By Jim Mullen

Nea Columnist

Like most people, I’m not very good at remembering jokes. But every now and then one sticks with me like a bare thigh on a hot vinyl car seat. A guy wrote to Reader’s Digest a few years ago to say that one day as he was driving his 5-year-old daughter to kindergarten, she turned to him and asked, “Dad, when did Mom come to work for us?”

I remembered the line when it was recently reported that if you had to pay a salary to a full-time, stay-at-home mom for all the different work she did – the baby-sitting, the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the chauffeuring, the overtime – it would cost you $134,000 a year.

Now if you are a man, especially a successful businessman, you know how ridiculous that figure is. It’s as if it’s been pulled out of thin air. For the baby-sitting alone a successful businessman would pay himself up to $5 million a year. And he’d also want the family jet to be available to him at all times, as well as the use of the family-owned condos in Paris, Rome, Martinique and Hawaii.