easy. That’s how long my severance was, and I thought, hey, this ain’t

bad — a full salary and I don’t have to go to work. I’ve got Thanksgiving

and Christmas and New Year’s. So I did what any logical person would

do; I went shopping. Bad idea. Swathed in denial and the absolute

confidence that I would get a new job immediately, I defiantly spent

my whole severance like a petulant teenager, even throwing a Martha-perfect

Christmas dinner party (the cheese man at Wegman’s loves me). And

I did get some very cool shoes. But when January rolled around and

my severance ran out and I still had no job, I got just a teeny weeny

bit cranky. And all of you know, when Mommy’s not happy, ain’t nobody

happy. I thought I was covering up beautifully, greeting my son every

day with a big smile and saying oh so positive things to my husband,

like this could be the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was a poster child of domestic prowess. I baked seven

flavors of biscotti for my husband’s clients’ holiday gifts and organized

a glitter paint activity for my son’s holiday class party. I finished

painting the dining room, which I had abandoned three years ago, the

perfect apple green with cream trim. One night, however, as my husband

and I toasted the poetic justice of our having been approved for a

home equity loan the very week before I got laid off, a nasty little

feeling of doom moved in, complete with toothbrush and several changes

of underwear.

The second lesson I learned was about communication. One of the hardest

things about being unemployed is not arguing with your spouse in front

of your kid. Kids may look like they’re not paying attention but they

absorb every argument you have. David and I kept saying we’ve got

to talk about this stuff when Mackenzie’s asleep. But then David would

come home and I’d say, "Did you get paper towels?" and he’d

say, "No, I forgot," and boom, Bush is in the situation room

raising the security code to red alert — at least on my street.

I’d mutter under my breath and David would slide into second base

with some comment about my job search, like, "Honey, maybe your

dream job isn’t out there. It’s been three months. Maybe you really

need to think about switching gears," or "You know, the economy’s

really bad. You really should think about accepting whatever your

first offer is." Through clenched teeth, I’d stuff "I’m doing

my best" into the dam, as if that would stop the torrent of emotion,

all the while cursing my former employer and the current administration

and bin Laden. All of this, because of forgotten paper towels.

It’s important to remember that some things can’t be taken back —

and those things are even worse if your kid hears them. Know that

you’re mad at the rat bastard who laid you off, not your spouse.

Then one day, I sat down with Mackenzie and said, "Mommy’s not

going to go to work at her old job. But she’s going to get a new job."

"OK," he said. "Can I go over to Lexi’s?" OK, I thought,

that went well. What I didn’t know is that his reaction would be delayed

and more subtle than even my sharp mom antennae were used to.

for a long time is kind of like living in a life-sized board game.

Each day is a new roll of the dice: Get a call for an interview; buy

new suit for $200 and advance three spaces. Get rejection letter and

criticize the way your husband loads the dishwasher; go back five

spaces. Your car’s alternator dies; draw a chance card and decide

which is more important in your life — transportation or food.

David and I had to look at how we could shave some expenses. So we

decided to stop eating. No, actually, we decided to stop feeding Mackenzie.

We did take him out of karate and the after school program that he

loves because he gets to play with all his friends. He was disappointed

at first, but then he realized he and I would get to spend a lot more

time together in the afternoons and he seemed fine.

On a whim, David bought a book about origami. Mackenzie and I became

origami gurus. We would sit for hours and make cranes and crows and

frogs and little boxes with separate compartments. Mackenzie cranked

out praying nuns and tulips and water bombs with no help from me.

After he went to bed, I would tackle even harder things, like lizards

and sampan boats.

In the morning, I would show Mackenzie my creation, and he would hold

it as if it were made of glass and exclaim, "Mommy, you’re wonderful!"

And I would say, "Mackenzie, you’re wonderful!" Those were

the little triumphs that kept me going as winter wore on and I scoured

Monster and Flipdog and CareerBuilder and HotJobs and mediabistro.com,

as I called every single person I ever worked with, as I wrote and

refined my "30-second sell," as I planned answers to the 101

most difficult interview questions, as I went to job-hunting groups

and listened to an awkward circle of sad sack overachievers tell their

tale. "Hi, I’m John. I was senior VP of IT at Monolithic Bank.

I saved my company $40 million by designing a new telecommunications

system for divisions in London, Hong Kong, and Sydney." "Wow,"

I thought, as 20 more people told virtually the same story — in

every field from retail to architecture.

One afternoon my husband came home from a shoot in the oncology unit

at a medical center. He told me that he had struck up a conversation

with a chemo patient, a woman maybe in her fifties, who told him that

she had worked in HR for a pharmaceutical company, and it was her

job to lay off about 200 people. Then, two weeks after she was finished,

her boss laid her off. Then she got cancer. That shut me up for about

two days. Perspective really sucks.

It was February. It was cold. It was snowing. A lot. I was becoming

more and more discouraged. Here I was, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude

from Tufts, with an immaculate resume full of "active verbs"

and no typos showcasing 20 solid years of work experience in public

relations, writing, corporate communications, and book publishing.

