When I was in college, I went to school full time, and worked several part time jobs at once, in an effort to survive. I knew that I was good at working with children, and I was going to school to get a teaching degree, so I started working at several different day care centers. (And a few telemarketing places, and random summer jobs as needed). I believed that the jobs as a “teacher” at the day care centers would be good to put on a resume, and that this would eventually help me get a “real job” as a teacher.
One day care center refused to hire me for part time work because I hadn’t taken enough “Early Childhood Education” classes to please them. It seemed my efforts towards a B.S. in Education were not good enough, especially once they found out I was specializing in Art. The day care center that shared the same building with them wasn’t happy that I was still a student, because I couldn’t work for them Monday through Friday, with completely open availability. Instead, I worked for both places as a Substitute day care teacher. I never knew when I would be called to work, and there was no way to predict how much work I would get. I had to keep working weekends as a tele-marketer, desperately trying not to starve to death.
Luck smiled upon me one summer, and I was offered a job as a teacher. It was almost full time work, which allowed me to quit working telemarketing. The job ended when the new semester started, and the day care center decided it was easier for them to hire a few part time college students than to work around my new class schedule. I eventually found another teaching job, at a newer day care center, that would work around my classes. I remember working ten and twelve hour days, and convincing the director to pay me hourly to paint brightly colored child-centric murals on the bare classroom drywall. The problem was that the pay was much too low to live on.
I spent a semester doing Student Teaching, one of the most intense, emotional, stressful, perplexing, terrifying, and exhilarating things a person who wants to be a teacher can experience. It took all day, five days a week, starting hours before school began, and ending hours after the dismissal bell rang, (and the janitors kicked me out). More hours were spent creating lesson plans, preparing art materials, and grading endless art projects. In other words, Student Teaching was an unpaid internship, of sorts, except that I was required to do it if I wanted to graduate, and I was paying a whole lot of money for the privilege. Once it was over, I was exhausted, and wanted a break from teaching. Could I really live like that, for years and years, until I was old enough to retire? I believed teaching would kill me long before then.
After graduation, I did what the young character in the movie “Up In the Air” did, and “followed a boy” to a city somewhat far away from the college town where we met, fell in love, and lived together. He had been working for a hospital the entire time I was student teaching, and had grown tired of the long commute. There just so happened to be a day care center at the hospital, where the doctors and nurses could take their children while they were working. I was right back in day care, but that was ok, because it was a stable job situation. The pay was higher than any of the day care centers I had previously worked in. I had health insurance for the first time in my entire life, paid sick days, paid vacation days, and even a 403B fund, to help me plan for retirement. I finally had job stability! I could quit worrying now, right?
Wrong. The day care center had a quirky way of sending people home as soon as a certain number of children were picked up for the night. The hospital would then subtract the same amount of hours from our vacation pay, but not pay us for those hours, which always seemed less than legal to me. The secretary in charge of deciding which teachers got sent home, and which ones got to stay and earn money would keep her friends, and send home everybody else first. She decided she didn’t like me, and I was right back to not being able to count on a regular paycheck.
At the same time, my relationship with the boyfriend imploded, and we went through what would have been called a divorce, if we had ever gotten married in the first place. I moved out, stuck at this dreadful job, while everything else got sorted out. One of my closest relatives was dying, and, when the secretary at the day care center refused to allow me to have time off so I could go visit, I quit the job. I used the last of my health insurance to get an official health exam, including a drug test, and sent the paperwork and a resume to the school district in my hometown. I was moving back there to be closer to my family. I had no job, no reason to expect the school district was hiring, and no idea where I was going to live. But, I believed this unsure situation was only temporary. I was about to use the big expensive college degree I worked so hard to get, and become a teacher. This would solve everything. After all, the old saying was “if nothing else works out, you can always teach”. Things would get better.
What followed was four years working as a Substitute Teacher for the same school district I attended as a student. I never knew when I would be offered work, or where, or how much. This made it impossible to make a budget, and it was always a guess if I would have enough money to pay my bills with. I ended up supplementing, at first by working an overnight job stocking shelves at a retail store two nights a week, until, several months later, I became so sleep deprived that I was damn near delirious. I no longer had health insurance, or paid sick days, or any vacation days, and there certainly wasn’t any offer to help me finance my retirement. I ended up working for an after school program, and trying to stretch the hours they offered me over the summer into something I could potentially live on.
