Finding a job these days is a daunting prospect. But imagine how much more daunting it can be if you haven’t held a job for the past ten, fifteen, even twenty years. You worry that employers will look askance at that huge hole on your resume. Your skills may have gotten rusty—or perhaps, given the rapid pace of change, obsolete. And you’re going to be competing against energetic, tech-savvy applicants half your age.
It’s a situation faced all too often by women who’ve chosen to take time off from their careers to care full-time for their kids and who later—whether by choice or necessity or both—try to get back into the workforce.
I’ve been lucky. Unsure of whether I wanted to continue my career in the law or stay home with my kids, I managed to find an interesting and fulfilling part-time job when I was pregnant with my first child. Later I turned to writing, which (in addition to being the one thing I’ve always wanted to do) gave me the ability to control my hours.
But I’ve long been interested in the difficulties faced by mothers seeking jobs after having gone cold turkey from the work world. I’ve had friends in that position, and I’m well aware I could easily have been there myself. Beyond that, it’s a national, maybe even a global problem as well as a personal one. These women have talents and skills that could benefit the economy and society. If they can’t find a way to put them to use, we all lose.
So when I saw an opportunity to weave this theme into my novel The Mother Daughter Show, I jumped at it. Years ago, when I was freelancing for a magazine, I tried to write a feature article on stay-at-home mothers who were going back to work. I interviewed a lot of interesting women, but few of them were willing to be profiled intensively and identified by name. Not only were they wary of the invasion of their privacy, they didn’t want to be seen as somehow speaking for all women in their position—feelings I could readily understand. So if I wanted to write about this phenomenon, fiction seemed like a better approach.
My character Amanda practiced law unhappily for a brief period of time, as I did. When it became economically feasible for her to stay home, she jumped at the chance. With three young kids, she barely had time to contemplate whether she would ever pick up her legal career again—and she wasn’t exactly eager to do that anyway. As her kids got older, she found the idea of looking for a job after such a long hiatus paralyzing. When the book begins, Amanda’s youngest child is about to leave for college. And she’s under serious pressure to make some money: she and her husband have just lost their nest egg in the 2008 stock market crash, and they’re facing the prospect of three college tuitions.
It’s hard enough to return to a career after a long absence when you really loved what you were doing. But trying to launch a reentry when you’re unenthusiastic about the job you left makes it way harder. Some women, like Amanda, always disliked their jobs. Others find that the years they’ve spent at home have changed what they want. One of the women I interviewed for my abortive magazine article had a successful career in the aircraft industry before quitting to stay home with her kids. When a divorce forced her to start thinking about a return to work, she discovered she no longer wanted to be a part of the macho world where she’d once thrived. Instead, she decided to get a graduate degree in school counseling.
Whether you’re returning to the same career or embarking on something new, there’s bound to be anxiety and trepidation. Thankless as the job of being a stay-at-home mom often is, at least you’re your own boss (unless, of course, you have a tyrannical toddler). And you can wear what you like. If you’re accustomed to that degree of freedom, you may not relish the prospect of taking orders from someone else (possibly someone younger than you) and squeezing yourself into constricting work clothes.
And a woman who doesn’t feel she’s exercised her intellect much lately may come to doubt her abilities. I’m not one to underestimate the psychic rewards of unpaid work—whether in the home or outside it—but there’s nothing that says “validation” like a regular paycheck. When I was doing background research for my novel, I interviewed Linda Mercurio, Director of the Lawyer Reentry Program at American University Law School, who said the women she counsels have often “lost that sense of themselves as a professional.” She reminds them that they’ve “never lost that piece of themselves,” and that what made them successful before will make them successful again.
If you do develop the confidence and have the luck to snare a job, you may find—as Amanda does—that you’ve now got two jobs: the one you’re getting paid for, and the one you were doing at home for free. Old habits die hard, and husbands and children who are used to having someone else pick up after them, cook their food, and do their laundry may be slow to adjust. And of course, you don’t stop being a mom just because you’ve gotten a job.
The Mother Daughter Show being a comic novel, I gave Amanda a happy ending: after she suffers through a stint as a temporary employee doing the dreariest of legal work, the (non-legal) job of her dreams falls into her lap. Certainly many real women—even in this difficult economy—eventually find a way to successfully reintegrate themselves into the world of work. But it should be easier than it is. Someday, I hope, society will recognize that the talents and intelligence a woman once brought to her career haven’t vanished while she’s been home with her kids. In fact, given what it takes to raise a kid, they’ve probably gotten a lot sharper.