I tell Now Magazine (I think it’s basically People magazine for the UK audience) to call back after I got the kids off to school. I ask my housemanager to come early because I can't handle the sleep deprivation and the early-morning interviews and school lunches all in one morning.

I block out the morning to write a thousand-word essay for the Guardian to justify tweeting about my miscarriage. Which the Guardian wants done in the next 20 hours.

Now magazine wants to know if they can send a photographer to take a photo of my kids.

No.

Or the Farmer?

No.

What about if their faces are blurred?

No. (But this at least makes the Farmer laugh.)

The Today show called Tuesday to see if I could be on the show on Thursday. I said yes. They call in between the Guardian and Now magazine to ask if I can fly there.

The first thing I think is that my kids were so sad that I was not taking them to school as usual that I promised to pick them up after school, and I don’t want to break the promise.

The only reasonable flight to NYC is at 3:08. I decide that the only thing to do is take my kids with me. I can’t bear to simply be gone when they come home from school. I did that so much last year. I don’t want to do that anymore.

So I tell the Today Show that I can make it only if they will fly my kids and the nanny with me. And pay for two hotel rooms.

The Today Show says yes. They start booking tickets. I finish interviews and the nanny starts packing. She calls the school to get the kids ready to leave early. She cancels violin lessons and cello lessons and a reading tutor.

I call the Farmer to offer him one last chance to go with us. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t take the offer seriously because it is so far from anything he’d ever do. He says he can’t believe I’m taking the kids on a trip again when the last business trip I took them on turned out so bad that the police came.

He has a point, but I tell him that I’m taking the nanny along this time.

Then the new CEO of Brazen Careerist calls. He’s concerned. I have given a one-hour interview with a tabloid that was not recorded and it’s being taken out of context all over the UK.

So we have a two-hour phone call about the Brazen Careerist brand. Should it be tied to me? Is miscarriage a workplace issue? What drives people to sign up at Brazen Careerist anyway?

Wait. Can you just go sign up at the site right now so the CEO can see that a post like this does not hurt the brand and I should just write what I want on my blog?

Okay. So the nanny is decked-out in black, with blown-out blond hair, and she almost looks a little New-York-y for her first-ever visit there, when the Today show calls to say they need to move me to Saturday.

Really?

This is what I thought: Is there enough time for me to get really drunk on junk wine in the fridge before I have to go pick up the kids?

I say no to Saturday.

Later, I get a death threat. This is not new. I have been getting death threats all month but today’s death threats are different. They are from the UK, and then from the Australian Christian Coalition. No kidding. Three calls in a row.

This all might be the end of me catering to mainstream media. But. Wait. I’m so happy to be in Inc magazine this month where Max Chafkin wrote a great list of top bloggers. And Max was so easy to deal with. He scheduled a call. We had a nice conversation. And he wrote an intelligent article.  He’s so good, and considerate that he’s almost like a blogger.

But for now, I’m exhausted. And I am thinking that dealing with mainstream media just isn’t worth it. I get my own story out, the way I want it, on my blog. I have a smart, engaged audience that is fun to talk to and, when there’s something really good, they tell their smart, thoughtful friends. I don’t think I need mainstream media. And I know I don’t need the ridiculous way they've been talking with me.

(Hi, Penelope Trunk? This is Steve from the early show –

What? What early show?

It's the morning show on CBS.

Oh.

Can you tell me how you justify your tweet?

What?

Just quickly. I’m going into our 4pm meeting and I need a summary of your position.)

So, mainstream media, here's my position. More than feeling compelled to justify myself to your audience, I feel compelled to protect my schedule and my family from your intrusive calls and seemingly random deadlines. I feel an urgent need to separate a sane online conversation about women at work from an insane media that is doing exactly what destroys women at work: Making it extremely difficult for me to have a manageable schedule for parenting.

I tried to do the advisable thing to do when you’re with someone who has commitment issues. I tried to fall in love with someone else. But I didn’t. I only missed the farmer more.

So I told myself that it’s okay to be with someone who has commitment issues, as long as I am having fun.

But my kids grew to love the farm, and the farmer, almost as quickly as I did. This makes sense. My oldest son was with me on my first visit to the farm,  and if you have ever been on a working farm you know that to kids, it’s like Disney World.

So my kids were constantly asking to go to the farm, and constantly trying to figure out, what is the farmer? A friend? An uncle? And why did I kiss him if he’s not in my family?

This is not a good path for kids if the relationship isn’t going toward marriage. So I waited until a day when the farmer and I were holding hands, walking between rows of corn higher than our heads. And I told him that I can’t keep bringing the kids to the farm because we’re not getting married and I’m scared the kids will get hurt.

The farmer didn’t say anything for five minutes. And then he said, “Okay. Let’s get married.”

It’s taken me months to tell people. It’s taken me months because I sort of don’t believe it.

I didn’t want to write that I’m worried. You will tell me, in the comments section, “Don’t get married if you are worried!” But I’m not sure I’d ever NOT worry.

