Occupation: n/a

          Occupation: n/a

“What’s your occupation”, the bank teller asked me. Occupation? Why does she need to know my occupation just so I can get this check cashed? I’ve been a member here for a while now anyway. Didn’t they already collect all my info when Lilly first gave me access to her money? And I’ve been in here a dozen times, and this time they ask for my occupation? What gives. All these thoughts passed through my mind in the moment I stood there in bewilderment while searching for what to say.

“I stay at home to take care of him.” I said proudly as I nodded to my boy sitting impatiently in my arm. I almost said I’m a stay-at-home-dad, but I just couldn’t do it. Why couldn’t I? Do I hate pasting a label to this, my profession of choice? And yes, I am a pro at it, don’t you think otherwise.

“You uhh….okay, well.” She was obviously confused as to what to put down in the computer blinking in front of her. Of course, she was also thinking, because I read minds, that what I said wasn’t actually a job and no one back at corporate gives a rat’s ass if this guy is SAHD, especially when it comes to keeping records of our customers and their loot.

So I relented and gave her my proper title, just for the record of course, “I’m a stay-at-home-dad.”

“Okay,” she nodded. As she started typing I looked at her monitor and saw what she had put down. As my official occupation she listed me as, ‘n/a’. N mother fucking A! I’m going to tell my son that when he’s older. ‘Son’, I will say, ‘ Son I raised you, but I was not your parent or guardian, I was not your dedicated stay at home father, I was an official n/a. Big shoes to fill I know, but I have faith in you to go out into the world and be all you can possibly aspire to be. And if you want to be an n/a too, you get our full support.

“Just put unemployed.” I want to tell you that I refuted her denouncement of my job, but I didn’t. I want to tell you that I told her that what I do is considered by many to be just as much a job as any other, that what I do is more difficult than dropping checks in a cash register and smiling for old grannies cashing in on my future social security all day. But I didn’t really care. And of course I realized that for the sake of keeping bank records, all they are interested in is the occupation where you earn money from, not the occupation that pays in pride and honor and a close knit families and free room and board and hugs and mini-me’s.

I think perhaps if I were in a social setting and an acquaintance were to ask me what I do, and they responded by telling me that that job title is not applicable, I would have constructively and efficiently drilled them a new one. But I let it go in the bank. And I didn’t care while thinking about it all day until I started writing it down. Now I want to go back there and let her change his dirty diaper and try and feed him and chase him around all day and drop him off at her doorstep tonight when he wakes up at twelve and two-thirty in the morning, then ask her tomorrow if she would still have put , Occupation: n/a.