The first two items on today's to-do list were "blood" and "taxes."
Actually, I get a gold star for showing up at my tax preparer's office this morning with every single document I needed. I don't think it has ever happened before that I didn't have to at least make a follow-up phone call with some missing numbers. But this year is an easy tax year for us, unlike last year when we had bought a house and sold a house, and sold some stock that had been held for many years and had split and re-split, such that I think our tax preparer had to use a quantum calculator to figure the cost basis.
Years like this, I think I could learn to do my taxes myself. But there are some things I prefer to have an expert take care of for me, and I like my tax preparer. She has guided me through not only the prickly financial parts of tax season but through the thorny moral bits as well when they have come up. I trust her. I'm glad I have her to turn to when needed.
A few weeks ago, in another context, I made a stunningly maladroit comment to the effect that work like tax preparation was little more than glorified clerical work. It would have been less maladroit had my tax preparer not been present. She replied very graciously, and what she said has stayed with me. She said that, for her, there is an element of call in tax preparation, that dealing with taxes is stressful for almost everyone and she likes making it less so. She had recently read in a trade publication about a tax-prep company that was undertaking programs to try to get up to a 50 or 60% client retention rate, and that was striking to her because her retention rate is closer to 96%, so high that she can rarely take on new clients, so she thinks she must be doing something right beyond simply preparing accurate returns. And she said, "They didn't tell us in accounting school that people would come in with wounds from the previous year, divorces or the deaths of spouses. Or a deduction needing to be removed because of the death of a child. And you can't just say, 'OK, I've deleted that one. Do you have last year's property tax bills?'"
It reminded me that there are people who experience a sense of call in almost any work imaginable. Even in housecleaning, the oft-cited epitome of exploitation. I've had friends and acquaintances who have cleaned houses say that they get satisfaction from seeing how helpful their work is to the families they work for (OK, I'll 'fess up: the people I have hired to clean my house have invariably said that to me, because the breadth of my incompetence and the depth of my need in this regard are so readily apparent. "I love cleaning your house, because it's so obvious how much you need me," is a typical--and actual--comment).
On the other hand, there is work that seems obviously call-prone, and not everyone doing that work is there because of a call. Take me: I'm a teacher, a member of that hallowed profession, a job so exalted that there is an entire genre of literature devoted to glorifying it. But I'm not called to it; I drifted to it. During periods of my life when I have not been driven to it by financial need, I don't miss it much. I take some occasional satisfaction in it; I take my responsibilities as a teacher seriously (if anything, too seriously sometimes); I'm generally a good teacher if only because I have some skills that serve that work well, like being comfortable with people, clear-spoken, and knowledgeable about my field. But I'm not sure I rise even to the level of "dedicated professional," let alone "called to the work." I suspect sometimes that the only thing that makes me so much as meet the minimum needs of my students is a generally over-developed sense of responsibility, so that, having signed a contract for the semester, I do my best by the students in my classes. But call? Heavens, no.
I think I was called to be in my relationship with David, not so much in the beginning when the drive was heavily hormonal, but later, when there were walk-away moments and we chose not to walk away. And I was called to motherhood. Without those two things, my relationship with David, and my relationship as a mother to at least one child, my life would be deformed. I can't say that about anything else.