It’s the third month of unemployment, and I’m considering going savage. For the first month, beyond not buying things or going out to eat or getting a sitter — none of which was that much of a stretch — things seem relatively unchanged. Some down time. It was kinda nice to have him around. Things would pick up again in January.

January came and went.

We’re now in full-on joblessness. I’ve learned more of the story at the company, which explains things a bit better but which wouldn’t have changed our decision to move here. We gambled. There’s a reason I don’t gamble, and this is it.

It’s tight around here.The grocery is a chore, all the comparing and measuring and searching for value packs and discerning needs from wants. Sleepytime out, generic chamomile in. Soon that may go, too. I eat at school as much as I can — it’s covered — and I don’t drive much. We only go to free events, except for the school play, and we had to wait for Friday to buy even those tickets.

Should we be spending emergency money on entertainment of any kind? I haven’t time to entertain such existential questions.

Last weekend we were invited as guests to a benefit for our school, a dinner auction where bids were cast for art and trips and jewelry, none of it trinkets. I was thrilled but Allan refused so I took a girlfriend and it wasn’t until I got there that I understood what he meant by the disorienting feeling that came with pasting a smile on and chatting over a plate of risotto that my host had paid $150 for. It felt like nausea and I couldn’t count-my-blessings the discomfort away, no matter how many happy thoughts I forced up.

But mostly, like always, it’s the unknown that yawns and swallows. I have faith that we will be okay, somehow, i really do, but I don’t know what that ‘okay’ will look like, where it will take us, what it will demand of us. What adjustments and alterations. Our house is threatened, and this is real, and we can talk of little else. Ugly, awful words we once heard only on the news now apply to us.

I will stop here, and I will first recognize our own culpability, how deeply flawed our money management was, the many ways this might have been avoided. I know this, it wakes me every single night, and it will forever change my financial habits, and this is important but right now I have to encourage my despondent husband and protect my little daughter and feed two dogs and make Valentines and that’s what occupies my waking hours.

If I had been in that plane, I have no doubt which camp I would have joined. I’d have kept my handkerchief in my pocket and brushed my hair and looked to the horizon.

And sipped my ‘tea.’ Even when there was nothing in my coconut-shell cup.

It was, by any measure, a lovely afternoon. And we get to do this every day.

So I wish I knew why, then, I couldn’t sleep last night for fretting over all I hadn’t done. The neglected second job, the thank-you cards still piled on the counter. None of this should matter.

Hemmed in by chores, finances and the uncertainty of our future, we have every right to essentialize, to tuck in and make the most of that rare commodity we actually have at the moment: time. Time to play. Time to dance. Time to sing and to talk and to make it up as we go. Time to enjoy.

And yet I fretted because I wasn’t cooking from scratch. I thought about the unfolded laundry. I wondered if she’d remember this afternoon, long into her life, when she could have been … learning Spanish, I suppose, or soccer or t-ball or swimming.

I nearly ruined it, this happy memory, and that’s such a shame. How many of us do that? Every day? I do. I do. I do.

It’s so difficult for me to evaluate a day by what went right, and so natural to look for what went wrong. It’s just the two of us and the dogs.

Our shepherd, Tuco, assumes the role of deputy pack leader, patrolling, guarding, keeping us safe. He takes this so seriously that it’s almost comical, but I can’t laugh at him; he’s working so hard. (Of course, should I ever cry or get upset at anything in the house, he slinks into the shower. This does challenge his tough-dog image.) Rosa, the female dog, never quite lets me parent alone; she’s always on hand to help manage the puppy.

Who is managing quite well, thank you very much. When Allan is away, she sleeps in my bed and brushes her teeth in my sink and bathes in my tub. Much of this is sheer practicality; it takes half the time to supervise her if she’s right with me. But I like it, too, if I’m truthful, having her cozy-close, sharing a bath, singing while we dress.

We have as much of that as we want, these few days. What a treasure it is, this thing we have, so precious and so fleeting. I know this, really I do, and I won’t forget.

