IHAVE DONE IT AGAIN, overstepping my boundaries as a “helpful” mother to my job-hunting son. All with the best of intentions of course.
The problem with an arts degree—one of them, that is—is that unless you want to be an academic or a museum curator, you end up looking for work in a swampy field called “communications.” These job descriptions are often written in something like Esperanto, a highly evolved form of gibberish that obscures the true nature of the job. “Office management” could mean six hours of photocopying a day and “excellent interpersonal skills” can be work-speak for “receptionist babe with a nice smile.”
Until recently Casey had spurned this end of the work spectrum, preferring to live the non-cubicle life. Then he began applying for more professional positions.
Sometimes I’d troll through the jobsite listings myself, an unwise activity that can lead to “forwarding.” These sites can also be slightly addictive, like taking online house tours. But it cheered me up to be able to contemplate careers other than freelance writing. I was sure that I could “participate in designing both print and digital design strategies” for someone. It wasn’t too late, perhaps, for me to become a professional cake decorator.
One day he sent us the descriptions for a couple jobs he had applied for that sounded promising. Both were well-paying positions requiring years of experience in their respective fields. Neither was out of his league in terms of his skills (“communication” and writing) or strengths (working with people, managing projects). But in the past decade the etiquette of applying for a job has ramped up to a level where every detail matters, no matter how picayune. Did he know this?
Only 24 hours earlier, when I was bugging him about a barista gig he didn’t even want, he had asked me to lay off with the job advice. But I couldn’t restrain myself; I didn’t want him to waste his time collecting no’s.During my stints as a magazine editor, I’ve been on the receiving end of pitches, queries, and cover letters. I knew how quickly one misspelling can land someone on the rejection pile.
So I sent him an email with a few carefully chosen suggestions regarding the art of résumés and cover letters.
This did not go over well.
He did not require redundant professional advice, he informed me, and indeed he found it “fundamentally insulting.” Everything I advised him on, he already knew, thank you very much. He had already talked to a career counsellor at McGill. He understood cover letters. Yes, he tailored his CV to each different position. THIS IS NOT YOUR JOB, he emailed in caps. And if I wanted him to continue to take my advice seriously, I should consider not giving it unless asked for.
Gulp.
I phoned him, apologized, and said I would try harder on the not-meddling front. The air was cleared. But I knew my impulse to “help”would swing back again. I tend to be meddling and entrepreneurial with most of my friends, so it’s difficult to censor this impulse with my own son.
This is the stress of motherhood at the twenty-something, middle-management you are confronted with a problem (your son is looking for a job) without having any agency or power in the situation (you are no longer the boss). Much of the necessary un-mothering that goes on with grown-up kids falls into this category, where the main challenge is to shut up and go along with other people’s decisions, good or bad. Breathing exercises also help.
And it’s not the case that I always leap in unbidden; our son does ask for guidance from us at times, or at least a sympathetic ear. When things get discouraging on the job-hunting front—hard to avoid, given the current unemployment rates among the young, which are twice as high as adult figures—my natural response is: how can we fix this? What practical advice can I offer? I want the world to make use of all the things he has to offer. Instead, my advice can come across as a lack of faith in his abilities to make his own way.
Doing stuff for him as a child always came easily: the costume-making, hamster-feeding, chauffeuring parts. Being that kind of mother felt like a holiday from other responsibilities. But this category of help is tougher: not doing things for him. Mothers of grown kids must learn new tricks of the lip-zipping sort. Empathetic listening, responding in short sentences, preferably while making a large vat of bean soup. “That must be tough” is okay, and “We’ll keep our fingers crossed” is too. “You might think about a haircut before that interview”is not acceptable.
Then I would remind myself that my son was only a year out of school and still learning the ropes. “Putting on his game face,” as he said. I’ve been officially employed for perhaps a total of five years out of the past 40 so I am hardly in a position to tutor him in the ways of the “real world.” But I still have to remind myself that my urge to edit, to make sure that all the commas and dashes are in place, should not be transferred to my son, his haircuts, or his life.
And when I was in my twenties, as I recall, I committed some professional faux pas that still give me pain.
I was freelancing for the Toronto Star, writing entertainment listings (but with a Proustian flair, I thought). I had worked myself into a froth of indignation about the fact that my editors had failed to offer me a column of my own in the newspaper. The thing reporters work decades to earn normally. Hadn’t they noticed the wit and nuance of my listings for fall fairs and outdoor concerts? How long did they expect me to toil in these menial assignments?
But I didn’t have the nerve to speak to my editor or to do something professional, such as submitting a column on spec. Instead, I wrote a chippy little note about how my talents were far better suited to a column and how could this be redressed? Then, even more bizarrely, I tucked this note into the open purse of my editor, on her desk.
We never spoke of it. I never brought it up, and neither did she because she was a kind woman. Luckily, she didn’t fire me.
It was also at the Star that I spent a few months pinch-hitting for the book editor, who was on leave. I enjoyed the work but it came with a windowless office under fluorescent lights. Unacceptable! I was an outdoorsy girl and simply couldn’t function without daylight, even though I should have been grateful I wasn’t out there toiling in the newsroom with everyone else. When it came time to hire a new book editor, they gave me the courtesy of an interview.
I breezed in and began kibitzing with the interviewing editor. “Just two things,” I said,“there’s no way I can work in a windowless office, and I wouldn’t consider any salary under. . . .”And I named a ridiculous figure, I think it might have been $18,000 a year. This was 1975, remember. An arts position. The lips of the editor across from me twitched as he suppressed a smile. “Well, the salary starts at $24,000,” he said.
I was also fired from one of my first jobs, as an editorial assistant for a small publishing house. I thought I was doing fine,writing long, intensely articulate letters of rejection to the authors in the slush pile. But there were money issues and some office politics; the easiest resolution was to eliminate my job. The editor who hired me was kind about breaking the news. Unfortunately, I was inexperienced in being fired and I didn’t know that when this takes place you are not supposed to show up the next morning. I thought it would show character to work the following day to wrap up the projects on my desk.
I was sitting there dutifully typing when the editor came into the small office we shared.
“What are you doing here?” he said, possibly worried that I might never leave. No. It was just that I didn’t understand the etiquette of being fired.
Being hired has its unwritten rules too. Which my son has figured out. At 27 he is more job savvy than I ever was.
In studies of workplace satisfaction, the bottom line isn’t the size of the salary or the amount of responsibility you wield. It’s the sense of agency and being able to measure your impact on a project. When the job at hand is motherhood and the project is “assisting” your son as he looks for employment, sometimes the best strategy is the most unsatisfying one—to lay down tools.
Or enlist his father. Boys want more guidance from their fathers anyway. And way less from their mind-reading mothers.