How can I not worry about marrying a farmer? I will be moving, with my kids, to his farm. The farm is in the absolute middle of nowhere, outside the town of Darlington, WI. And now, I guess this will be my debut in Darlington, because I’m pretty sure there will be no blog outranking me for that search term.

But if I didn’t marry the farmer, I would be worried, forever, that I should have married him.

So it’s not a hard decision to marry him. I have been married before, and I don’t think I’m going to change much, so I know what I need, and I know what I have to offer, and we are a good fit.

And, I have Asperger Syndrome, which could be summarized as raging intellect and acute sensitivity to outside input. So the farm is a perfect spot for my mind to explore while outside-my-mind is calm.

But I worry about the farm for my kids. One of my kids also has Asperger Syndrome, and he is completely addicted to the farm and the animals, and the farmer’s calm, slow, sunny demeanor.  My other son does not have Asperger’s and probably does not need of the serenity of life on the farm.

Not that serenity is bad. And the family life that grows from farming is intimate and grounded and full of routine. All good things for kids.

But I grew up in a world where everything was open to me. Check out my high school: New Trier. It’s always ranked in the top twenty-five high schools in the country. I remember the principal telling us that the top 500 kids in our graduating class would go to colleges where most would be the valedictorians of their class.

At the time I didn’t understand how this could be. But now I understand that in order to compete at the top of the academic field, you need to be the number-one student in your small town.

Maybe not number one academically. But number one in soccer if you want to play soccer in college. And number-one in cello if you want to play in an orchestra in college.

Wait. No. It’s worse than that. Because in Darlington, there is no orchestra in high school. So where will my son play his cello in high school if he wants to play in college? And how will my boys learn to play soccer at a high enough level to play in college if all the kids on the coasts are getting private coaching? Where is the private coaching in Darlington?

It’s scary how limiting the choices are when you live in a place like Darlington. But competition is scary to me as well.

The reason I couldn’t keep playing professional beach volleyball is that I didn’t care enough about winning. To get to the very top of anything, you have to think you’re going to die if you don’t win.

That’s not me.

I belong on a farm, where life is slow, and rhythmic, and people are not breathing down my throat about getting the best of everything.

The farmer and I discuss this a lot. He went to graduate school for biology and hated it and went back to the farm. He thinks he could have done anything, so why won’t my kids be able to choose anything?

I am not sure. I am not sure if it’s my proximity to overachievers that gave me opportunities, or it’s my innate optimism and intelligence.

Then he tells me that what I really would have wanted from my childhood is to feel love and security, and why don’t we just focus on giving the kids that?

He’s right. But it’s hard for me to act on that. So I think this marriage and move are leaps of faith for me, hoping that love and security will trump opportunity and achievement. I hope I’m making a good decision for my sons.

The Story of the Farmer – From the First Day We  Met:

June 2008 New Way to Measure Blog ROI

June 2008 How I started taming my workaholic tendencies

Oct. 2008  Self-sabotage is never limited to just one part of your life

Nov. 2008  Think of networking as a lifestyle, not an event

July 2009  The sign of a great career is having great opportunities, and saying no

Sept. 2009 How to deal with an insane commute

Oct. 2009  How to deal with doubt: Take a leap

Don’t get me wrong—women still do more than their male counterparts – for example, even women who have stay-at-home husbands are more involved in parenting than men who have stay-at-home wives. But Gen X men have been more involved in parenting than any generation before. And Gen X women have done a better job of mixing high-powered careers and family than anyone else.

There is another trend here as well: Gen X is much more family-focused than previous generations. Baby boomers talk about putting kids before work, but Gen X actually does it. For example, even with full-time jobs outside the home, Gen X spends more time playing with their kids than housewives did in the 1950s. (I can't remember where I read this. I think it's from Sylvia Hewlett.)

The result is a new sort of divorce, especially in the case where the woman earns more than the man. The woman cannot stop working. We already know the laws require the breadwinner before the divorce to continue to be the breadwinner. But when the difference between breadwinner and caretaker are not as clear cut, it’s not so clear where the kids should live.

What is clear is that kids need a home. We know from decades of research that one of the most traumatic parts of a divorce for kids is that they have no home. The parents each have a home and the kids shuttle between homes. This undermines the child’s sense of security in irreparable ways.

We also know how to solve the problem: The kids stay in the house and the parents shuttle between two houses. This preserves a sense of the family home. Parents are raising kids in their home and parents have a consistent set of house rules. It’s much harder on the parents, much better for the kids.

When my ex-husband and I started doing this, people thought we were nuts. But I knew, deep down, it was good for the kids. The kids feel almost like both parents live in the house. We have family dinners. And my ex has an apartment outside the house. The kids never stay there. My ex sleeps over (in his own bedroom) when I go out on an overnight date, and when I travel away on business. But the kids feel like I live with them.

