I’m sending my youngest off to kindergarten tomorrow and find myself surprised by how emotional this prospect is making me feel. William will turn six the very next day. He just missed the cut-off date to start school last year, which, considering Covid, did not seem like a bad thing at the time, as virtual kindergarten sounded like a nightmare. Now, here we are, kindergarten eve in the midst of yet another Covid surge. Thankfully our school district has a mask mandate, yet, like most parents of unvaccinated children, I’m nervous as hell about sending him and his brother to in-person school. I’m also nervous as tomorrow I become a stay-at-home parent who no longer has anyone at home to parent.
Nearly nine years ago I quit a job I loved to become a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t really want to quit, but I had been commuting from south Minneapolis to Rochester for more than three years. The commute was 80 miles one way and took me an hour and a half to complete. Three hours a day in my Toyota Corolla. Three hours a day. On top of that, my job as a staff photojournalist for a mid-sized newspaper required a hell of a lot of driving for daily assignments. Needless to say, it all took a toll on me and once my oldest son Oskar was born, it just became too much. Between the price of gas and daycare, and my meager salary at the paper, working didn’t make a whole lot of sense. During my commuting years, I was constantly looking for work closer to home, but if you know anything about the newspaper industry, you know it's been in decline for quite awhile, and any kind of photojournalism job is pretty tough to find. When I finally quit, I continued to look for work, expanding my search to any job that might require a journalism background. Communications, PR and even office administration jobs — I applied to some 70 positions and got nowhere. Finally, I resigned myself to focus on building my freelance photography business SisuPhoto, while taking care of Oskar. I named the business after the Finnish word “sisu” which loosely translates to strength of will, determination, perseverance and acting rationally in the face of adversity. Frankly, I thought it was easier to remember than my Finnish surname and Jokinen Photography really doesn’t have much of a ring to it.
I had some weddings to photograph from time to time, started photographing families, occasionally got some freelance work from my old newspaper and slowly built up a bit of a client base, but never felt very focused, as being a stay at home parent of a young child is a job in and of itself. Fast forward a few years, just as things with Oskar were getting a bit easier, William was born. And now, nearly six years later, I’m facing a brand new phase in life — being a stay at home parent without any kids at home. At 46, I’m trying to figure out what this all means and what I should be doing.
Before the pandemic, I was very excited about reaching this point in my life and facing so many possibilities. I was excited at the prospect of reevaluating my career aspects. But now, like everything else in life, it’s rife with uncertainty. Reaching this point was always going to have some uncertainty involved, but not the kind of life-or-death uncertainty we now seem to face everyday without end in the midst of Covid.
So what am I going to do with myself? Recently my former boss sent me a text with a link to a website for city government communication jobs, encouraging me to look into applying. I was flattered by her encouragement and vote of confidence after all these years. I checked out a number of the job postings and found a few that I thought I'd be fairly well qualified for. However, after being out of the workforce for so long, and not having more formal writing experience, I feel like I’d be facing the same uphill battle I experienced when I first quit my job and applied to these kinds of positions. The positions are located in suburbs that I don’t live in. If I could find a similar position in my own community, I’d apply for it in a second. The first two years of my time working for the paper in Rochester, I lived in Rochester and felt a connection with the community I covered. Once I moved and started the long commute, I lost much of that connection and eventually just resented my overall situation so ultimately, by the time I quit, I was not doing my best work. I need that connection and need to care about the work I’m doing.
