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Back Story 2

Sitting on the green sofa, looking at the pink walls and the orange carpet day after day put me onto an important truth about home. Its most powerful resource was time.

Such thinking may have only been psychological compensation: consoling myself with thoughts that having time made up for not having money. We certainly were never going to get more time, and there was always the slim chance we might get more money. Limited resources are more valuable, right?

Renewable, though, time was renewable—every day a new day, every hour a fresh hour. What renewable resource could be valuable if it was that plentiful? Not only plentiful, but already distributed and saturating the whole market. What does everyone have that anyone values?  The entire economy rests on people needing or wanting things they don’t have, not something everyone already has for free.

On the other hand, time couldn’t be hoarded or saved, like gold or money; that would be a point in its favor for being valuable. Back and forth I’d go, considering the relative merits of time.

Asking the Right Questions

I will admit to quickly running out of ideas of what to do around the little homestead. I mean, how much vacuuming and dusting does a one bedroom apartment need? Wasn’t that, however, more a problem with my mind, rather than a problem of either the homestead or our scheme to have me at home?

I completely missed the significance of that question intruding in my mind. Not until long after did I recognize it as an early example (in my life, at least) of an important life skill: getting the right answer requires asking the right question.

Just as an infinite number of unmarked points reside between any two points on the number line, so between any two questions lay answers to a myriad of unasked questions. The best lawyers, policemen, and parents know how to fish in that sea between obvious questions. I was none of those, so when I started wondering with myself, “What more should I know to make the most of my time at home?” it was a wildly unfamiliar sensation. Part of me was creatively challenging another part of me to stretch myself and not settle for status quo or mediocre. Part of me was making another part of me uncomfortable. Part of me was acting like a teacher or a parent or an impertinent friend to myself. It was a game changer.

Back Story 1

I was a dinosaur from day one. Less than three months after completing my undergraduate degree in three years (Phi Beta Kappa), I was not heading to graduate studies, a high-paying job, or a clinical internship. No, I was off to a small, furnished apartment with pink walls, orange carpet, and a green sofa as a twenty-one year old cultural anomaly: a stay-at-home wife with no children and no disabilities.

Honestly, who can relate to that?

Whatever were we thinking, my fresh-faced young husband—who had to go prematurely gray before people stopped asking if the “man of the house” was home when he answered the door—and I?

Didn’t we know I would be bored sitting at home all day with nothing to do? I mean really nothing to do, because in another swing at radicalism, one of our pre-nuptial agreements was to not have a television for at least three years—the better to spend time together, my dear.

Didn’t we know we’d need more money than he would make? I mean really need money, because another pre-nuptial agreement/experiment was to not go into debt for items like cars or refrigerators or sofas or vacations.

All we had was an eager, vibrant expectation that home was vital for society, and we wanted to give it full-time concentration.

Thus began our adventure as a single-income family with, eventually, eight children and a salary with a current buying power that is still less than the buying power of his first salary. If “our kind” was an endangered species when we started, the group is probably code red extinction level by now.

Our chosen path is unlikely to resonate with, or even appeal to, virtually anyone old enough to read, so my quixotic investment in time, the home and its processes may very well sit dusty on the cyber-shelf. A receptive ping or two bouncing back from distant reaches or mindsets would, of course, not be unwelcome. Even dinosaur bones generate their share of modern discussion.