Shalom Bayis For Hire
By Chaya Miriam Fried
Sometimes I hesitate to say that I’m bookkeeping or tax, because if you think about it, the most valuable part of my output is shalom bayis. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, turn to your spouse right now and tell them that you forgot to file your taxes for the past couple of years. Or take your small business and tack on another couple of hours to figure out what’s going on with its money every night, and see how your family feels about that. Witness the heartache, the fighting, the paranoia, then think of how you could have avoided all that.
I have this theory that in every successful small business (or marriage, for that matter), there’s the person that brings the ideas, and then there’s the person that does all the logistical work. So if my husband says hey, let’s move to a relatively uninhabited town with awesome mountain biking in State X, there’s got to be a person that comes in and asks him if he’s nuts, where he plans to get the money to drive all of his stuff there, where is he going to find Jews to make fun of, how far away is the mikveh, etc. That’s me too, but that’s where I make my point: you should be growing your business while someone else runs along behind you and does the math to keep you from taking your great idea and running it into the ground.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d love to drum up some new business for myself and I figured hey, why not let all 3 of you who read Frum Satire know about it?