I am always trying to figure out what is the best way to make this work. I am always wishing I could meet other people doing this because it feels right to do, even if there are not a lot of people in my world doing it. (I think Alexis Martin Neely does this on some level with her ex. Her videos documenting  their arrangement — on her blog sidebar — are fun.)

Then the Gosselins separated. And while it’s sad they are not staying together, I can’t help looking forward to seeing how they run their lives. They are a great example of a couple who both earn a living and they do equal amounts of parenting (as equal as any) and now they will try to continue that divorced. The kids will have the house and each parent will live part-time away from the house.

I wonder what it will be like.

People are so hard on Kate Gosselin, but I think she is an anthem to Gen X women. She has taken charge of her career, and she has a job that accommodates her doing what she's good at, and her making time to take care of kids. She's an homage to the fertility mess Gen X has found itself in. She an homage to the fact that Gen X — not Gen Y — is the first generation to manage their children's online identities, and she's handling the issues with flair. And Kate is the quintessential Gen X mom getting post-baby plastic surgery.

I love that she has a husband who is fun and cute and not a demon but yet, the marriage still isn’t working out, because that's what life is like. It's not good and bad. It's messy, and Kate's figuring things out. Gen X is great with messy.

Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist favorites, then are there any gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes. Here are three:

1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they’re part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.

VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it’s incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don’t pay women more. Here’s the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he’s doing a good job at parenting, but not the woman.

This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else they wouldn’t leave and no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “This is good enough” and then the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.

How this translates to the VC world is that you need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men. Other industries have done it in order to benefit from women's brains. The VC world should follow suit.

2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better at work: they earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which, of course, inspires confidence.

So we need to pay attention to the orgasm gap, which Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: "Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there's one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn: The orgasm gap."

Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, "The orgasm gap is an inequity that's as serious as the pay gap, and it's producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry."

Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed—and who's expending it. England's study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts—from casual hookups to serious relationships—at significantly higher rates than men do. (Hat tip: Sepideh)

And if you’re wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd—Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.

3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. So we should all start learning to have some levity early on, and this is the damage of the fun gap.

You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it okay for men to get drunk in order to have an easier time hooking up, but it’s not okay for women? This is such a serious problem that New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.

It’s clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy the more we get of what we enjoy.

It starts in kindergarten, where the girls sit in their chairs and pay attention in class, and they socialize in the lunchroom. The boys, on the other hand, have spent the first five years of their lives turning everything into a gun or sword and cannot be contained in a classroom atmosphere.

Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two young boys, I have never heard any parent disagree with these generalizations, (and it's official that boys are six months behind girls developmentally by kindergarten). I did not buy guns for my sons. I didn’t have to. They can use anything. And I remember as a fourth grader thinking, (from the back of the classroom, where all the strong performing girls sit because they don’t need help from the teacher) “Wow, the boys sure are doing poorly in school.”

The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school is not what makes kids successful at work. What actually prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.

1. Focus on something you can control.
You might have noticed that my blog posts are very frequent right now. It’s a way to cope with the funding drama. I have so much control over my blog. And if I obsess over the traffic statistics then I have that crack-head feeling of immediate feedback, and it feels good, and even if half the people are telling me how much they hate me: Traffic is traffic.

Another part of the out-of-funding routine is fighting with Ryan. When I am totally focused on running the company, and I’m not worried about payroll, then things go smoothly and Ryan and I have great conversations about the future of social media and the future of resumes and where we fit.

When we run out of money, Ryan and I focus on our cycle of miscommunication: I say something rude that I don’t know is rude. Ryan gets defensive because he isn’t able to say, “That’s rude. Please don’t talk like that.” I have no idea why he is defensive, he just sounds like he’s up in arms about nothing to me, because if I knew I had been rude in the first place, I would not have been, so of course I don’t know. And when he is up in arms, I yell back. And then he says that I am impossible to deal with because I’m rude and I yell.

So we did that fight routine last week at least twice. I lost count. But I know that the first time, Ryan said, “You know what? Sometimes I hate you so much I have to restrain myself from punching you.”

My jaw dropped. I did not expect him to say that. And then I said, “I feel the same way about you.”

The second time, Ryan Paugh yelled out from his office, “Shut up! Both of you shut up!” And we did. (Though I think Ryan Paugh felt like it was hopeless that we might actually stop, so he took a walk to the coffee shop.)

2. Take time to talk about what's still going well.
So today I sort of kept to myself except that I had to go meet a board member to talk about the funding. The board member, Erik, is so fun to visit because he has this huge, stable company, and this gorgeous lair where he has an office and a secretary and a shiny deep-brown meeting table that my papers slide across while we figure out how to keep my company running. Erik is a great board member for a lot of reasons, but maybe the most important is that he’s so stable. Brazen Careerist needs a lot of things, but really, it needs stability.

But before I go into the board meeting, I remember that I have been named one of the top 30 women running Internet companies.

I call Ryan Healy. He says, “What is that site? I’ve never heard of them.”

I have not heard of them either. But the women on the list are amazing. Arianna Huffington, Caterina Fake, Michelle Malkin. I am happy to be there.

