Let me tell you about my mom and the choices she’s made, careerwise, as best as I know.

My father is my educational inspiration, and really he deserves his own entry but for some background I’ll share his part of the story:

• He finished highschool in Nigeria but could not afford to go to University despite his great love of education (sometimes love just ain’t enough!). His father was not a wealthy man (he was a farmer) and therefore could not help him.
• Undeterred, my pops worked for six years to make money to help support his family (his parents and siblings), all the while doing what he could to make sure he didn’t lose his any of the knowledge he obtained in school. During this time he also applied for full scholarships to finance his education.
• Finally, he got a full scholarship to study in the USA, and that’s where he got his Bachelors and Masters degrees. He had decided my mom was the woman for him prior to his leaving Nigeria for school, so after he had been in the States for a little while, she went to join him. My sister and I were born there.

Back to my mom:

While in the USA, my mom got her Associates degree in Accounting a month before I was born. In fact there is a picture of her from her graduation, in a royal blue graduation gown, large with child, beaming and holding her diploma.

When I was three, we moved to Nigeria, where we lived for three years. My mom worked in accounting while we lived in Nigeria.

When I was six, we moved to Canada; it was my dad’s fault: he received a full scholarship to obtain a PhD. While he studied, my mom took care of my sister and I and worked in jobs that would allow her the flexibility of being at home for us children after school. She worked in restaurants, fast food and otherwise, doing food prep most of the time. She also cleaned houses. My brother was born a year after we moved to Canada; and my second brother followed two years later. While the boys were growing up, my mom was home when we came back from school. She baked yummy treats for us and we always had home cooked meals (we rarely ordered out in our early years in Canada). My dad received his PhD a year after the baby of the family was born.

My father found work in another province in Canada, so we moved across the country to our current city. I remember having a paper route, and delivering the fat Saturday edition of the local paper with my mom. My mom sold Avon as a way to make some money while working fulltime as a stay at home mom.

Then, four years after moving here, she started working part time at a department store, in the shoe department. Given her long break from the working world, and the fact that she could only work part time because she wanted to be at home when her baby arrived home from school, it was the best choice for her at the time. It was a good fit too: her love of people and amazing customer service skills (and a flair for makeup application) soon took her from shoes to the beauty department, and full time work, and that is where she works today. She continues to provide amazing customer service, and has no qualms spending an hour with one customer, showing her how to apply makeup to suit her face, even if it means missing out on a number of quicker sales. She truly has a passion for helping people.

I don’t know a person with a better work ethic: she’s honest, believes in not breaking the rules, won’t call in sick unless she’s sick (and often doesn’t call in even though she is sick), she doesn’t take extended breaks, she won’t lie and tell a customer that a certain shade of lipstick looks good on her if it doesn’t, even if it means losing a sale that has been hard to come by. She has helped the store catch shoplifters on more than one occasion, and has testified in court against a shoplifter before .

(Do you get the feeling that I sort of adore this woman?)

Anyways, that is her story, and that has been her story for the past 14 years. But the job is wearying. She’s in her mid-50s and she deserves (and needs) a job where she can:

• sit down once in a while, and not just during her breaks
• have Saturdays and Sundays off (as it is, she works three out of four Saturdays, sometimes until 9:30pm, and she works one or two Sundays a month)
• avoid the stress of what has to be one of the most poisonous work environments I know. Remember how I said she’d rather spend one hour with a customer than ring in quick sales? Well, her colleagues who have no qualms with ringing in six sales all in a row have a big problem when one of my mom’s one-hour sessions turns into a huge sale. They get catty and go and tell coworkers that my mom “stole” the customer away from them, or that she forces customers to buy things they don’t want (a claim easily disproved by the low return rate she has), not remembering the number of times my mom has customers who thank her for the lovely makeover and don’t buy a thing, or the sales that they took instead of sitting down with the more needy customer.

(I’m biased, of course, but I also work in retail too so I know how it is.)

My mom has some health problems and I would love it if she could have a job where she didn’t have to also worry about the mental stress of a job where she has to deal with jealousy, backstabbing, and two-facedness. Her heart is too soft and although she can bite your head off one minute, and comes across as very gregarious, she’s also very sensitive (I am totally my mother’s child) and has a hard time dealing with people not liking her when she’s done nothing wrong. She can’t just brush it off as the other person’s problem. As you can imagine, her attempts to have a good relationship with all her coworkers have led to more pain than anything. My sister and I constantly tell her to go to work and not give a darn who talks to her or not, who goes off to whisper to other colleagues about her, that she should just ignore them. However, the truth is that it’s hard to work in that sort of environment.

Very often in the last few years, I have this lovely daydream where I make enough money that my mom doesn’t have to work. Instead, she stays home and spends time on her passion, cooking, and I call her from work and force her to go for a walk. The whites of her eyes turn bright white again, and lose their tired look, I no longer hear stories of work that she claims she’s telling me just so I know, and not because she was hurt by the incident (liar). So my motives are selfish then: I absorb her pain and take it as my own, and I can already feel its toll on me, and I’d like it to stop.

As long as my parents’ health remains ok, they will continue to work. They entered the home owners game late compared to the majority of their home-owning Canadian-born counterparts, and they entered the “saving for retirement” game late too because of their circumstances. This means that my mom’s income is needed, and just not working isn’t an option. So, because of that, we’ve been thinking of some career options that would take advantage of her skills and abilities, give her the hours she wants, and remove the coworker-induced stress in her life (or lessen it; I know all workplaces have their issues). Two of the ideas that have come up are freelance makeup artist, which would be so awesome (but it won’t give her weekends and nights off as I bet her easiest area to break into would be doing wedding makeup and weddings tend to be on the weekend), and Nigerian food caterer, but that’s another job that occupies your weekends. And she’s definitely at the age where having a health plan at work is sort of important, so this may rule out working for herself entirely.

My mom is open to retraining, and is actually dying to learn how to use computers, but she also thinks that at her age alone, no matter what qualifications she has, will cause employers to avoid hiring her. She doesn’t look her age, so unless she tells her potential employers, I think she wouldn’t have trouble getting a job, as long as she has the right qualifications she needs.

So, I’ve made myself my mom’s job search agent, and I figure that’s only fair since it was my dad who led me to the website that my job was posted on, one day before the due date for applications. If you have any ideas or suggestions that take into account her particular situation, they would be much appreciated.

Filed under: Family, Job by jummy