In the spring of 2000, I left my last full-time job, as an instructor in the English department at the University of Puget Sound. I was expecting a baby, and Wade and I had decided that it made the most sense for me to stay home full time. We agreed that of course I would go back to work — when the youngest child was in school full time. It was going to be so easy, I thought, this little break from working.
Henry was born in June, in what was the hottest summer on record in Oklahoma. We only had one car with air conditioning, and Wade drove it to work every day, which meant that I pretty much just stayed home with the baby. I read a lot, about the opt-out revolution and about how women weren’t really giving up on their careers, they were just taking time off and then stepping back on the work treadmill right where they had left off. And I started to panic a little because how on earth was I going to do that? I didn’t have a “career” to speak of — I had been a university adjunct, without health care or even an office, but still, I loved teaching because it made me think, and that mattered to me.
And I started to wonder: what was I going to DO with myself when my kids grew up?