dad's view

Jeff Shelby is a full-time author and a stay-at-home Dad. Jeff's mystery novels, Wicked Break and Killer Swell, have both appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Denver Post best-seller lists. He also serves as a writer/reviewer on the book site, MyShelf.com.

I'll Be So Awesome With The Fingerpaints

November 5, 2008

I've been thinking a lot recently about heading back to work.

I always knew that at some point, I'd be heading back to work. As much as I'd like my daughter to stay tiny forever, it's been pretty obvious that the voodoo spell I put on her in an attempt to keep her below the age of six forever isn't working. I hate voodoo spells that don’t work.

But as I've slowly gotten used to being home by myself, it's occurred to me that the time for me to return to adulthood may be near. Truth is, I feel a little guilty staying at home all day long while my daughter is at school and my wife is at work. While my career as a writer is moving along smoothly, it simply doesn't require that I stay at home to work. I know that writers around the world are going to be screaming at me, that they do, in fact, need to stay at home to work. But that isn't true for me. Whether I'm writing things like this column or working on my novels, the truth is that it doesn't require eight hours of concentrated thought to get it accomplished. I tend to write in fits and bursts and I wrote my first novel, as well as the majority of my second, while holding down a full-time job. So I'started thinking about returning to work.

Ugh.

No, it's not that bad. Before "retiring" I worked as a high school administrator and basketball coach. While I had no trouble leaving the job because I was excited about staying home with a new baby, it was a good job that I enjoyed. Like any other job, it had its drawbacks that made it less than fun at certain times. But I really enjoyed working with teenagers and the assumption in my mind was that when I returned to work, I would do so as a high school teacher. I didn't want to go back to an administrative position, but the idea of returning as a teacher was very appealing. I've had some experience teaching and enjoyed it very much. The opportunity to teach English on a regular basis seemed like a no-brainer.

But now I'm having second thoughts and it's not what you'd think.

I still think I'm going to teach. Just not at the high school level.

I can't describe how much of a shock to my system this has been. It's like knowing your whole life that you are six feet tall and you wake up one morning and you realize you are actually a seven footer. Whenever I thought about teaching in the past, I only thought about teaching high school, mainly because I rationalized that I wanted the semi-adult interaction that you get with teenagers. I wanted to grade essays, discuss novels, get to know them as people and help them pick out colleges.

But over the last two years, it's dawned on me how much fun I was having introducing my daughter to the world and over the last two months in particular, as she's jumped head first into kindergarten, it's crystallized for me. Getting to kids early in life can make a huge difference and it's not just babysitting, as I'd unfairly looked at it in the past. The good teachers make a gigantic first impression. As I've marveled at the activities that she's participated in in both preschool and kindergarten, more often than not, I've found myself thinking "That would be so fun to do with kids."

It's no accident that I'm volunteering nearly every day at my daughter's school – in her classroom, in the library, in her P.E. class. I'm doing that to make sure I'm not kidding myself. For sure, there are things that making teaching elementary age kids tougher than teaching high school kids. But I've found that being in her classroom, around her classmates, inside the environment of an elementary school, energizes me. I'm not dreading the idea of going back to work, which I was when I was assuming high school was my destination. Now, I'm trying to figure out a way to start, maybe as soon as next fall.

I think I want to be an elementary school teacher when I grow up.