The Natural
I'm well into a "career." As such, I have been trained, taught, honed, sculpted, molded, polished, beaten, shaken, stirred, scattered, smothered, and otherwise whipped into being a good Corporate Man. I spent a the bulk of this week in a "Workforce Development" training session, where I listen to a bunch of catchy phrases and participate in silly role-playing exercises, all of which they tell me will make me an even better Corporate Man.

Then there's The Wife.

Her "career" involves taking three genetic reproductions of ourselves and molding them into decent human beings while simultaneously preventing them from growing up to become menaces to society. She is about 95 percent -- probably closer to 98 percent -- responsible for feeding them, bathing them, making sure they don't leave the house without clothes, making sure they don't hurt themselves or each other.

That's her basic responsiblity. She goes beyond that to inspire each of them, in varying degrees based on their ages (8, 3, and 2) to have a love of life and a love of learning and a love of each other and a love of having fun. She's teaching them to love, basically, and she's teaching them very well.

She's a leader, a teacher, a nurse, a chef and a role model. And she has done all of this for eight years without the benefit of a single "Workforce Development" session. Nobody told her how to do any of this. Nobody peppers her with inspirational catch-phrases and daily affirmations. She does this without getting an annual ego-boost from a performance review. She occasionally gets a nice note from me or one of the kids telling her how great she is, but if she got one on the hour every hour every day, it still wouldn't be enough. Nobody holds an annual Recognition Event for her. Her reward for feeding the 2-year-old is a poopy diaper. Her reward for correctly answering 100 questions from the 3-year-old is Question No. 101. Her reward for giving the 8-year-old a valuable life lesson is hearing "That's not fair!" and the sound of a slamming door.

Number of complaints I have lodged about my job over the last eight years: approximately 2,920, give or take a few hundred. Number of complaints about parenthood she's delivered to me over the last eight years: zero. That's an exact figure.

One of the things I was awake for during my training session today was an exhortation from the speaker to "follow your calling." I was asked if I knew what my calling was. I said, yeah, and it's changed about 14 times in the last 15 years.

It occurs to me that my wife has a calling. She's answering it as well as anybody on the planet -- anybody -- ever has answered a calling.