toil and trouble

I often write here about being a non-traditional family, and I tend to think of my husband as a stay-at-home dad because he is in fact at home all day. But he does actually "work" (ok, look. I know stay-at-home moms get their panties in a bunch about how raising kids and running a household is a hell of a lot of work. I know. But what am I supposed to call it? How do you distinguish one from the other so that we can have a conversation about it? But the interesting point here is why it is that our vocabulary is inadequate. I guess it's because the word work traditionally did distinguish men's business from women's domestic sphere, but at the same time it also served as the opposite of play -- so when women set out to reshape attitudes about the domestic sphere, the word "work" had to be co-opted.). So right now, for example, we are experiencing the special difficulties of a two breadwinner family. He's got a draft brief due Sunday morning, and I have to be in the office all weekend doing pretrial prep. If we didn't have my parents nearby and eager to spend time with their precocious and insanely adorable grandson, god knows what we'd do. Even so, it's going to be a rough weekend. Not to mention how much it sucks to lose my weekend time with said precocious and insanely adorable one.