Things My Wife Complains About #30: Supporting Our Family

For the last eight years, I've had a job that requires me to go to the office three days a week, forty-four weeks a year (sometimes less). This schedule is very hard on my family, who find my being home only four days a week--the weeks I'm not home every day--fundamentally unacceptable. My friends with full-time jobs are generally away from the house for fifty to sixty hours a week, so I assume their families don't speak to them, if my friends manage to maintain families at all.

Each morning I leave, my son wails, "Dada, don't go to work AGAIN." When I get home, my daughter rushes to the door and clings to my leg, as though she's spent the day scrubbing floors or avoiding a whip (in reality, my daughter spends all day drawing, clicking things into other things, pushing buttons that make noise or glow, hiding remote controls, crying over nothing, attacking her brother or mother brutally without reason, eating on demand, and napping).

My wife is similarly afflicted. Recently, after a three-day work week that followed Spring Break and preceded an Easter trip to Massachusetts, I had little time to do anything but work and take care of the kids. So bereft was my wife during this time that she wilted like a plant deprived of water. Fortunately, Family Day was coming! Family Day is when nobody works, so everyone can commit all of his or her energy to getting on the nerves of someone else in the family. It happens every Saturday, and we start drinking before dinner.

Possible Solutions!

1) Build downtime into schedule by eliminating sleep
2) Complain full-time while someone else supports family
3) Become independently wealthy (hard)

At work (last summer)