I worked every connection I had to make sure I had a name to drop

in as many of my cover letters as possible. Did I mention the snow?

I was lucky enough to get interviews for senior editorial positions

at a major educational research company and a leading young adult

nonfiction publisher; public affairs positions at a world-renowned

foundation and a leading scholarly institute, a PR position at a private

school offering a salary $20,000 below what I was making at the time.

But none of the interviews led to an offer. I didn’t even get callbacks

for dozens more jobs I applied for at medical communications firms,

educational and healthcare publishers, parenting magazines, and marketing

agencies from New York to Philadelphia. The HR department at one Princeton

marketing communications firm told me they were getting 200 resumes

a week. OK, I’m doomed. And it’s snowing.

was about anger — and patience. I hadn’t a shred of self-confidence

left. I was moving over to the dark side, the place those unemployment

articles don’t tell you about (kind of like how they never tell you

about labor and delivery while you’re pregnant — they just figure

it’s best if you don’t know). Those little things, those things that

parents in better times shrug off as "boy things" or "seven-year-old

things," began to set my teeth on edge. Lost sneakers. Lost library

books. My son can make a B-52 bomber out of a three-inch square of

foil he finds in his lunchbox (maybe it’s the origami influence),

so he would pick up anything on the dining room table and start playing

with it, rather than move on to the next homework problem.

When he had to write a story from his spelling word

list and said he couldn’t, I said with exasperation, "Mackenzie!

Just pick anything and write about it!" "But, Mom, I can’t

think of anything!" "Just think of something!" "I

can’t!" "Well, geez, Mackenz, it’s not that hard!" And

the tears would spill out of his eyes, and there it’d be — that

look: "For crying out loud, lady, I’m seven!" In the late

winter, he just became a royal pain. He blew bubbles in his milk.

He threw fits when I picked him up from play dates, big fits. He actually

crushed a juice box on his head in the middle of a birthday party

and squirted the remainder over the table. (I thought of a line from

my favorite author, Anne Lamott. In an essay on anger, she talked

about how mad she could get at her son: "I gave birth to him.

So I figure if I kill him, it’s a wash.") Did I put two and two

together that just maybe my son was reacting to the tension in his

house? No! I just thought he’d gone off his meds.

One morning, I barked at him for something. As he stepped on the school

bus, he turned around and barked at me, "When are you going to

get a stinkin’ job?" The bus doors shut, and the bus drove away

while 10 pairs of elementary school eyes stared at me. I just stood

there. I felt morbidly alone, like I’d just been dumped on another

planet where they don’t have Bloomingdale’s. When Mackenzie got off

the bus that afternoon, the first words out of his mouth were, "Did

you get a job today?" "No, honey," I said, "But I’m

trying." I felt like I was reporting to Mini Me. And that little

creature of doom was making closet space for himself now.

One evening after giving up all hope of finding the real Mackenzie

inside the alien that now lived with us, I went up to my room and

lay on my bed with my back to the door. After a bit, I felt a little

hand on my back, a small finger tap-tapping. "Mama?" I turned

over and there he was, all ready for bed in his jammies with Big Dog

— his equivalent of a security blanket, a large stuffed puppy

he’d had since birth — in one arm and a really ugly stuffed bulldog

in the other, a toy he won when my husband took him to Great Adventure

last summer. "Hey, buddy," I said. He thrust the bulldog at

me. "Bulldog needs some loving, Mama. You need an animal to sleep

with. I have Big Dog and you don’t have one. You need Bulldog."

Well, damned if I haven’t slept with Bulldog every night since then.

They say unemployed people start to mimic the psychological symptoms

of abused children after so much constant rejection. A stuffed animal

feels remarkably good when you’re unemployed.

Sometimes it takes a total outsider to put you back on track. My mother

suggested that we put Mackenzie back in the after school program and

find a way to cut back elsewhere. She thought it would be better for

him to associate his being able to go back separately from my getting

a job; he probably felt our taking him out was a punishment because

I lost my job. Here’s the really good thing that came of that. We

told him that he could go back but he had to do all his homework while

he was there. And he did — every day.

After I had started working again, I asked him how he felt while I

was job-hunting. And he said, "Oh, you mean the day I said, ‘When

are you going to get a stinkin’ job?’" Yeah, that day, I said.

"I felt mad, aggressive, angry, like I was gonna do a kick or

a punch or a belly thing. But I held it back." "Why were you

mad?" I asked. "Because I couldn’t go to the after school

program. But then I got to go back, and I was happy." Bingo.

