Susan Senator

Space: the final frontier.
–Captain James T. Kirk

Sorry, Trekkies everywhere. Kirk had it way wrong, in my opinion. The final frontier in my universe is Work. I think about work a lot these days, because I don’t have enough of it, because Max needs a summer job, and because I want Nat to be able to work as an adult.

It has been quite a challenge, getting Max to understand that he will have to work someday soon and that he probably will not love his first jobs. I have been very careful to refer to what I do as “work,” which it is, albeit piecemeal and strange hours. I’ll write intensely from 10p.m. until I fall asleep. Thanks to the the sleep guide I read I am getting better sleep but it’s difficult since I work all through lunch trying to sell whatever I wrote, but then sit around making meals, appointments, phone calls, conversation, and checking email while they’re all here. I don’t know if my boys understand that what I do is work and that if I did not, we would have to pay someone a lot of money to do it all for us. (My pay is a cossie a month and other perks, I suppose.)

Everytime I suggest various job possibilities to Max — tutoring my friends’ kids in computer skills, working at a game store, being a computer camp counselor — he makes that face that looks as though he smells something bad. I even suggested he get the same job in the same place as H, his lovely girlfriend, and he would not consider it, because it is something to do with gardening. (Oh, how terrible that would be, to spend your summer gardening for others…!)

Am I supposed to take that on, too? When I was sixteen, I remember getting my own damned jobs. I drove around to movie theatres and to Friendly’s, asked to speak to unhappy managers and tried to demonstrate my competence and capability at those crap jobs. It was hard, but I did it. Woke up at 6 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and wrenched myself into a God awful polyester blue checked dress to work the morning shift, making the salad fixings at Friendly’s, with a mean girl and her older sister. I stunk of pancakes and bacon.

Will Max do stuff like that? How were my parents that consistently tough with me? They were such total adults. I wish I were.

Sometimes I think maybe I save all of that kind of effort for Nat. I am going to have to become Hurricane Susan, plowing through any place that I think could possibly hire him, and explain him to them, and broker a job. Is that how it’s done? I can’t imagine that anyone out there would do it for him other than me. Once he’s done with school, once the entitlements end, it feels like we will be swimming in shark-infested waters.

Well, I’ll be damned if all of his years of hard work and education get him eaten alive. That just makes me see red. I feel a rage building up inside of me, that things are this way in this country. That people like Nat are viewed as lesser somehow, and undeserving of the extra effort it takes even to get to know them, let alone to help them work.

Then Ned says to me, “Why does he gotta work?”
And I say that he does, he does. It’s what I want. It’s what I always imagined, long after I gave up on other things. I want to see him going to a job, having that in his life.
Ned says, “Why can’t he just do what he does? Be a man of leisure.”
I don’t know, I don’t know. Stop challenging me, Ned! Because! Because if I let this go, it feels like giving up on something. Yet another thing.

Well, not while dere’s still bref in mah body…