Stay-at-Home Mom, Back-at-Work

Tales from a now gainfully employed woman after a 13 year career hiatus

By Dorothy Nixon

Yippee! My days of being an ambivalent, mostly stay-at-home mom are over. I’ve landed my first full-time job in 13 years! I’m 47 years old and my sons are 13 and 15.

Every morning I rise at 6 am, meditate for a few minutes and then perform some Pilates stretches. I shake my teenage boys awake, threatening them with a cold water shower if they delay) throw on some slacks and a jacket and head out to our wreck-of-a-second -car which will take me to the train station, which will stop just a 20 minute ride and short walk from work. I brush my hair in the car.

I arrive at the office on the eighteenth floor of an eye-popping art deco building downtown at precisely 8:30 and plug myself into my 8 by 6 cubicle, with its awesome view of the city. Despite the long commute, I’m feeling perky and ready to face the new day.

I answer an avalanche of emails and type away furiously, usually through lunch (this is an info-age job) and then, promptly at 10 minutes to five, I scoot to the elevator, to avoid being delayed by the homeward-bound throngs. I don’t feel guilty, after all, I take my emails at home, so I can check for any late breaking crises later in the evening. It’s 7 p.m. by the time I drive up to the door of my home. I’m tired, sure. But I don’t care. I’ve landed my first full time job in 13 years, despite the odds. (After all, I am 47). I’m back in the loop.

My last full-time job was in 1988, when my eldest was 2 and my youngest but a tender 4 months. Coincidentally, that office was located a hop and a skip from where I am now. In those days I would rise at 5 am, (if I wasn’t already awake) nurse my newborn, and feed and dress my toddler and drop my newborn off at my neighbour’s and drop my toddler off at my inlaws’ (feeling guilty as heck) and I would drive to the very same train and arrive at the office at the very same time, 8:30, phew, already tuckered out. And every day at 10 minutes to 5, I would slink out of the office to catch the same one-and-only train home, feeling guilty as heck because everyone else worked until past six.

THAT particular job at an advertising agency - lasted only 5 months, thank goodness. I quit and/or was let go - and that was the last time I brought home a steady pay cheque. I’ve fretted continuously about my family’s financial future, see MY financial future (was I destined to be a bag lady despite my ambition and education?) although I was consoled by the fact that many my working woman friends were at their wits’ end, juggling stressful 60 hour a week jobs and their privatized modern day family lives.

Fearing a bleak future for myself, I worked assiduously to build a freelance writing career mostly at home - penning essays and articles and reviews (sometimes for no money) on the Internet and elsewhere, taking a short-term contract here and there when debts loomed large.

And it worked! Today, I have a real full-time job. (Did I tell you?) A writing job. A high tech job. Sure, it’s not a particularly secure job, but what job today is? And with my son’s college tuition to top off, and the fact my husband’s income has been frozen for a decade, I’ll likely have to work until I am 83, or thereabouts, but who cares? I HAVE A FULL-TIME JOB. I’m back in the loop, and I’m positively loopy with optimism about my future.

I feel redeemed, re-energized. Maybe it isn’t so terrible for women to ‘take time off’ to raise their families in order to be there for their kids when they get home from school all excited over some barf-in-the-bus incident!

I cannot deny it. I used to argue the very opposite, and ferociously, too, with smugly content stay at home moms on parenting website message boards, the front lines of the Mommy Wars, that ideological battle between work-at-home and stay-at-home moms.

“Taking off time to raise a family for middle class women is risky,” I would say, articulating my own palpable fears. “What happens if your husband dies, or leaves you (more likely) or loses his job? Where would you be, then? Do you expect your kids to support you? Ha!”

“It is worth it,” they’d reply. They were staying home for the sake of their children. These women weren’t worried about their future. They had faith, they said and, I suspected, hefty trusty funds too.

But seems those stay-at-home moms were right. After all, I managed to find a good job after a 13 year hiatus. Why shouldn’t they?

But, then, I read about Cinquantelle, a Human Resources Canada program in Quebec, mounted in conjunction with Emploie Quebec and L’edition Magazine. Cinquantelle aims to improve the employment chances of women over 50! Women just barely older than I am. I’m suddenly depressed.

Cinquantelle is a fancy PR campaign to convince companies that older women make valuable employees. It seems that as the baby boomer men edge to retirement, more and more older women are seeking employment. They can’t afford to retire, having interrupted their careers in one way or another to raise families.

Yikes! I was right to fret. (Sure, there may be two of us women of a ‘certain age’ working in my office, but the office next door does seem to employ only suspiciously attractive young women.)

Looks like I am the exception, gainfully employed at 47 after taking time off to take care of my family. (Sure my 21 year old co-worker, with one year of technical college under his belt, makes almost as much as me, but hey, them’s the breaks.)

Maybe women should think twice about putting their careers on hold to raise families, after all. Because, if it were easy for older women to return to the workforce after raising a family the Powers That Be wouldn’t need to mount a slick PR drive to convince companies to employ them, now would they?

Dorothy Nixon will soon be moving to Toronto,as her husband has been transferred. She hopes to take her job with her.