If Work Doesn’t Define Us, It at Least Sets Restrictions

My daughter’s third birthday. We’re in the midst of the annual kiddie extravaganza on a hot Sunday afternoon.

The noisemaker balloons are a big hit. Sunblock needs to be reapplied. Sand clings in the folds of chubby little baby thighs and between the toes of “Watch me, Mommy” daredevils. So far, no tears.

My husband, of course, is recording it all on videotape. Birthday girl is serving an invisible beverage with her new Barbie tea seat. She’s all smiles.

But wait. She’s thinking this scene must be too good to last. Suddenly she loses the smile, bunches her eyebrows together and points her finger directly at the camera lens.

“No go work, Daddy!” she yells. “No go work!”

My husband had no intention of going to work, at least not for another 19 hours or so, and neither did I. But try explaining that to a 3-year-old, or for that matter, most anybody who fears being left unhappily behind.

Why are you going to work Mommy, or Daddy, or husband, or wife, or any of countless significant others?

Answer: Because I have to.

So the work ethic can be a problem, a conundrum as old as the chicken and the egg. We’ve been asked before: Do we work to live, or live to work?

But, come on, who can really give that a serious answer? Seems to me that’s the wrong way to frame the question, at least in Orange County in 1989.

Who among us really divides their time between living (would that mean sailing, or dining out, or reading your child a bedtime story?) and working (maybe pouring concrete, or reading tax returns or ringing up grocery sales)?

Work defines us, and if it doesn’t control us, then it certainly sets some rather strict limits.

Don’t stay up too late on Sunday or you’ll feel like hell on Monday. Pull the kids out of school because Dad, or Mom, has a new job somewhere else. No cigarette smoking in the office and don’t even think about any other kind, on or off the job.

Even at the birthday party, the specter of work hung over us all, depending on each of our perspectives, looming like an approaching storm at sea or a lighthouse through the fog.

My daughter was anticipating her father’s departure for the office, where that greedy other family of his must live, the one that always seems to be calling him back.

Another mother wondered when her husband was going to show up. He had a job interview, on a Sunday morning, because it had been too important to delay. She couldn’t stand the uncertainty and left to make a call.

And as another guest took turns swimming with each of his daughters, his wife made sure to keep within earshot of the beeper snapped to the outside of their red beach bag.

Sure, lots of strangers take offense when you accompany a handshake with the opener, “And what do you do?” I’ve occasionally taken umbrage myself. But just try to carry on any sort of meaningful conversation without asking at all.

(I remember when the cool rejoinder was, “I don’t do , man. I am .”)

A few years ago, I was without something to officially do for exactly 10 days. I left the company that had employed me for seven years by walking out of a coffee shop after a conversation with my boss.

I simply told him that I quit, a spur of the moment decision with no accompanying letter of resignation or two weeks’ notice. The words just sounded right as they hovered in the air.

But my so-called freedom got old fast. I hated the fact that my husband had a job and I didn’t. I had always been my job, and I didn’t want to take the time to be anything else. Not just yet.

Others, of course, have been far less fortunate.

The birthday party over, a friend called to ask if he could stop by. He wanted to talk to my husband, the news he had to convey being too weighty for the phone.

The two of them sat out on the front steps, and as I came out to say hello, I heard him tell my husband, “And I’ve got this $300,000 house. . . .”

He was losing his wife to divorce, feared losing his children to an out-of-state move, and now he had lost his job. He told my husband he hoped his former wife married the man she was seeing. The alimony hurts. His ex-wife doesn’t have a job.

Then up drove a neighbor, the one who had the Sunday morning job interview. He was offered that position, and another one somewhere else, and his current employer didn’t even know he had been thinking of moving on. Headhunters had come to him. He’s in demand and doing very well.

Or is he?

His wife and children love it here. It hasn’t been two years since they moved from Boston. They don’t want to uproot yet again.

“But I don’t want to be one of those wives that holds her husband back,” his wife told me at the birthday party.

So they’ve reached a compromise. He’ll take the new job in Los Angeles, but they won’t move just yet.

“I figure if I get on the road at quarter to 6, it should take me under an hour and a half,” the husband told me. “Then I’ll be home by 7:30 or 8 o’clock.”

As he walked toward his car, my husband mentioned that he didn’t seem overly excited about his new opportunity.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “It really is a long commute.”