By Jenny Albers
@jennyalbersauthor

After the standard greetings and usual discussion about what we’re doing today, my stylist, Jess, rotates the vinyl swivel chair a quarter-turn and snaps the button of a black cape at the nape of my neck. My eyes meet their mirror image, and I take a deep breath, ready to embrace two hours of respite on a late-summer day. But the peaceful morning I’ve been anticipating is cut short by a question.

“So where are you at in your career?” she asks casually, dipping a slender black paintbrush into a bowl containing an opaque, glue-like substance.

I don’t know where I’m at, I want to say. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

My lips curl under and clamp together in an effort to restrain laughter. Or crying. I can’t tell. I’m struck by my inability to respond to a basic question. My shoulders tense, my breath catches, and my mouth turns to cotton. Career? I feel exposed, embarrassed by what my answer will be, or rather that I can’t think of an answer at all. The black cape I’m wearing isn’t enough protection to shield me from growing insecurities.

My mind sprints in every direction, searching for a satisfactory answer, but I cannot come up with anything that falls under the definition of the word.

***

ca·reer

kə-'rir

noun

: a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling

***

Jess separates my hair into sections while I stumble through an answer to her question. I’m half-panicked, half-embarrassed, and fully unsure of myself. I blurt out a tangle of words, something about my little part-time job from home and writing and social media management and maybe going back to school.

She begins pasting thin sub-sections of hair onto palm-sized foil sheets and folds each one into something resembling a super-sized stick of wrapped gum loosely attached to the crown of my head.

Where am I at in my career?

I want to tell her that even though I deliberately stepped off the career path more than a decade ago, lately I feel like I’m wandering. That I wish someone would give me a map detailing which direction I should go to find my way back to where I belong. That right now, I’m in a career desert, where extreme heat overwhelms me each time someone calls attention to my lack of professional job title.

Instead, I say, “I’m not really sure what’s next,” and abruptly ask if her kids are excited for school to start.

***

 The seeds of insecurity sprouting from my position in the salon chair were planted only a year ago when a playground acquaintance casually mentioned that my son, the baby of our family, was entering his final year of preschool.

“One more year until kindergarten!” she declared, trying to make friendly conversation. “What are you going to do then?”

It’s a question I knew people would start asking, and I dreaded it. This question seemed to imply that after eleven years of being known solely as Mom, I would catapult into the position of Full-Time Working Mom on day one of both kids being in school. But even in my anticipation of such an inquiry, I hadn’t prepared a response that seemed adequate. I would have no immediate status changes to report. 

***

At the salon, there is a lull in the conversation after Jess and I have shared updates on our kids and swapped summer vacation stories. She has found a rhythm in her work. Paste hair to foil. Fold once, twice. Paste, fold, fold. Repeat. She methodically works her way through my hair while I take a mental inventory of past jobs I’ve held. There was my paper route at age ten. Then, as I grew older, I moved through stints in fast food, retail, and medical records. By my mid-twenties, I had earned a degree in social work and gladly accepted a position working with children and families. But none of these occupations could be filed under permanent calling. My professional achievements are rather, well, limited. They came to an abrupt halt the day I traded my position as a full-time social worker for the role of full-time mom.

 ***

At the start of summer, I was more comfortable answering the questions about work that came up in general conversation. 

When a dental assistant asked me what I did for a living, I told her I was mostly home with my kids. It was an answer that didn’t need further explanation. After all, there were three long months ahead of me in which I would be home with both kids. All day. Every day. I figured it was assumed that I was responsible for managing total chaos on top of all other household related duties.

But what happens when chaos is dropped off at school for several hours most days? Do the domestic responsibilities I’m tasked with while my kids are away from the house still count as work? Can I still call myself a stay-at-home mom when my kids aren’t home with me?

Now that school is about to start and my youngest will be there instead of home with me, it’s more difficult to articulate what fills my time.

***

“Okay,” Jess says, “let’s let this set.”

She guides me to a cozy nook on the opposite side of the room and tells me to sit anywhere I want. I sink into an end cushion of the leather sofa and pretend to occupy myself with something on my phone, but my mind can only focus on one thing.

Career.

The word sounds as if it’s being shouted through a megaphone in my head, calling me out for some ambiguous indiscretion.

I imagine myself facing the megaphone, hands in the air, like I’ve been caught. I don’t have one.

When I left what could have become my career just before my first baby was born, I was confident in my decision to stay home. At the time, my days were spent pouring energy into children who were not mine, worthy work to be sure. But I wanted to shift that energy into caring for the child who would call me mom.

Was that the wrong choice?

Before I can even begin to piece together an answer, Jess returns and carefully peeks underneath a few of the foil rectangles capping my head.

“Ready to go,” she almost sings, and leads me to a row of sinks.

After my hair is washed, glazed, cut, and dried, Jess escorts me to the front desk where the receptionist accepts my payment and schedules my next appointment.

I step into the thick August heat with lighter hair, in both weight and color. Still, the heft of a single word remains.

Career?

When I open my car door, Jess’s question falls into the driver’s seat with me. Like a game of Tetris, it feels like the first brick to drop, the foundation that heavier questions build upon.

Can something only be a career if someone else says so? If it results in a paycheck? If it requires a formal education? Is work only worthy if someone else places value on it? If someone else validates it?

On my drive home, questions continue to stack up.

What am I? Where am I? Who am I?

***

The house vibrates with first-day-of-school excitement as my kids buzz from room to room. My daughter looks confidently cool in her carefully chosen athleisure wear. My son is thrilled to finally have permission to wear his new red sneakers. I glance at my reflection before we head out the door and feel good about starting the new school year with a fresh shade of blonde.

Eager anticipation fills the car as we approach the drop-off line. My son is a brand-new kindergartener, and my daughter is officially in middle school. I have all kinds of feelings, and not surprisingly even more questions—none of them easy to express.

Three days later, my daughter’s uncontrollably runny nose interrupts her while she sits at our worn kitchen table doing homework. By evening, she has a fever. On day five of the new school year, she is home sick. I take her temperature throughout the day, dole out medication to relieve her fever, offer her a bottle of Gatorade, and reiterate the importance of plenty of water and extra rest. I carry the familiar tenderness of not being able to make her well, but I’m grateful I can be a comforting presence.

For years I’ve heard moms of all kinds say being a mom is my most important work. I’ve often wondered if they really believe it, probably because I’ve had a hard time believing it myself. 

But now that both of my kids are in school, I’m finally starting to. Maybe because it’s becoming clear that my work here isn’t done, and that in fact, much of it is just beginning.

While my daughter is curled up on the couch watching Garfield, I start another load of laundry and sit down to check in on my little part-time job. For a moment, I’m sheltered by a sense of peace, when answers to some of the questions I’ve been asking myself suddenly emerge.

I am a mom. I am in the middle of raising kids. I am someone who is still needed right here.

“Mom?” my daughter calls from the living room. “Can you bring me some more water?”

“Be right there!” I call back.

I cannot say exactly where I am going. I don’t know what’s next. Right now, I’m here, where I’ve been for eleven years. Everything has changed, except it hasn’t, and I’m not sure how to explain this. The work I’m doing isn’t what I trained for, but even as it changes and evolves, I’m certain that my position as Mom is the closest thing to a permanent calling I’ll ever have.

Guest essay written by Jenny Albers. Jenny is a wife and mother who loves words and creating pretty things with her hands. She lives in South Dakota with her husband and two kids, and is the author of Courageously Expecting: 30 Days of Encouragement for Pregnancy After Loss. When time allows, she can be found savoring nature, browsing antique stores, or connecting on Instagram.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.