There is one more good thing about today. Flowers. Another bouquet. From a blog reader. I think he might be in love with me. But whatever. He leaves great comments, and now he sent flowers, and the flowers make me happy. They make me want to sit at my desk and write one more blog post.

3. Accept help, but continue to exhibit your strengths.
After my meeting, it’s 2:30 p.m. — Violin time. I leave to do school pickup, and Business Week calls. It’s a conundrum. Should I talk to Business Week and be late? Or should I risk that Business Week uses a different source because I was unavailable?

I take the call. I try to summarize all my ideas about intergenerational offices in five minutes, and I try to hide sort of out of the way of my son’s view, but he sees me. The rest of the call is about me getting off the call.

I buy my son his favorite after-school snack: Gatorade and KitKats. I tell myself it’s an example of optimistic spending that only a top-30 entrepreneur would do.

We go to the violin lesson and I want to tell you I love violin, but I don’t. I love the idea of the Suzuki program for violin. It teaches self-discipline, and perseverance, and working well in a group. I love that my son is getting all this, and he’s so proud and works so hard, and I love the teacher.

But look. I’m out of money in my company and that’s really all I have to think about for the half-hour they practice for his group recital. I am getting anxious about maybe not getting funding and I’m biting my nails.

Not biting sort-of-casually biting. But biting like I would imagine a serial killer does when he is trying to distract himself from thinking about the badness. Like, biting with way too much enthusiasm. And on top of this, I really really like my son’s violin teacher and I worry that she is going to see me biting like a crazy person and not want to be my son’s teacher.

And then I don’t have to worry about the biting anymore, because he is unfocused and too squirmy, so I scream at him: “Put the violin under your arm and take a bow!”

Has that ever been yelled at a child? It’s not normal. I know. And I know he is just anxious for his recital. The violin teacher gets very nice after that. To compensate for me being a psycho: This is how we are a team.

There is an hour break before the dress rehearsal. We go to the bagel shop for a snack. I have already prepared myself mentally for this snack. Normally, if I am having a bad day, I will have four bagels. But then I would be fat. Really. Four bagels can do that to you. They are like sponges in your stomach. So I told myself no bagels. Not even one, which would be okay, if I could actually eat only one.

To cope, I check my email. There is a note about me talking to CBS. I call them while my son is in the bathroom. They want to do a story about how Gen Y and Gen X don’t get along.

I tell the guy from CBS that I manage five people in their 20s and they would all be happy to talk about why I’m annoying. The CBS guy is shocked. I give him Ryan Healy’s phone number. Things go very well, of course. I know what I can count on Ryan for.

4. Hold things together, of course. But be okay if you can't.
After my son has eaten two bagels, he is not chatty. So I look through my purse for something to do. I find the form for signing him up for classes to help him stay organized. By the time I am done filling it out we are late for the rehearsal and he tells me that I am unorganized.

I help him get his recital clothes on in the bagel bathroom, and we are not the last people to arrive. We wait. I take my son to get his violin tuned and his teacher says, “Black bottom.”

I say, “Huh?” Then I say, “Oh. Shit. I can’t believe it.”

There are 100 kids ready to play their violins and only one of those kids is wearing khaki bottoms: My son.

Luckily, the violin teacher reads my blog, so this is not a huge surprise to her. And we acknowledge that I do have a second chance to get it right since this is only the dress rehearsal.

I almost cry. But I tell myself that if I’m not going to cry about running out of money in two days, then I'm not going to cry about khaki pants. I tell myself to focus on being a top-30 entrepreneur: Success does not come in a linear fashion.

My son and I wait for the teacher to call his group. And I am trying hard to not get blood on his shirt. Because his shirt is actually the proper shirt to be wearing, and my fingers are actually bleeding from aggressive bites.

So I am really overwhelmed now, between the violins and the fashion faux-pas and the blood, and then an investor calls. Yes. In the middle of violin even though I am certain that every investor I talk to knows that I am with the kids in the afternoon because they all bitch about it in a subtle way like, “Oh, that’s great,” with body language like, “She is fucked.”

So I ignore the investor's call because on my death bed I don’t want to remember the day I took a call during my kid’s dress rehearsal.

The teacher calls groups to the stage by the piece of music they are playing: "Allegro! Gavotte! Song of the Wind!" It looks like The Price is Right for the cultural elite, and the kids are walking up, nodding to their teacher as they go.

Each kid has a teacher there, except for my son, who has two. Because this program is really about the parent teaching the child and the teacher teaching the parent and the child and parent bonding through music. And that ended for us the time I got so frustrated that I broke my son’s bow. Well, actually, the fourth time. So now we have two teachers. And when investors want to know why my salary is not the same as all those god-forsaken 22-year-old guys that Y Combinator funds, I want to say, “You try running a startup and teaching your kid violin. Violin lessons cost way more when you are running a startup.”

Okay. So there are 100 kids together on the stage playing. And it’s stunning to see.

For a minute I forget that I am running a company that is running out of money.

