Recipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca Barry

Author:Rebecca Barry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

How to Balance Your Home Life with Your Career

March 3, 2009

Yesterday Tommy had a job interview for a copyediting position at a nearby college. Last night we were talking about how great it would be to have a steady income and benefits. (Although happily, we did get another check from my publisher yesterday, so we have a small cushion.) I am a little worried about what will happen to the house if he goes back to work, though.

“The thing is, Tommy’s so good at running things,” I said today to my friend Sandra, who used to work with Tommy when he was a managing editor. Last weekend I left the house for two days to write, and while I was gone he kept the house clean and the children were dressed the way my mother and sister like to see them (i.e., matching socks, clothes with no dried oatmeal on them, combed hair). He managed to clean out, lightly furnish, and rent a recently vacated apartment in our house, all on a still-healing ankle. And in his spare time he’s doing freelance copyediting.

“Seriously,” she said. “He cleans, he’s good with the kids, he puts out, you do not want to let go of that.” Then she added that what he really had was the classic work/home life-balance problem we talk about all the time in magazines: he’s excellent at running an office and equally excellent at running a home.

It’s true. He doesn’t get mad when the boys climb on him, he coaches them in hockey, made their Halloween costumes by hand, and he remembers what allergies other kids in the classroom have. And he can knit. (He learned in college from a bunch of women who lived in his dorm. “It was a thing to do while we were hanging out,” he said. “I made a pair of mittens and a pair of socks.”)

I, on the other hand, am completely uninterested in sports, and don’t appear to see dirt the way other people do.

“The problem is, I don’t make quite enough money,” I said.

“Work harder,” Sandra said.

I am working hard, I thought, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. When I wrote my first book, I was still going to bars all the time and was living in the world I was writing about. Now, I have to mentally inhabit that place and somehow the kids are always home, either because they’re sick or there’s a teacher training day or a snow day, and I can’t seem to find the consistency I need. And then the characters in my book don’t get enough attention, so they wake me up in the middle of the night, saying things like “I don’t like the way my story line is going.” Or “I think I should be the one who has sex with Linda’s boyfriend.”

“Be quiet!” I’ll say. “I’ll deal with you tomorrow.” But they keep chattering on about their backstories and how underdeveloped their girlfriends are as characters, and have I thought about writing the whole thing in first person? (Yes.

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