What children think work is. And what they see when they watch you do it.

The question exposed something I hadn't fully considered: I don't know how to describe my work to a child in a way that makes it visible. Most of what I do is invisible. Thinking. Reading. Writing things. Talking about what might happen. My son can watch me sit at a desk for four hours and have no idea whether I'm working or not.

This is not unique to my work. It's the condition of most knowledge work, and increasingly the condition of most work generally. The physical labour that once made work legible — the thing made, the field tended, the object moved from one place to another — is less common. The invisible labour has expanded. The child watching the parent work sees: a screen, a person, sometimes words appearing.

What they can't see: the attention, the decisions, the frustration, the small satisfactions. All of that is internal and therefore invisible. May Day is traditionally about making labour visible — the worker's contribution made legible through collective action. The same problem applies in the kitchen on Tuesday: my work is invisible to my child, and his understanding of what I do is mostly guesswork. The curriculum runs every day without being scheduled.