All the parents in the audience are motionless; those tiny violins all together sound like a chorus of angels.

My son comes back to me in the audience when he’s done. I say, “I’m so proud of you for working so hard.”

He says, “Are you proud of me for playing perfect notes?”

I say, “No. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to just keep trying every day to be your best. And you are doing that. You should be happy for yourself.”

And he says, “You are trying to be your best every day, too, Mommy. You don’t need to have everything be right. You should be happy for yourself.”

I cry.

To really get tips for being a CEO with young kids, you'd have to hang out with me for a day. Like, last Tuesday. Which was just another day of being a parent and running a startup. Except this day starts at midnight. When I decide that I am not going to go to sleep because I have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to drive to Milwaukee to catch a plane to Atlanta at 7 a.m. And here’s the first tip:

1. Get sleep. The kind that is not warm and sweet.
I decide I’ll stay up late and work but what I find is that I’m mostly eating. First coffee. Then coffee doused in sugar. Then peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I covet each morning I make them for school lunches. But normally I restrain myself.

I see now I’m too stressed for normal restraint, so I go to bed.

My three-year-old is in my bed. If I get in, he will snuggle and whisper “I love you” in his sleep. But when I get up to go to the airport, he’ll have a fit, because what kid wouldn’t hate to wake to his mom leaving his house in the middle of the night?

To shield my son from childhood trauma I take him out of my bed and put him in bed with my ex husband, who is sleeping in the bedroom down the hall so that I can leave on business trips.

2. Be great at business travel. But get out of it whenever you can.
I set the Blackberry for 3:30 a.m. And when it wakes me I feel like I slept for ten seconds. But this crappy itinerary was my idea. Because I was so excited to go in and out in one day and not have to stay in a hotel.

At my gate I write a blog post, and I feel really good that I can do it at 5a.m. in an airport on no sleep. I send it to my editor and tell him I’m a star for sending it a day early – usually I send it an hour before I want to post it.

Then the flight is delayed. Then it’s broken and delayed. Then it’s probably not happening. Then I see that I will not get to my meeting if I wait for the next flight. But another airline has four, gloriously direct flights that get there in time. I am happy.

Until I hear that the cheapest ticket is $1200. So I call Atlanta to say that my flight was cancelled and I can’t get another.

3. Go to the office when you could go home. Go home later with impunity.
I want to go home and sleep. But I go to the office because we are getting ready to pitch to VCs. We have a lot of great ideas for what we are building for the community. And we are obsessed with the news that Gen Y is not using social media at as high a rate as Gen X is.

I spew the statistics about how bloggers are higher earning and higher educated than most people, and the average Twitter user is nearly 40 years old. We see our spot in the world, and we draw on flip charts and make PowerPoint slides, and then the nanny calls.

And I remember that since I’m not in Atlanta, I can take my son to his T-ball game. So I leave. Here’s something Gen Y really hates: when Gen Xers bolt out the door early to deal with their kids.

4. Prioritize. And keeping the kids from screaming comes first.
I pick up my sons and they want shorts for T-ball. I’m happy about this because I can run in the house for their shorts and check my twitter feed, which is hard to read on my Blackberry.

In the house I grab a diet Coke and the fridge light doesn’t work. I am so focused on shorts that it takes me two more light switches to realize my electricity has been turned off.

Then I remember that paying the bill was on my to do list. Somewhere. Under blogging and investors and T-ball. Yes, I know this is totally irresponsible. But the bill got too big at the end of last year, when my company was not paying salaries and I was not paying most bills.

Also, last week I took half the money for the electric bill and bought my six-year-old a new violin. I told myself that was OK because the violin teacher said his fingers were missing the notes because the violin was too small, and solving that problem seemed more important than paying the electric bill on time.

So I go to T-ball. Because it’s way easier to deal with no electricity when kids are consumed with swinging bats at each other.

5. Get as much help as you can afford. But there will never be enough.
I call the house manager, who has written “pay electric bill” on a post-it maybe ten days in a row, and I tell her the lights are off. She gives me a plan for getting electricity back the next day. Her plan entails paying the bill in person, and stopping at the grocery store for treats, and going to McDonald’s Playland, so the kids are quiet while I’m on the phone with the electric company.

The six-year-old asks what we’re doing. I say, “The Internet is turned off. I have to turn it on again.”

I know this is very serious to him. Because he is consumed with watching YouTube to find out how to win levels in Super Paper Mario on the Wii.

He explains to his younger brother, “This is serious. If we don’t fix the Internet, Mommy won’t be able to work. And neither will her helpers. And people will not see penelopetrunk.com.”

6. Don’t be sneaky. Kids always catch it.
Once I pay the bill, the sun is almost setting, and I need a plan for being in the house in the dark. The house manager makes a plan: Go to a hotel.

But I don’t want to because the kids will know something is wrong. I worry they will be messed up from living in an unstable household. They will grow up wanting to work at the same job at the same company for 60 years because my unstable startup life made them crazy.

