It's tax time, and I am viewing our financial situation from atop a huge heaping mountain of anxiety. (Did you think I was going to make an allusion to all the paperwork instead?)

I have been at home with the kids for the past six years now, and for six years, we have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt. But the thought of working, of being away from the kids, rips me right apart. When my son was three months old, all of my leave time was up and I was supposed to go back to work. But he cried all the time. And it wasn't just a normal baby cry, not like the one my daughter used to cry. It was a cry of deep need, of panic. It was a cry that said, "Mama, I need you! Help me! Don't leave me!" So I was lying in bed one night, thinking about going back to work -- thinking of him screaming in some day care center where nothing could calm him because the one and only thing that could soothe the constant anguish of that baby was lying on Mama's breast and Mama would be gone. And I sobbed until I couldn't breathe, and I quit my job the next day.

When my son was three, he was diagnosed with autism, and sometimes I feel I knew it from those anguished baby screams. I knew something. So I didn't leave. I stayed and stayed and stayed. And the hole where the money wasn't got deeper and deeper as money went for therapy and for diapers (until after age four) and respite care and for any favorite something that might help him overcome his anxiety and rigidity and for anything that might make it up to his sister and for anything that my husband and I could use to soothe ourselves.

Of course, there was nothing balancing the pull to stay home either, nothing other than money, and money isn't much to me, even though I've spent most of my life without too much of it. I have never had a job I have loved. Jobs have always been a way to earn the money I need to enjoy my time away from the job: to buy the books I want to read and the services that give me time to write. Now I don't make any money, and I don't have much time to read or write.

So, with the tax forms putting into stark relief the depth of our financial woes, I've started looking for jobs, something I could do part-time from home, since my son said just the other day, "Mama, I need you forever." (And I want to be here for as close to forever as one can get in this life.) And looking for jobs has made me consider, yet again, what it is I want to do with my life. But I don't know why I consider it, really. I know, and have known all my life, that there is only one thing I ever really have wanted to do: write. And I realized that to do the kind of writing I love, I would need to start a blog, because it doesn't seem possible to be a writer without a blog these days. So, here I am, starting to be what I want to be when I grow up.