Chapter One: The Space Between
The email came on a Tuesday. Subject line “Organizational Update,” 9:47 a.m., and by 9:52 I was standing in my kitchen holding a coffee mug I didn’t remember picking up, listening to the dishwasher finish its cycle like nothing in the world had changed.
Eleven years at that company, and they let me go over email.
I didn’t cry. I expected to, and I didn’t. I just stood there doing math. Two mortgages — the one on our house and the one on my mother’s, which we’d taken over after her stroke — plus Mia’s tuition deposit due in six weeks, plus Jake’s travel soccer, plus whatever number used to be my salary now sitting at zero. I did it four or five times, like it might come out differently if I was patient with it.
Tom found me still standing there when he came down for his coffee. He didn’t say the wrong thing, which I’ve learned is its own kind of gift in a marriage. He put his hand on the back of my neck and said, “Okay. Okay, we’ll figure it out,” and for about ten seconds I let myself believe him completely.
Mia turns eighteen in March. She got into the state school in September, early admission, and when the acceptance came, she screamed so loud the dog hid under the bed. I screamed too, arms around her in the doorway, so proud I could have floated up through the ceiling. That was two months before the layoff. I didn’t know yet that I’d spend the winter learning to be unemployed at the exact same moment I was learning to lose her — two clocks running down at once, and some nights I couldn’t tell which one was making my chest hurt.
I took the retail job in November because the mortgage didn’t care about my dignity. Folding sweaters at a mall store for a manager twelve years younger than me who called me by my last name like I was in trouble. Temporary, I told myself. A bridge. A customer asked me once, kindly, “So what do you usually do?” I usually ran a department, is what I wanted to say. Instead, I said something about being between things and rang up her cardigan.
I applied to jobs at night after the kids went to bed, hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table with the TV volume low so Tom could half-watch something and half-keep me company. Forty-one applications by Christmas. Six phone screens. Two interviews that went nowhere, the kind where you can feel the “we’ll be in touch” forming before they even say it.
My sister told me to be patient. Easy for her — one mortgage, no kids applying to colleges. I love her, but I didn’t have patience to spare that winter.
What nobody tells you about a long job search is how quietly it wears you down. Not a collapse. Just a filing-down. I used to introduce myself with my title. Now there was a pause after my name, a little silence where the title used to live, and I filled it with something smaller each time. “I’m in between things right now.” “I’m exploring options.”
Mia noticed, the way kids notice everything they’re not supposed to. She came into the kitchen one night in January, seventeen and trying hard to be gentle with me, and said, “Mom, you don’t have to pretend it’s fine in front of me.” I told her it wasn’t pretending, it was coping. She gave me a look that said she knew the difference even if I was still working on it.
I still haven’t fully told her how much of that January went to arithmetic about her — not whether she should go, that was never in question, but whether we’d need to ask her to take out more loans, whether the dorm deposit would clear before or after my unemployment check.
By February I’d stopped believing the interviews would lead anywhere. Not despair, exactly. More like a callus. You can only get your hopes sanded down so many times before you stop offering them up.
I didn’t stop applying, though. Eighty applications by then, something like that. I’d lost the exact count somewhere in there, which felt like its own small failure.