So I get them very tired at Playland. They run and scream and I almost pass out on the table because now I am going on three hours of sleep in 24 hours.

Then I take them home to perfectly choreographed sequence of pajamas-book-bed just before the sun sets. They fall asleep and don’t even notice there’s no light.

Then I realize that I didn’t get flashlights. So I get the Dora the Explorer flash light out of my six-year-old’s room and wave it around a little to test it. He asks what I’m doing.

I ignore him.

He goes to the bathroom to pee. He says, “Hey. The lights don’t work.”

“Yeah. I know. Just pee and go to bed.”

“Hey. My bedroom lights don’t work.”

I ignore him. I tuck him in and kiss him and I tell him that it might be very dark if he wakes up in the middle of the night, but he can call me.

“Did you not pay the bill for the lights?”

WHAT??? How does he know this? Bills? He knows about bills?

I say, “Yeah. I forgot to pay the bill. But we paid it now. And the lights will be on tomorrow.”

“In time to play the Wii before school?”

“Well. Um. No.”

“You forget so many things. You never forget your work things and you always forget the house things. No mommy forgets more than you do.”

Then he says, “Mommy, I’m scared. I don’t know how dark it’s going to get. And the house will feel haunted. And what if I can’t see you?”

I get the kids out of bed. I decide we’ll go to a hotel.

I grab the essentials before the sun goes down in our house: Stuffed animals, my laptop, my purse, and gel from my dermatologist to squash breakouts. Because people like to read falling apart in stories and words. But people start to worry if they see the falling apart in your face.

Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. Here’s what came of that era: Latchkey kids who never saw their parents after school except on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. And, then later, those same little girls grew up to feel intense pressure to put work before kids which ushered in the biggest fertility train wreck in history, with Gen X thinking it would be fine to wait until after 30 to have kids.

So I have a bad taste in my mouth from the era of Take Our Daughters to Work. But then we had the era of boys underperforming. That’s right: Boys are doing so much worse than girls in school that it’s officially easier to get into college if you’re a boy (scores are lower and so are GPAs) and once these kids enter the workforce, girls make more than boys do.

So some probably-drumming, angry, white male decided that it shouldn’t just be daughters. It should be sons, too. So now we have Take Your Child to Work.

But here’s what I want to know: Why?

This holiday now strikes me as one similar to Secretaries Day, which is a relic from the days when there were no computers and secretaries had thankless jobs and the men who were having sex with them on the side always forgot to thank her in the spotlight for the typing, so there is an official reminder day to buy her a card. That made sense. Twenty years ago.

Which is why it reminds me of Take Your Child to Work Day.

You know what else reminds me of this special day? The Week of the Young Child. Seriously. It was last week. Did you celebrate? Of course you did. Because every week is the week of the young child, because if you don’t focus on young children they die. They eat bleach or get bitten by a squirrel or run over by a car.

The reason the Week of the Young Child reminds me of Take Your Child to Work Day is because, at this point, every day is taking children to work. I’m on my Blackberry all the time, and my division between work and kids is very tenuous. This is pretty common for my generation. And I think we’re pretty happy with it – or we’d stop. So it’s pretty clear to me that we don’t need a day for kids being at work because they get exposed to their parents working all the time.

And anyway, do you know how annoying kids are for people who do not have kids? It’s already totally over the top how many concessions people with kids get vs. people without kids. My cousin, for example, is a doctor, and when her colleague went on maternity leave early, my cousin was asked to cover for her because everyone in the practice has kids except for my cousin. This is routine behavior in corporate life (I know – I benefit from it all the time at my own company where I’m the only one with kids.)

So what we don’t need is a day when people's kids come into the office, disrupt everyone, eat all the good snacks and use up all the good office supplies. The disruption serves little purpose except to remind people without kids that kids are the center of the universe.

So I think this holiday is BS, and kids understand that they can be anything they want to be, so I don’t see a point in dragging them to work. Which is why I didn’t.

I ignored the holiday last year. And when I picked my son up at school, he said, “It’s Take Children to Work Day. Are you taking me to your work?”

I say, “What? How do you know it’s that day? Who told you?”

“My teachers brought their children to school because school is their work.”

What? Is this legal? My kids are in Madison, WI public schools. Surely it is not legal for teachers to bring their own kids into the classroom.

But before I can decide what to do about this, my son says, “I want to go to your work.”

How can I say no? I try to think of a way, believe me. But I don’t have the heart.

The problem is that there is nothing in my office. Just some books.

So I buy a bunch of cookies from the coffee shop across the street from my office, and I borrow the white board from Photis and magic markers from Ryan Paugh. And my son draws on the board in between bites of cookies.

He says, “Take Your Child to Work Day is boring, let’s go home.”

Maybe this is a victory.

I have always thought a good mood is contagious, but now there's more proof, in a study published last week in the British Medical Journal, (and in the Los Angeles Times, for those of us who like our research sliced in candy-sized bites.) The researchers followed 5000 people for decades and found that if you hang out with people who say they are happy then you are more likely to report that you are happy, too.

