Working Hard vs. Hardly Working

Who would’ve thought working part-time from home would be a lot harder than it sounds?

When mom was first offered the option, she wanted to leap over the desk and kiss her boss. Commuting was slowly sucking the soul out of her body, and she started to resent the people around her.

“Why are there so many cars on the road? Why can’t these people move out of state?” she thought, throwing dirty looks at her fellow drivers.

“Why don’t they leave me alone and let me work from home? I only need a laptop and a phone,” she thought, resentful of starting her day at 5 a.m. while the rest of the family slept until 7.

“Why the heck am I even working?” she thought, resentful of stay-at-home moms who pushed babies in strollers and sipped on Starbucks lattes.

“Why does he never complain?” she thought, resentful of dad’s work ethic, so markedly different from her own.

“Who invented working? Why can’t we all go back to the barter system?” she thought, shaking her fist at the sky.

And now that mom has exactly what she wanted, she finds herself working more than the requisite hours per week.

The lure of the laptop is too strong to resist. “I’ll quickly check my inbox,” she figures on the way to the laundry room with an armful of dirty clothes. Three hours later, she’s still responding to e-mail that could wait another day.

“Amma, I need a snack,” the children ask, as they watch her hunched over a computer.

“In a minute,” she responds, without looking over her shoulder. “Help yourself to some candy.”

When mom worked banker’s hours, she dismissed executives who sent e-mail after 10 p.m. as workaholics with no life. She pictured them sitting in their pajamas in a dark room, their faces lit by the eerie glow of a computer monitor, brows furrowed in concentration as they thought of new ways to create extra work for their minions.

“You leave your BlackBerry behind at work?” a cousin had asked. “How do you check messages then?”

“I’m supposed to check e-mail even when I’m not working?” thought mom. She must have missed that memo.

It's not unusual now to find mom jiggling her computer mouse after the whole house is asleep. The woman who chose to leave work behind at 3:30 p.m. every day now finds herself making up for lost time. All her best-laid plans of shopping when the kids are in school, watching Oprah on television, cleaning out her pantry and packing for the move are on hold.

While the left half of her brain listens to her mother on the telephone, the right half tunes in to the periodic new message dings on her computer.

"Just a couple more projects and a few final e-mails before I log off," thinks mom, ignoring the rumbling in her stomach and crossing her legs under the table.

She can hold her bladder a while longer.