What's your ideal working situation?

my ideal working situation is...well, NOT working! hahaha! isn't that everyone's ideal? but since being alive requires a certain amount of doing things, and especially being a parent, i'd say the best-case work scene for me is at home. or at least, not in any typical 9 to 5 scenario. i have a horror of cubicles and fluorescent lights and ambient noise. and of getting up before dawn, at the earliest.

i am what you might kindly describe as "schedule resistant"...i have bumbled through my life never knowing what day of the week or month it is, forgetting how old i am, detesting and refusing to use alarm clocks. i am the one who would show up for the final exams bathed, fed, and dressed, with an extra cup of tea in hand, but lacking an exam book to write in and completely uncertain which exam i was about to take. ("excuse me, is this medieval art? oh, good!") i do have a daybook, and i try to use it. still, yesterday afternoon found me rummaging in a purse that i wasn't currently using, looking for the card from my daughter's orthodontist to see if i had forgotten an appointment and double-booked it with the teacher's conference i had just committed us to that afternoon. fortunately i hadn't, but i could have.

i am a procrastinator. i never do today what i can put off until tomorrow, at least. i start things that i do not finish. my house looks pretty clean and tidy, but it conceals small areas of unholy chaos, usually the things that should be best organized, like paperwork. in my attempts to learn how to manage money since the divorce, i decided to keep all receipts and credit card statements and stuff like that. (formerly i just binned all that stuff.) i purchased some file folders and a little filing cabinet thing to contain them. i found after a few months--ok, maybe 6 months---that there were alarming piles of this crap everywhere. so one afternoon, i sat down and tried sorting through them. what a nightmare! i can never decide which pile things should go in, because to me they belong in multiple places. i mean, does the car stuff get its own file? or does the car insurance go in the insurance file? what about petrol receipts? property tax bills---into the home expenses or into taxes? after a while it got too confusing, so i thought about putting them into folders by month. then i realized that i would never be able to find them again should i need to. clearly, this is not the type of work i should be doing...

i am bad about prioritizing tasks. i should be doing laundry right now, and if i was even half-way efficient, i would have put a load of whites in before sitting down to check e-mail. then i could do stuff like this whilst the washing machine hummed along. but would i do that? would i hell! laundry is boring. writing is fun. so we have no clean underthings or towels or uniform shirts for school. i can always do that later, right?

by this point, the casual reader is probably wondering, just what is this bitch good at doing? anything? actually, i spend a fair amount of time wondering that myself...well, i'm good with babies. i am the 'baby whisperer". give me your sad, your tired, your cranky, your colicky. give me your over-stimulated, your neglected, your badly-fed, your sickly. (and please, give me too your jolly, your plump, your loved, your well-tended and attachment-parented...) send me your miserable babies, and i will transform them into smiling, fat, shiny, happy babies. give unto me your wailing sodden balls of misery, and i shall redeem them. plus, i like it! babies just make me happy. i don't mind that they are needy and that you have to hold them 20 hours out of 24. that is why slings and other baby-carriers were invented. i'm pretty good with older kids as well. i don't take crap from them and they still love me. (so unlike men...sigh.) i adore the 2 to 4 year- olds, the ones all the other parents and teachers say they can't cope with. i play tea party and build fairy houses out of bark (boys too) and hang upside-down on the playset with them, and teach them to fence with sticks (girls too). we paint pictures and make all kinds of art and bake stuff. with the older kids, like my daughter's class, i go on most of the field trips, and humorously but firmly show them how to behave in fine dining venues, museums, theaters. i come in to give talks on ancient history or nutrition or different cultures. i show them yoga poses and point them to alternative news sources. i love them and i respect them at all ages, and i think somehow they can feel that.  plus, i don't have any agenda for them, just expectations of decent behavior and mutual respect. i don't care if they can't nap alone, or make their numbers backwards, or if they have been in gymnastics since age 3, or if they got lousy grades/reports or spectacular ones, or if their parents have multiple vacation homes or if they live in a 2 room apartment. i care if they are happy, healthy, and capable of productive interaction with other human beings. i would probably do well as a teacher's aide in a waldorf school, if we had such a thing here.

i am also pretty good at listening. lots of people who are having problems in their lives end up talking to me about it---sometimes complete strangers in bars or on airplanes or wherever. i can't sort out my own life terribly well, but apparently i can help others tease out the snarls in their lives. maybe i should have trained as a counselor. who would have thought it?

another possibility is that i should do something with pregnant women and/or new parents. i'd love to show women that they probably don't have to give birth in a hospital if they don't want to (and show them why they might not want to...) and give people the information on infant & child care that our media and culture don't impart to them. like what babies REALLY need (and it's not plastic toys or baby mozart videos), or how to breastfeed easily, or how to position babies in carriers, or how to co-sleep with their kids, or how small people come with different needs and personalities. i'd like to work with teen mums and their families to give them the understanding that as much as the baby needs mama to get her high school degree, he needs to be with mama and to be nursed. though how to do that without ruffling feathers, and within the framework of the idiotic public school bureaucracy, i don't know.

i think that whatever i end up doing in the next part of my life, it should have some element of service to it. it should preferably be something i can do in fits and starts, not on a regular schedule. it should be something i can work around easily if my child is sick or a friend needs help with something. it needs to be work suited to someone who can't do computers or maths, but can read and write and create. someone who isn't ambitious, but who is patient and gentle. someone who isn't uncritical of the status quo, but who is non-judgmental of individuals. someone who can't do her taxes, but can heal with her hands. someone who will never be the CEO of anything, but who cares, and cares, and cares. i need a working environment that values love...oh, and one that doesn't have high expectations of consistency, professionalism, or a decent resume!