I went to our local grocery store last night and had to write a check. What a rigamarole — they copied down my phone number and driver’s license number, then asked me what my job was. I said I was a stay-at-home mom, and they wrote “unemployed” on the check. I said, “Let me just give you my husband’s employer.”

“No, no, we have to do it this way,” they said, and sent me off to the manager’s desk to “put the check through.”

So he looked at “unemployed” scrawled across the check and asked, “Where does the money come from to cover this?”

Sigh.

I remember a similar exchange several years ago when we bought a car and wanted to put it in my name. The loan officer agreed to the loan, but urged me to “hurry up and go back to work” as we left because she felt she’d stretched the rules.

I know this is not a vast x-wing conspiracy. But it was pretty humiliating. And it did feel like a statement about how much my chosen vocation in this phase of life is valued by the world beyond the walls of my own household.