This might be a peer pressure thing, except it's really a moot point. Because if you say you are happy, you get all the health benefits of being happy (image hosting). And, of course, those benefits are huge. It doesn't really matter that it is irrational to be happy—you will mentally and physically in better shape if you go down that irrational path.

So even though I tend to choose rational discourse over cheery conversation, today we can have both. Here are three places where I found happiness and work intersecting.

1. This is my favorite time of year for news. Because there isn't any.
We are entering the slowest news time of the year, yet the December 8 issue of Time magazine is great. When the world would stops generating big, huge, overwhelming news like world peace, world hunger, and world war, then Time magazine reporters spend their time finding the workplace angle on stories I care about.

One article that is great is How to Fix America's Schools. Michelle Rhee came to DC to overhaul the school system and in eighteen months she fired 270 teachers. Surely we can each pick out the worst teacher of our lives and fantasize that she is one of the ones. But that's not the happy part of this story.

The happy part is that the Rhee got offered the job when she was separated from her husband, sharing joint custody of two grade-school girls, in Colorado. And here's what I love. Her sort-of-not-husband relocated so that she could take the job. Of course I love that she has a sort-of-not-husband, because so do I. And it seems so hard to explain to someone I want to date, but it seems so straightforward the way Time magazine reports it. So that makes me happy.

2. Even former spouses can work together to change the world.
But here's really what makes me happy. The sort-of-not-husband said, "Moving did not seem like a whole lot of fun. But I genuinely believed that she had the potential to be the best superintendent in the country. Michelle will compromise with no one when it comes to making sure kids get what they deserve."

Here is a marriage falling apart, but the people are so much bigger than the failing marriage. They are staying together, in an odd sort of way, for the kids—not even their own children—and thus are supporting a career to change the world. That a spouse in a failed marriage will relocate to support the other's career seems big to me. Maybe this happens all the time, but I think this must be rare. Because so many things have to line up: two people that understand how a divorce can destroy kids, a man who can be secondary to a woman's career, and a woman who can risk a lot for her career. And not get killed for it in the media. This all makes me happy.

3. Telling people what makes you happy is a high form of generosity.
And here's another thing plucked from that issue of Time magazine: Joel Stein's column on The Cupcake Kings. He writes about how he gave money to kiva.org, a web site that allows everyone to participate in microfinance. It's a good way to assuage a heart that's guilty of wanting to help more people make change in their life, but not doing so. Or, it's a good way for the greedy who have been bounced off Wall Street to think they are still making investment decisions by sending $50 to the Ivory Coast to launch a pottery barn.

In Joel's case, he chose to send the startup costs—$25—to a baker in Nicaragua. And then, because Joel is not only a columnist but a nut case, he called the guy—with a Kiva.org translator—to bug him about how to run his business. (Which, by the way, is how US investors function as well, though the stakes are higher—more money and more annoying phone calls.)

Here's a great quote: "My first suggestion was to change the name of the place from the Little Mango Bakery to the far more compelling Joel and Freddy's Extreme Cupcakery." And, "Before I got off the phone, I asked the translator to quietly try one of Freddy's pastries to make sure I didn't have to bring in a new head chef." (They were delicious.)

The things that make me happy are that Joel's writing is so exuberant, and also that he's plugging a great cause. Which is what we can all do to spread a little happiness: Tell people the stuff that makes you happy. Because happiness is contagious.

I like learning this because I like being part of community. In general, it is lonely being Jewish. Not in New York City, where there are, really, more Jews than in Israel. But definitely in Wisconsin, where my son had to explain to a school administrator that Rosh Hashanah is a Jewish holiday.

There is part of me that likes being part of the community of Jews who almost all observe the High Holidays. But there is also part of me that appreciates being a minority, because you’re different, and different often means special. And we all want to be special in some way, even at the cost of being a minority.

I am fascinated with racial discrimination at work. I have felt nervous and out of place at times, like when my former bosses told offensive Jewish jokes in front of me. And when I’d tell them I am Jewish, they’d say, "Oh. Sorry. I didn't know you were Jewish." Like, “Oh, if I'd known, I’d have had the decency to say it behind your back.”

But I have seen also how valuable it can be to be just part of the group, fitting in, not a minority—it can be the difference between a promotion or not, really. Being accepted or not. And I have seen how much it means to understand what it's like for people who are treated like outsiders. I never understood this until I entered the workplace, but I like that I know what it's like to be a minority. It's part of who I am.

So I vacillate between wanting my kids to understand what it's like to be a minority, and wanting my kids to fit in. Both are so important.

But even with balanced intentions, I am never really sure what to do with myself and my kids on the Jewish High Holidays. When I was young, I went to synagogue and was bored out of my mind. But I never went to school and my parents never worked, so my kids and I do the same thing.

