trick question

New doctor, long form. Under the spouse section it asks for occupation.

That used to be easy: teacher. Now it’s not.

I could write stay-at-home mother – a noble calling and formidable challenge – but too often that’s viewed as a put-down, as somehow inferior. Besides, it doesn’t take into account my wife’s many part-time jobs.

It’d be easiest to write none, or N/A, or a dash. Or skip the question altogether. But that’s even less accurate, and odds are my wife, as the medical expert in our family, would stumble across this response and turn justifiably homicidal.

So I’m faced with cramming her four part-time jobs into a blank barely long enough to fit teacher. Should I pick just one? She still does teach: private voice lessons and music development classes for toddlers and their parents. Daycare provider would capture both her stay-at-home mothering and the other children she watches one or two days a week. Maybe I should pick the most prestigious: director of our county’s elementary honors chorus. Or the most corporate-sounding: marketing director for the music studio where she teaches.

But listing just one of these would leave out all the others, and somehow none of them include her other responsibilities: helping organize two mothers’ groups, singing vocals for our church’s worship team, and being the best friend I’ve ever seen to just about everyone she comes in contact with, serving them selflessly and eagerly.

Plus, on top of all that, she puts up with me.

The blank on the form is short and I’ve already deliberated over it too long, so I write the only term I know that can possibly capture my wife’s occupation in one word: saint.