Walking A Mile in a SAHM's Shoes

Maybe not a whole mile, but at least a few long city blocks. It's not a comfortable walk. For example, some early findings:

• Because they occur mid-day and mid-week, your contributions are somewhat invisible and easy to get used to if you're the recipient of these services. Includes grocery shopping (driving to/from, buying, loading/unloading), meal preparation (thinking up, cooking, serving) and laundry (gathering, sorting, stain-treating, washing, drying, folding, putting away). Also includes really thankless stuff like making and rescheduling appointments, enrolling in classes, and driving to/from school to enable these.
• It's lonely without other adults.
• Unexpected bonus: it's nice not to have to talk to your kids all day long, clean up after them or help them with things which interrupt completion of your own tasks or activities.
• It can make you very short-term-oriented, unless you have some large-scale and long-term projects that you are tackling.
• Unexpected bonus: you don't have to endure countless boring, inefficient and often infuriating meetings with coworkers.

I miss working. I like having a purpose that isn't directly related to taking care of my immediate family.