When you’re unemployed, your kid can drive you nuts, but he can also

be your savior. Late at night, I would tiptoe into his room and place

my cheek against his cheek. I would listen to the silence and the

deep slow pattern of his breathing. Like a blackboard eraser, watching

Mackenzie sleep would simply wipe away my anxiety.

it’s important to keep job hunting tasks separate from family life

and that you have to make time for your spouse whether you feel like

it or not. I had a habit of surfing the job sites after my son went

to bed and then at 11 or 12, fall exhausted and frustrated into bed,

sort of waving at my husband as I went up the stairs. Most nights

he’d fall asleep on the couch, after watching the late night talk

shows and then the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC till the early hours

of the morning. For months this was the pattern, until one morning,

he said, rather out of the blue, "I feel like I don’t exist for

you anymore." Initially, I was mad, like why should I have to

take care of you, when I already have to take care of Mackenzie and

get a job and keep my head together and do my best to get over the

excruciating anger I have at my former employer? You mean I have to

pay attention to you, too?

As if all these thoughts were on my forehead, he said, "Yeah,

you do." I was dumbfounded. I realized I could try to have a conversation

with him, which might turn into an argument, or I could go to Pilates

class. I chose Pilates. After class, I went to my "mobile office,"

Panera in Nassau Park, and bought a really large cup of cappuccino

and whatever baked good looked like it had the most carbs.

I really tried to be a grown-up, you know, think about what this whole

job hunting thing must be like from my husband’s perspective. I figured

it must really suck to have your wife, who has worked every day since

you met her, wired out of her gourd 24/7 and so brain-dead that she

loses her cell phone in between the car in the driveway and the front

door, which I did, about two months after I got laid off. My son found

it on the floor of his closet on Father’s Day.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that David could

have been a real thorn in my side while I was job hunting, but the

thing is, except for some occasional comments, most of which were

justified under the circumstances, he wasn’t. I just made him out

to be. He did nothing but good things for me while I was unemployed.

He offered to drive me to Philadelphia when I had an interview there

in the middle of a snowstorm. After every job I didn’t get, he would

identify some totally logical reason why I would have hated working

there.

One morning I came downstairs and found a stunning flower

arrangement the size of Texas on the dining room table, which he had

snagged from some event. Another night he came home and tossed two

perfect pink roses on my lap. "Where’dya get these?" I asked.

"What do you mean where did I get them? I got them at the store!"

"Oh, I thought maybe you got them at a shoot." "No, I

actually bought them for you." He went upstairs to bed, exasperated.

By April, I had been unemployed five months and had 16.3 versions

of my resume on the computer. I had made myself crazy and exhausted

with job-hunting stuff. I didn’t have a whole lot to hang onto. And

the one person I could be hanging onto was right in front of me. So

I switched gears. David and I started going out for breakfast and

taking mini road trips while Mackenzie was at school and dreaming

about all the great things we were going to do to our house.

In fact it was my husband who jumpstarted the chain of events that

resulted in my getting a job: this newspaper had given me an open

invitation to freelance, something I had done for U.S. 1 15 years

ago. The standard job hunting advice of calling everyone you ever

worked with took on a new meaning, and I realized that job hunters

might do well to reconnect with contacts from the very early years

of their career. David kept encouraging me to do the freelance writing,

to keep my brain going. I thought no, I can’t do that, I have to keep

searching. David kept saying, quietly but persistently. "Make

the call. Do what you love. Make the call." One day, more to shut

him up than anything else, honestly, I made the call, which led to

assignments and eventually a fulltime job at the paper.

made during my job search was to a former colleague. She said, "Don’t

rush your job hunt. Use this time to become human again." I like

to think that all the jobs I didn’t get meant that I just wasn’t human

again yet, that I needed more time. Time to learn that we are more

than our jobs. We are a best friend to somebody, a teacher to a child,

a partner to someone who needs us, a mother, a sister, a neighbor,

a citizen, a human being.

Two days before I got my job, I started to teach my son to ride a

bike. He and I took his bike down to the park. We practiced on the

evening of Memorial Day, then the next afternoon. Then on Wednesday,

we went to practice again. I told Mackenzie on the drive to the park

that I had gotten a job at this newspaper. I showed him one of my

articles in the paper. His face lit up like a Christmas tree. I showed

him my byline. It was easy to explain that that was "my new work."

It was dusk and we had the whole park to ourselves. After just a few

times with me holding onto the back of his bike and running alongside

of him, Mackenzie said, "OK, this time let go." "Are you

sure?" I asked. "I’m sure," he said. And I did, and he

flew down the path, leaning into the curves, sticking his feet straight

out like Pippi Longstocking’s pigtails, and building up speed down

to the end of the path. I watched him go, like a baby bird flying

out of the nest for the first time. He was screaming with joy. Way

at the other end of the path, he came to a rather abrupt stop, leapt

off the bike, turned towards me and yelled, circling his hips and

arms like a rapper, "Yeah baby, I rock. I rock! Who’s your Daddy?"

Coincidentally, or maybe not, David came home and guessed at where

we might be, and on our way out of the park, we saw him drive in.

We stopped and got Mackenzie’s bike out of the car so he could show

his dad his great accomplishment.

As Mackenzie flew down the path again, David put his arm around me

and said, "I’m really proud of you." "About the job or

about teaching Mackenzie to ride a bike?" I asked. "Both,"

he said. "But mostly about the bike. I knew you’d get your job."

Corrections or additions?

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