“Remind me again when you have work calls today?”
My husband has already answered that question at least twice this morning, but I am too distracted by my own mental Tetris to hear his response. I have clients at 10 and 11, and a meeting at 1. I can call into the meeting, but not to the clients. Josh can work from home, and although some of his calls overlap with my meetings, the girls are old enough to reliably zombie-out in front of the TV without needing help with snacks or tushy-wipes.
Fortunately, the stars are aligning. Today, we have cobbled together a plan that isn’t ideal, but is good enough. Josh will take the morning shift while I meet clients in my office. I will relieve him in the afternoon, managing the girls while calling into my meeting. After that, I’ll take the girls to the pediatrician for their (apparently) monthly throat-swabs for strep while my husband works.
We knew this was coming. Just yesterday, I negotiated with the school nurse (the closest thing I have to a work husband, if that tells you anything about how often our girls get sick) about whether the little patient could loiter in his office long enough for me to see one more client. She could. I was grateful.
For the past eight years, I’ve worked from home, so I stayed home when we had sick kids. But now I’ve opened a private therapy practice, which means we have joined the ranks of families with either single working parents or two parents who both work outside the home. This decision was a good one for my career and our finances, but it dramatically decreased our bandwidth for managing sick days and other last-minute disruptions.
We got lucky today, but there will be other days when I have clients and my husband won’t be able to work from home. I wanted to know how other families managed this kind of situation, so I typed out a quick question on Facebook. By the time I arrived home to take the parenting reins, there were over 60 responses. Not surprisingly, my fellow parents had a lot to say about this predicament.
You can read the rest of this post over at Kveller.com.