Leading up to the holidays, I tell my kids that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are a big deal. I drive this home by chanting a mantra with the kids that connects the Jewish stuff to what really matters to them: "First is Rosh Hashanah, then Yom Kippur, then Halloween!" I tell myself I'm being a good Jew because this generates constant discussion about the high holidays. As in, "When is Yom Kippur over so that we can buy decorations for Halloween?"

So the day before Rosh Hashanah I said to my six-year-old: "Tomorrow is a big day. We'll tell your teacher you will not be in school. And I will not go to work. Jewish people stay home to celebrate the new year. Rosh Hashanah is a big day. It 's our new year."

So we tell the teacher. And it is clear my son will be the only kid out of school.

I tell him he is special. I tell him that we are lucky to have such a nice time for the New Year, and that this is the time Jewish people think about how to make next year even better. I stress that all Jewish people take time off because I want him to have that feeling of being part of something bigger than himself or our family. I think this is a path to community if I play my cards right.

Then I stress again about what we will do with our day.

Part of the Rosh Hashanah tradition is eating apples and honey for a sweet New Year. So I decide that apple picking maybe is within the bounds of what's okay to do. The driving is not okay. And the paying for the apples is not okay. And the carrying them is not okay. But I ignore that. I tell the kids we'll pick apples and bring them home and dip them in honey.

We get to the apple orchard—it's really crowded—and my son says, "Mom, look at all the Jewish kids here!"

I think I am making progress. I think it’s working—my kids are learning what it’s like to be part of a special community, while trying really hard to fit into the bigger picture that includes everyone else, too.

There is so much written about the challenges of handling race in the workplace, but I see so little about how to cultivate otherness at work, how to thrive on being different. It seems to me that sometimes people want to do that. Figuring out how to do that is part of understanding who we are and where we fit. And the more we understand about ourselves, no matter what the angle, the better we are able to craft a life that works for us.

1. Use the downturn to figure out where you stand.
Wall Street ticks with rainmakers and math geniuses. Usually these guys (almost always guys) are tough to come by. Everyone wants them, everyone knows where they are and where they are going, and they are so powerful that they usually come and go in teams. So you can probably guess that recruiting this talent is extremely difficult.

I have a friend who specializes in headhunting finance talent, and he reports that it is unprecedented that these guys would all be fired, flailing individually, and available to the next taker. So in this downswing, where investment banking layoffs are fast and furious, the management at the places that can still hire finance talent (true banks, and other corporations that have so much money that they could be a bank, like GE or Harvard University) are finally enjoying a buyer's market.

My friend's phone is ringing all day with hiring managers scared that they're missing out on a shopping binge, all of them simmering in a sick feeling that their competitors might be getting a good deal this week.

There's a saying on the trading floor that up or down doesn't matter, because as long as there is volatility, you can make money. And it turns out that this is true of recruiting, too.

So, if your sector is tanking, test your star power. There will be a feeding frenzy for top-talent. Learn where you stand by calling a headhunter. If he or she will work with you, you have star power, or at least you're at the top of your game.

2. If you're stuck, become a stay-at-home parent.
Let's be honest. The hedge fund guys who are out of work are not going to be a big drag on our welfare system. (Well, unless you count the whole hedge fund economy as a welfare system.)

These guys have been bringing home million-dollar checks for years, so there's likely to be food on the table and money in the bank for back-to-school clothes. And guess who's taking the kids back to school? The dads. Because all those finance guys who just last month were expensing trips to strip clubs with their clients are now taking kids to preschool and then hanging out at Starbucks talking about how great it is to be a stay-at-home dad. While the markets adjust, of course.

When I was a kid, a latchkey kid, consulting was the new unemployment. Today, in the era of good parenting, stay at home parenting is the new consulting. In the Midwest it happens when you get laid off from your job at American Girl and you realize that any job you could get will not cover childcare costs. In New York it happens when you get laid off from Lehman Brothers and you realize that any job you can get will not feed your ego more than telling people you have miraculously become a doting dad.

Of course, there are people who were born to stay home with kids. Not everyone uses it as an escape route. But everyone can, if need be.

3. Free yourself from the delusion that safe paths are possible.
Here is me linking to the ten billion times I've written that there is no more corporate ladder and you should stop thinking that someone will take care of you and tell you where to go next and give you a gold watch when finally you retire at 65. Even still, when I tell people that no ladder means instead that you can be lost while you find your own path, the most fearful of self-discovery balk at being lost and instead go to law school.

Everyone used to think law school was safe, but in fact, it's not. And it's not unsafe just because more than 50% of lawyers would not recommend that you become a lawyer because they don't like it. It's not safe because you will work really hard in your early career and then get de-equitized in your later career which is the law career equivalent of having the ladder pulled out from under you.

So the last bastion of the fast track to safe money and job security used to be finance. And now, that one's gone, too. There are officially no more safe paths to money. You have to make your own path. This is a stark, big-bang broadcast that the end of the safe career is here. And that's great. Because the quest for a safe, beaten path that will work for your own life is an empty quest. We are in a new era of work, and you get to make your own path. It's exciting. Even in a down market.