The reason I continued this mad lifestyle was because of a promise. I was told in college that working as a Substitute Teacher was a great way to get a job in a school district. When positions opened up, they would want to give the jobs to the people who they were familiar with, who had already proven themselves competent and reliable. Instead, I watched the schools cut Art position after Art position, and learned that I had the wrong degree to be offered any other kind of teaching job. (Unless, of course, I wanted to pay more money and go back to school). I’d been led to believe that the expensive degree I had framed, and hanging on my wall was a “Golden Ticket” to a good, stable, job. Instead, I learned it wasn’t even worth the paper it was printed on.
An odd series of events led me to apply for a retail job, for a big chain store that was opening up a new store nearby. I never expected to get the job, because I had very little retail experience, and all of it was years and years ago. Instead, I got hired part time. I was able to quit the after school job, but had to continue working as a Substitute Teacher. I was making a higher hourly wage at the retail job than I was able to make at the after school job.
This company offered paid sick days, paid vacation days, health insurance (with dental and eye care), and even a 401K, but only to full time workers. As soon as a position opened up, I stepped in, “volunteering” to do some of the tasks that weren’t getting done since the previous worker quit. I ended up getting that job, and was told by the store manager that he wasn’t even considering me for the job until he noticed what a hard worker I was.
I quit the dead end job as a Substitute Teacher immediately. I wasn’t teaching, but that was ok. Working as a Substitute Teacher felt more like babysitting than teaching, and I was constantly getting sick, and couldn’t afford to go to the doctor, or take a day off to get better. I finally had a stable job that I didn’t need to supplement with a second one. I was making enough money to get a mortgage, and begin working my way towards owning a condo. I had fallen in love again, and Shawn and I got married. When we decided to move across the country, I was able to transfer my full time job (and all it’s benefits) from one state to another, with very few missed work days in between.
And then, of course, things changed. The company that I started working for was no longer interested in education, and community outreach, and instead focused all its energy on sales. Nothing else mattered. When the economy got bad, this company promptly cut all the titles of the full time workers. There was no longer a reasonable expectation that I would continue to get full time work. Managers were encouraged to cut as many hours as possible, and then to cut even more. Employees who worked for this company for many more years than I did went from having forty hours one week, to being given five hours the next. Everyone’s hours got cut, but the workload didn’t, and the addition of a new district manager made everyone completely miserable.
This job was killing more than my soul, it was also screwing with my health. I got injured (tendonitis) more than once, from lifting stock. The added stress meant that my body could no longer stand the amount of dust I was breathing in daily, and I needed a second, and then a third allergy medication to get through the day. It was time to get out.
By now, I had started writing. I had a completed second draft of a book all ready to go, and I had published my first book of poetry. I started writing for a website that paid writer for articles they wrote, but, none of this amounted to enough to live on. I wanted a stable job. I wanted access to health care!
I ended up finding a job as a paraeducator in a Special Needs classroom for the local school district. It offered health care, paid sick days, paid vacation days, and a retirement fund. I was in a union now, and I believed this would help keep the workplace from screwing me over. I was working less hours than I had to at the retail job. I had lots of days off. I knew, for a fact, that I would never work weekends ever again. I had summers off, (with the possibility of working summer school). What I believed was a stable job disappeared in the blink of an eye, and that is how I ended up writing this blog.
What did I learn? That “job stability” doesn’t exist anymore. I learned that I can exist without access to health care, and pray that my husband and I will continue to be reasonably healthy, so we won’t become bankrupt from a hospital visit. I learned that jobs that are willing to offer health care, paid days off, retirement plans, and all the other stuff I wanted so badly when I was in college are few and far between now. And yet, I am not yet homeless. I am surviving.
Years ago, I considered trying to focus on my writing, to see if I could live off of it. I was always afraid to do it, though, because freelance work seemed so risky. What if I couldn’t find enough jobs? What if not enough of them hired me? Did I really want to go back to scrounging around for work, desperate to pay the bills, like I spent my college years doing? In the past, it always seemed like a stupid idea, to spend time looking for freelance work, that could never be anything more than a gamble.
Well, guess what? Every single job out there right now is a gamble. All of them! Nobody is safe. The concept of a “stable job” no longer exists. I have decided it’s time for me to give this writing thing a try, now that there is nothing to lose. Yes, it’s possible that I won’t find enough freelance work to sustain me. But, its equally possible that I won’t find enough of a “real job” to sustain me either, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Time to jump in, and find out if I sink of swim. I’ve applied to not one, but two want ads asking for freelance writers so far. Let’s see what happens.
Time to swim.
