Help Wanted: preferably a wife.

Within the last two days I have attended 8 meetings. Of those 8 meetings only 3 were under 1 hour.

Last night I left work after 6pm and returned this morning before 8am. For some people this is par for the course for me it is not my preference. It is not the amount of work that bothers me so much as the impact on my contribution and in particular the decrease of my participation in my domestic life.

This morning while moving between meetings I spoke to my team leader (she is also my best friend) about how busy it has been for us since we have been one team member down. We discussed that we both agreed it best to take work home rather than stay in the office. As it was better to put in an appearance at home even if it meant we did not get back to finalise our work tasks till after 9pm which was the case for both us last night.

She also mentioned to me that her husband would be leaving for 5 days to work away and that it had become more common that he would be doing more complicated work. She had hoped that as she had supported him through a particularly busy period of work only recently, that he agreed to return the favour. It wasn’t to be - he was being paid far more for his work than she was for hers, so in the scheme of their family life the demands would have to be greater on her supporting him and the three children no matter how pressing her full-time work than vice-versa.

So knowing how busy we were next week she said she was going to have to possibly ask her mother to live with her for a week to get by while he was away (they have 3 school age children). I jokingly mentioned that perhaps we needed to combine households as my husband had agreed to step-up and help more with the domestic side of life or that maybe we should just pay him to stay at home for us. She said the solution really was that what both of us needed was a wife - it was something that another extremely busy girlfriend of hers had always advised!

I realised however, her idea however wasn’t such a big joke tonight as P and I helped Elliot with his homework, it suddenly dawned on me that we had forgotten to attend an interview that afternoon with his teacher, despite the fact that we had chosen the appointment last week. I am completely gobsmacked as I have to tell the teacher I was so busy at work that I just forgot about my other obligations. I feel even more careless and stupid because I had even marked it on our events calendar.

Now if only I had a wife who was on top of all these things then I would have been reminded about the parent-teacher interview.