As if academom had willed it, I had one of those days where my worlds clashed. It’s like that Seinfeld episode where George’s world with his friends is about to meet up with his world with his fiancee. I’m checking my son’s homework this morning and find a note from his teacher that says he hasn’t been doing his homework. Instant guilt. I find my son, begin giving him a stern talking to. He breaks down, misses the bus and I have to drive him to school which makes me slightly late for work. I bring this guilt and anger (a little) to work with me.

At work, I e-mail the teacher, apologize profusely for my slacker son (and his slacker parents) and promise we’ll do better. I manage to put all of that aside and do real work until I’m sidetracked by a talkative co-worker. Post-lunch, life gets bad when I find out because of a programming glitch, several people have dropped out of Blackboard. I spend time manually adding them back in and dinging the programmer. I don’t understand the programming and feel powerless–akin to the way I felt in response to the teacher’s letter.

Flash forward a little, I’m plugging away again, getting ready to read some blogs and post something in my professional blog when I am dragged into the lab because a woman’s life work has been erased. (The lab I maintain is a video lab and nothing is supposed to be removed without my permission.) We spend hours trying to recover the files–no luck. We will have to import over 100 clips again.

I go home defeated, thinking I should just have been a stay at home mom, so that I could make sure my son does his homework and I wouldn’t have to deal with all of this stuff. Sigh. Do men have these tensions? It’s not like I was angst-ridden all day about the homework thing, but it was there nagging at me. I know in my heart of hearts, I would not be satisfied staying at home, but I think about it. It’s very tempting on days like these.