NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER

NOVEMBER 24, 2002

Because I have spent most of my adult life in academia, I have often wondered Where is the Real World? As a student, I was often told that I was not in the Real World. We were sheltered as students; we didn’t have to deal with jobs, taxes and bills. I didn’t quite understand this, since I was paying my own way through school. I worked; I paid bills. I even paid taxes.

I studied economics, a subject that is often taught at a very abstract level. I learned about supply and demand. It made sense to me. But you could always count on some kid in the front of the class to stick up his hand and say, "it isn’t really like that in the Real World. My uncle owns a dry cleaning business and he doesn’t draw those graphs."

Gee, I thought, my brother owns a house painting business. He doesn’t draw graphs, that’s true. But he does try to make money in the most sensible way he can figure out. He gets more work for his crew if he thinks he can make money on the job. He lays people off if he can’t find any jobs. He buys supplies at the least cost he can find. He seems to be maximizing profit, just like the book says. How come the guy with the dry cleaning business is the Real World and my brother with the painting business is not?

Then I started teaching economics. I’d explain to students how government policies that are supposed to help ordinary people sometimes sometimes turn out not to be helpful. People might prefer to keep their own money, rather than pay taxes to pay for government-sponsored day care, or health care or school lunches. I could always count on a student to say something like, "But it isn’t really like that in the Real World. Most people are too dumb to figure out what kind of services to buy for themselves. They need the government to decide for them."

My research used to be in economic history. My husband is a Nuts and Bolts engineer. A genuine, Real World kind of guy. He would ask me from time to time, "when are you going to do a research project that gets you out of the Ivory Tower? Economic history is nice, but why don’t you work on something in the Real World?"

Then I had children. I needed to stay home with them. Of course, like the good Modern Career Woman that I was, I couldn’t admit that straight out. It took me a couple of years to figure out that my two and a half year old son adopted from a Romanian orphanage didn’t need daycare. Not even High Quality daycare. Not even a nanny. He needed a Mommy. That would be me.

Now, I knew for sure that I was going to be completely severed from the Real World. After all, everyone knows that the home is nothing but a guilded sanctuary for disabled birds; no one but a nitwit stays home with children. The Real World is Out There, the world of jobs and money and competition and struggle and dog-eat-dog. The home is so easy, comfortable and serene by comparison. If the university was the Ivory Tower, home is Rapunzel’s tower, pretty, but isolated and irrelevant.

Nevertheless, a fairly intense version of motherhood seemed to my vocation, at least for the time being. I found myself in doctor’s offices, with other mothers of screaming children. I found myself worrying about what came out of my babies’ behinds more than about the condition of the world economy. I found myself in waiting rooms for speech therapists and psychologists and hearing pathologists. I listened to heart-broken parents agonize over who or what caused their child’s problems. I sat in the Public Health office, waiting for subsidized speech therapy. I looked around at the families there, waiting for free check-ups and vaccinations. Lots of the poor people in the waiting room were young and foreign-born. I never saw these kinds of people while sitting in my university office.

Finally, after lots of ordinary mom-stuff, it dawned on me: this is the Real World I have heard so much about. The Real World is at home. This is where people are born and grow up. At home, people get sick, and get better. Home is where people love, where they fight, where they kiss and make up and love some more, and ultimately, where they die.

The world of work and business is artificial by comparison. No one ever really brings a little baby to work, unless she can stuff him off in a company daycare center. If anyone gets sick, they are instantly whisked away from the workplace. When people get mad at each other, they quit. When they aren’t useful to the company, they get fired. There isn’t any place for a person who genuinely needs help. In fact, there isn’t any place at work for people simply to be who they are, for no particular reason. And for sure, no one faces death on the job.

The workplace is all about being Independent and Productive and Responsible. But where do all those Independent and Productive and Responsible people come from, if not from homes where people love them, wipe their noses and correct their misbehavior?

So, now I am more content with my vocation. I do it proudly, knowing for sure that there really is no World as Real as home.