Unemployable

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 1254

During my entire childhood, my mother worked. She was a broadcaster, a writer, and a TV morning show contributor. I can remember coming home many times and finding her office door closed. If I bothered to make myself known, she would always say, “I can’t stop, Bex. I can’t stop.” And I would usually slink off to the kitchen to make myself some beans on toast.

At her memorial service, my half-sister, Mercy, who only intermittently lived with us and whose real mother was an actual stay-at-home mum, said growing up that my mother, who she also called mum, was the first and only working mother she knew. 

I grew up with the notion of working, and it wasn’t a particularly happy one. While my mother had an enormous amount of success in a very small market, she failed spectacularly when she eventually moved to New York and tried to make a go of it. That’s a little unfair. She didn’t fail spectacularly; she did get published in GQ, The Village Voice, Lears, and a number of other magazines, but there was always such angst, and the lack of security took a toll on all of us. Whatever was going on in my life, whether heartbreak or bone break, she would wail that she couldn’t be bothered with such trifles. Didn’t I understand that if this column, essay, or opinion piece wasn’t done and done in time, then the whole edifice of our lives would crumble? And, of course, nothing she wrote pleased her. Though she made damn sure to grill me, and if I wasn’t dazzled and awed, then I was a philistine, unread, lacking in any imagination. After she died, I re-read a lot of her work. It was good, better than good, something I never got to enjoy with her pacing the living room, nudging me roughly if I took too long or didn’t laugh at the appropriate lines.

While my impulse to my mother’s overweening hysteria about work was not to work, it was the opposite for my younger sister Sophie. She was determined to find a steady job, with no doubts as to when a pay cheque may come, nobody telling you that you haven’t struck the right tone, or that you were confusing your readers with that “British humour. Which is what? Sarcasm?” This kills me because she has probably the greatest imagination and comic timing of any person I’ve ever met. You can’t have grown up in a life where a threat of eviction was ever present and want to follow that path.

There were plenty of people who wondered why I haven’t worked, and more still who have marvelled at the fact that my husband has been willing to support me. I have no concrete explanation for why I chose to live a life without a job. I have theories. One of them is shame. I did have opportunities. I worked for a while as an arts reporter for CBC Radio. Freelance. I was a soundman on a documentary about the Turkana tribe in Kenya and also helped write the commentary. These could’ve blossomed into real careers. But they didn’t. They sputtered out. Many a night, I lay in my bed staring up at the ceiling, wondering why these various things I attempted just didn’t take. 

I hit my thirties. I started to work on a novel. It took ten years to write. Obviously, I felt bad about not making any money, but I didn’t know what to do about it. All my friends their careers had taken off and the only job I had had was being a waitress at O’Neal’s Baloon. I was a fantastic waitress. But that was decades back. Now, I was approaching my forties, and I was good at and good for nothing. 

To cover my shame, I blamed my mother. She let me drop out of high school. She never got my dyslexia diagnosed. And in a weird way, she wanted me to be a handmaiden to her career. That doesn’t pay, either.

I started my next novel and now I’m careening towards my fifties. Then, my sixties. The shame of not making money began to calcify into something else. Stubbornness. “What would you have me do?” I would sometimes cry to my husband. “Be a fifty-year-old waitress!  It’s the only thing I know how to do.” 

My sister Sophie, after working in the garment industry for forty years, very much like my mother, found her industry changing almost overnight. In my mother‘s case, magazines died on the vine. In Sophie’s case, the middleman was cut out, and stores now deal directly with the factories in China. 

She is unemployed for the first time since she was fifteen years old. We spent hours on the phone trying to think of a job that she could do that wouldn’t be humiliating or degrading or beneath her. It’s next to impossible. She worked for a bit at Anderson Windows, but it was basically Glengarry Glenn Ross on steroids. It soon became clear that all the leads she was given would only result in a set of steak knives, if that.

Think about it. If you were an unskilled person, there really are no jobs available for women that now can’t be done by AI or require a level of education and experience that we both missed out on. 

The truth is, it’s not my mother’s fault; it’s mine. Vanity, being deluded about what my writing might yield, and shame created a permanent barrier between me and a job.

How little my earnings have been was made manifest when I, as a joke, went online to the Social Security website, typed in my number, and was quickly informed that I was eligible for nothing.

What does this all mean to a sixty-five-year-old? Do I have no self-worth?  These are questions that I can’t possibly answer.

There are definite downsides to my not making my own money. I don’t feel I have the right to spend any money. I haven’t gone to a hairdresser since the dawn of time, nor a dentist. I wax my own bikini line. I paint my own nails, well, that’s a lie because I bite my nails, so I’ve never painted my nails, but you get the drift. I try not to be acquisitive. But I do have my lapses. If I see a great cutting board, a good knife, or anything to do with the kitchen, yes, I can’t help myself. And Amazon at two in the morning is definitely a siren call.

How do you buy a present for your husband for his seventieth birthday when he’s made all the money? How do you buy Christmas presents or anniversary presents or any of the other things? 

There have been many people, friends, and colleagues who have questioned the fact that I have never made any money, and to Charles‘ credit, he has always defended me. Publicly.

But every single one of our terrible arguments, the worst ones, the ones that make you feel so lousy, that make you feel there’s no hope for the marriage, all come from the fact that I haven’t made any money. They are rare, but they do happen.

As I sit, my face swollen from tears, I can only offer one excuse. An overwhelming desire to be protected, and hiding under the wing of my husband is the only way that I have found comfort after the storms of being my mother‘s daughter.

Bex lives in France with her husband and their dog. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, Finnick