unable to afford Nordstrom, where even the shoe salesmen are dressed in suits.

Finally, after years of mooching off dad, mom looked at the price of daycare and decided she needed a job if she ever wanted to spend quality time with herself. And a few months later, a bewildered Kuki found herself in daycare, while her mother trotted off every morning to warm a swivel chair in a cubicle for the next eight hours.

The first few months, mom was so thrilled to be on a company payroll, she vowed never again to quit working just because she didn’t feel like it, or make some other lame excuse, such as:

• I hate driving more than 10 miles both ways
• My company has too many desis
• I can’t find a radio station I like during rush hour
• My car pool buddy passes gas and cracks corny jokes
• They’re paying me too much
• I’m the only vegetarian around
• My boss keeps looking at my boobs when she has a perfectly good pair of her own
• My in-laws are visiting and I have to do seva
• I miss Oprah
• My dog needs me

Lately, though, mom’s honeymoon phase might be tapering, especially as she finds that people younger than her are ascending the ladder quicker because they were concentrating on their careers while she was busy birthing babies.

And so, as mom congratulates a former co-worker on her newfound managerial status, and helps herself to another slice of celebratory cake, she idly wonders how many senior leaders in her company have read Dr. Seuss aloud 1,986 times.