I haven’t blogged in a long time have I? DH has been working very long hours and watching him has prioritized the financial for me in such a way that I am trying to focus on somehow making my full-time at-home presence count in some materially concrete way. I do think it is nice for my kids to have me there, but honestly, my staying home has more to do with the double bill of daycare held up against the modest income I command as an undiscovered novelist / underpaid and unmotivated secretary/ and very tired and haggard waitress.

Yes, it bothers me that I am not bringing in actual currency. I got my first job at the age of 14, paid under the table at the Paoli Pancake House… anyone remember that place? Subsequent jobs like movie theater concessions, real estate weekend office help, waitress times 10, etc. etc. followed. At last count I have held over 35 jobs. And it wasn’t so much that I needed the money, it was more a sense of pride, a desire to make my own way, to control my own life on a material front.

Now, after a few freelance gigs dried up, I started selling things on Ebay. It is addictive, actually. Like gambling – watching the watchers, waiting for an auction to end and the email notifications in the morning that let me know I have items to ship and an increase in my Paypal account balance. My kids are sick of my constant email checking, of going to the post office (they now beg to be allowed to stay in the car – too bad for them this isn’t the seventies!). But it has relieved a mild depression that set in as DH worked harder and I felt more and more useless to help us climb out of the debt that naturally occurs when suddenly one person’s income is supporting four. And I buy as well as sell. I have already outfitted the twins with snow pants, footwear, one winter coat and rain boots via a few pretty fabulous Ebay deals that everyone else missed because it’s hard to get excited about snow in August. If you had told me how much time and energy I would be spending planning wardrobes a few years back I would have laughed it off as pure absurdity. But it is the hunter gatherer instinct in our day and age. I am providing, scouting and foraging for items we will need so that we can save in the long run.

I have great visions of preschool starting, and of spending those four hours a week (laughable isn’t it?) typing away at another book… one that will be marketable and engaging to more than ten other people… and then, THEN I will be able to take on some of the responsibility for the worldly half of our venture. So there you have it … an inside look at the mind of a stay at home mom revealed.