Been a stay at home housewife for 8 years and want to go back to work badly but feel defeated and hopeless about finding a job. How do I get out of funk? –@mainlinewife
I obviously do not have direct experience with this but, that doesn’t stop me from offering advice. First off, being a “stay at home housewife” seems embedded in how you view yourself. Your twitter handle is “mainlinewife” and your “name” associated with the handle is “Main Line Housewife”.
We need to break you free from the identity you have created for yourself, from the cage you have put yourself in, from the boundaries you have personally drawn around you, like a kid playing with chalk on the playground during recess: “Nobody can walk in these lines!”
Second, congratulations on everything you’ve done. Obviously spending eight years devoted to raising children is a heroic and underrated task in our society. People shower credit on Mark Zuckerberg and make movies about him but the blood, sweat, and tears of making a brand new human being a responsible member of society is often forgotten.
Now back to your question, it takes work to get back into the job world. You need the confidence, the health, the idea engine, the spiritual engine, all working for you again. The idea muscles atrophy as quickly as any other muscle.
Most important: you need to exercise every day. And you need to write ideas down every day. Write ten ideas a day, about anything under the sun: ideas for jobs you can do, ideas for how you can help people, ideas for articles you can write, specific ideas on businesses you can start.
Assume that for one month you will only come up with bad ideas. That’s ok. But give it three to six months and everything will be different. Particularly if your other relationships are more or less smooth, and physically you stay/get in shape. The key is to not lapse back into thinking, “Damn, I can’t do this. I’m just a housewife.” In which case, follow the advice in “Being Unpredictable Will Free You” http://bit.ly/uAjea8.
Find a moment today to finger-paint. Or swim. Or take a walk by yourself. Or respondto an email from 1999. Do something that will take you out of your normal routine for 2 minutes. That’s all it takes. What happens then? Who knows? The miraculous.