Patti
My mom, Patti, is a big character in my story. Everyone who knows me knows her. She’s a role model to many, but especially to me.
I find her story to be very inspirational, especially during this time in my life. Unemployed. Starting over. Bills to pay.
Lessons she’s taught me:
Risk is required.
Resiliency is resourcefulness.
Happiness is found through humility.
Your love is your legacy.
We can learn a lot from previous generations. Switch up your content consumption to learn more about history or explore make-from-scratch recipes. Look up the new trend: “Grandma Hobbies.”
Patti grew up in a multi-generational household. Her mother was a single mother before this was socially acceptable.
Her great-grandparents emigrated to the United States in the late 19th century from France and Germany and started their families here. Her grandparents were born around 1900, entered adulthood during World War I, and started their family during the Great Depression.
In their home countries, her great-grandparents were chefs and bakers by trade. As an adult, her grandfather started his own business in North St. Louis: Kientzel Noodle Factory. They made egg noodles and other food products. Business was successful. Neither her mother nor her uncle, a software engineer, wanted to take over the family business so it closed in 1969.
Housing wasn’t available to a single mother in the 1950s. Patti, her brother, and her mom lived with her grandparents in a small, 2-bedroom house in Overland: a northern suburb of St. Louis popular after World War II. Her mother contributed financially to the household as a full-time administrative assistant at SCNO Barge, an industrial shipping company.
There were always three generations in the house. It was more economical for the whole family to live together. Over the years, other family members would move in when the support was needed and move out when things had stabilized for them. A shared household saved money on expenses like the mortgage, utilities, and groceries.
However, money was still tight. Her grandparents used their experience growing up and their skills to reduce expenses. Processed, packaged foods were not in the house. Groceries were flour, milk and cheese, meat, eggs, and sugar. They kept a garden in the backyard to grow seasonal produce year-round, and they canned the excess to use for the rest of the year. Flowers and herbs were used to treat illness. Often, clothes and other linens were sewed from fabric spools and mended by hand. Dishes were hand-washed. Laundry was air-dried when the season was warm, sometimes hand-washed to save money when necessary.
Upon graduating from high school, Patti couldn’t enter college immediately because she couldn’t afford it. She continued to live at home while working full-time in retail, contributing her fair share to the living expenses. She married in her 20s and started her own family. As a young adult with children, money was tight. However, she had learned skills like cooking from scratch, gardening, and sewing from a very young age. She knew how to manage a small budget.
Her son was autistic with multiple learning disabilities and required special services. They needed a second source of income but couldn’t afford outside childcare. Patti used her sewing skills to be a seamstress: a role that allowed her to work at home with her kids and provided enough money to pay for those special services.
When her children entered school, Patti found herself wanting more. Financially, they were comfortable. The kids were in school. She realized that she really wanted to be a teacher, but she knew that the time commitment to get her college degree was significant and they couldn’t afford to pay for after-school care.
Her family and friends encouraged her to pursue her dream and promised to help in any way they could. Anxiety about potential consequences, like financial hardship, caused hesitation. Eventually, she decided to take the risk and address any hardships at the time they appeared.
Her happiness was more important. And she knew she had community support.
And she was very successful.
Ask yourself
Who is your role model?
Have you told your friends and family how you are feeling?
Are you avoiding risks that may never happen?
What holds you back?
What is in your control that you can do differently?
You’re never alone.
The job search is lonely. It’s scary. It’s frustrating.
It gets worse as time goes on. You put all of your energy into the job search. It’s exhausting. You start to question yourself and your value.
You adjust so much and so often that you start to feel like you have lost your elasticity.
It’s embarrassing to tell people that you are unemployed. While always well-meaning, statements of sympathy can become annoying. The natural next question starts to feel like an invasion of privacy: “What happened?” You can only listen to so much unsolicited advice from someone who is still employed. If you worked for a large employer, the conversation shifts to the other’s opinions of the company. You try to steer the conversation in a different direction, but it usually transitions to the economy. You take a deep breath and you hope it doesn’t turn political.
But when you are honest about your feelings and your mental health, your community comes together and you succeed.