I’m particularly struck when something one of these public people says rings flat-out true. Michelle Williams, an actress who is generally press-shy but who, in the run-up to a promising bid for an Oscar, we can expect to see bursting into every available frame, said something in a recent interview that perfectly framed for me that alien sense that absolutely everyone else knows exactly what’s going on while you, and you alone, aren’t in on the joke.

Part of it’s here:

“I didn’t know how to keep myself warm in the winter or cool in the summer. It felt like somebody was withholding all the secrets—how to take care of yourself and where to get the things that would help you take care of yourself. I just literally didn’t know where to go. I was too shy to ask for help or to admit that I was cold or that I was uncomfortable or that I didn’t know what I was doing. Look, I didn’t know what I was doing at so many points in my life that I felt that if I had stopped and admitted that I didn’t know what I was doing then I would be really lost, and the best thing to do was to just keep forging and to act like you were okay.”

Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201202/michelle-williams-gq-february-2012-cover-story-article#ixzz1jrCcb4b9

I worry sometimes that this might be the universe correcting course, that I am somehow responsible for dragging our family east by the sheer force of my will, an act so pushy the universe could not allow it to slide. I won’t let it happen again.

If the lesson I’m supposed to take away from this is to live and let live, then I’m in a crash course not of my choosing. Allan is home all day now, which means the house is adapting, in ways subtly and … not. He’d rearranged the kitchen (the horror) before a week had passed, and is now eyeing the rest of the house. The Christmas tree came down in record time and for the first time since we moved in there is food in the cupboard that I neither had to purchase myself nor will be responsible for cooking. We share pickup, and dishes, and vacuuming… I don’t know which has surprised me more: how much I used to accomplish each day, all by myself, or how miserable it actually was for him to be gone from before sunrise to after sunset every single day.

If this is in fact the universe correcting course, then the universe clearly has a thing or two to learn about balance.

Which it’s welcome to get on with: the sooner, the better.

Then, also for the first time, she put together a 24-piece puzzle entirely by herself. She carefully found the four corners, then the straight-edged side pieces, then the middles.

Noting these firsts, one right after the other, I felt that mother-feeling. The feeling we live for, the we-are-one sensation (an illusion, I know, but let me have my moment), the feeling that we are parts of one whole, sharing one emotion, one moment, just us, undivided.

It had become too rare, and I worried.

I remember when the ‘firsts’ came so quickly that I could not keep up, scribbling them in a journal, then forgetting to scribble, then forgetting where I’d put the journal, finally giving the whole thing up. Then they slowed down, became less remarkable, sometime around her second birthday, when she began to spend long hours away from me, away from home, making new friends and learning so much.

We’re back, somehow, to a world of our own. All of those firsts never really went anywhere, I suppose, they just grew harder to spot, tinged with melancholy at the passage of time. She hasn’t ceased her explorations, certainly; she casts her net wide, loving recklessly and with abandon. She’s as engaged in school and friends and playdates and birthday parties as any five-year-old.

The difference, it seems, is with me. The difference is that my world is so aligned with hers: my work is her school and her teachers are my colleagues and my schedule is hers too and her friends are my friends’ children … it’s cozy. So cozy. So cozy it hurts sometimes, like a hug held just a moment too long. But mostly, it’s comfy.

I like it here. I like to remember, as I watch her flash across the playground, the moment we spent this morning, choosing purple socks or red ones. (I like that that even matters: purple socks or red.) I like sitting here, laptop glowing in the dark, thinking of all of the things I like about this life. I like the fumbly way she plays with the language, telling me she “goed” here and “goed” there and how much she loves “Sabannah” no matter how often she hears the name of our town pronounced correctly (all-too-soon, she’ll say it right, for the first time, and then this small chapter too will close). I like to listen as she tells of her day, that she played blocks with Olive and Victor spilled his milk and Tyler is a red square now instead of a green triangle. The surface of her narrative slides over and around me like a smooth current, words tumbling and flowing and playing in the light as she makes sense of her shiny new world.

That’s how the world seems to me, too, when I stop and look at it through her eyes: shiny and new, I mean. Every corner, every minute, bursting with first-times. When I think of it that way, it’s not so hard, watching the firsts slip away, for there are always more to come.

Always, always, more to come.

I hope she keeps this trait, always.