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So, it’s career week at my son’s pre-k, and the parents are invited to visit the class and do a show and tell on their job. The teachers sent a note home asking us to participate and wear the appropriate uniform/work attire to give the kids a real taste of our profession.

My “profession” is a bit murky and has been since my first kid lured me to quit my job as a technical writer and stay at home with her cuteness. On the school form, I filled in “writer” as my occupation because I have a blog and I do freelance writing from time to time. This prompted the teacher to ask me to read stories to the class every two weeks since I’m familiar with how one writes and tells a story, and presumably I have a lot of time to kill. I like reading the stories. Four year olds are a pretty good audience. I read a story last week about a family of pandas kissing, and they all screamed out ewwwwww in unison.

But when it comes down to career week, my skills are less than demonstrable. Do I show them the Word Press dashboard and wow them with the photo upload feature? Perhaps do a slideshow of my StatCounter stats, such as how many people have found my blog by googling the phrase donka doo balls? Answer: seven.

And to play up the philisophical angle, there’s so much more to us than our professions, anyway, right? I mean I play guitar AND drums. I have jam sessions with neigbhorhood moms. I write songs. I make videos. This, all in addition to maintaining a blog, keeping a clean house and cooking/preparing every meal my family eats daily.

In short, I am awesome. But like a lot of artists, I don’t get paid a whole lot for that creativity sweat shop going on in my head. And like all at-home parents, I don’t get a paycheck for raising my kids DIY style. And I’m not suggesting I should, but wouldn’t that be nice if all parents got a little voucher or something? Especially on really tough days. Like, hey we heard your kid woke up late for school, refused to eat breakfast, insisted on wearing legwarmers on his arms in 98 degree weather, and then after arguing for 10 minutes about it on the way to school finally mentioned it was Wear Legwarmers on Your Arms Day at school: here’s a coupon for a free coffee and doughnut.

But until the doughnut vouchers start rolling in or I start making some serious money as a dream chaser, maybe I’ll just tell the pre-k teachers that I will be there for career day. I’ll wear my uniform, which is rock-n-roll jeans and a tank top, and I will gladly give the kids a demonstration on the art of being awesome. We can make up songs about playground politics, brainstorm on blog posts, maybe discuss the pros and cons of mixing the personal and professional on facebook.

They may not know what they want to do for a living when they grown up, but surely, they all want to be awesome, right? And who knows, maybe allowing themselves to be the creative little creatures they are past preschool will lead to a legitimate career in the arts. It can happen. I’ve read about it and seen it in movies!