re: #241 A Mom Anon

Yeah, I know, I only recently told my husband about my past, shame and feeling weak and like a freak are powerful things.

Since our sense of self worth is often tied to an occupation, I have found it especially hard to accept that my 20 yrs as a full time parent mean literally nothing to potential employers. No references except personal ones and no one cares about that. I’m still struggling with what I should do now, I’m almost 54 yrs old. I’d love to go to college, but there’s no money for it, and by the time I got out of school I’d be pushing 60. Who the hell would hire me? I thought of starting a business, but without seed money, that’s not going to go far. It’s triggered depression and at this time of year especially (did I mention I hate the holidays? GAH) no one wants to hear that stuff. I recently confessed my hatred of this time of year to a dear friend and she was STUNNED that I could feel like that. It’s not like there’s no reason and I’m Scrooge, I have concrete reasons why. But you can’t say it aloud or people run like crazy and stop having much to do with you.

I went through a very similar thing in my 50s, when I lost a well-paying job, was under- and unemployed after that, my house was foreclosed on, and I had to move here to the “boondocks”, into my son’s house; in fact, I had a “nervous breakdown” during that period. I share a similar story to yours in that I was raised very poor and raised 2 kids by myself with virtually no education except a couple of yrs of comm college in my 30s.

But getting out of the pressure cooker I was in, as a single female person, and scaling down everything, including jobs, was an eye opener and mental health cleansing in my case. I was on so many medications before I moved here I was a zombie and incapable of making decisions; I got off all of them and have never looked back. Learning to simply go with what I have and not “forecasting” the future was a huge step.