All washed up and nowhere to go

It’s been 30 days since I lost my job. I started positively; filing a three count claim with ACAS, job interviews with high profile employers in the bank. Job Seekers direct into my investment account. Sauna and running. Dinners made from scratch, volunteering and bake sales. Enjoy it, I said to myself. It’s a gift. Spend time with your family. I tried.

But the pervasive whisper I’ve failed at life grows louder with every passing day.

Yet how can I have failed? Jonah, my eldest is on his world cup tour. Ava has three a*s in her mocks, the credentials to apply anywhere she likes for uni. My mortgage on two homes is due to be paid off in less than 5 years. I am asset rich. I even have a vacuum that cleans and washes my floors. A red light mat that helps keep pain at bay. What’s not to be happy about?

But now, I am cash desperate – especially with two children in or approaching uni. I am 45. My mood is fragile. The country is increasingly beleaguered. The economy shot to bits. No one’s hiring, and it’s the wrong time of year to get new bites. I have been ghosted by several people who tentatively reached out about new roles, including someone I used to work with in my 30s. It’s rough out there and I am angry. Maybe even bitter.

I am also tired. The fight in me has gone out, except when it comes to Reprobate Tom, as usual, keeping us afloat against the storm. I pick petty fights with him. We don’t have sex. He is knackered, often away. I’m left cooking, cleaning, ironing, and my rage simmers along under the surface until he comes back when it boils over at the first person who actually cares. It’s not okay, but it is what it is.

Nothing is easy anymore. Ten hoops to jump to book anything; millions of forms requesting the same information day after day. Human contact is substandard or non-existent. Where did our country go – the one where things worked and offered opportunities, and people understood each other and you felt safe wandering down the street. Gone, the way of my youth and my energy. I am fighting a battle that has no winner and about which no one cares.

I have thought long and hard about my future. If financial services is brutal and stressful, the exit strategy – working as a teaching assistant, for example, or in a pub – feels bleak and pointless – although minimum wage, when you calibrate the hours, is all that FS was really paying – the promised bonus vanishing in a charade of performance management that is a false and made up as financial dream it once proffered.

I’ve never not had my own money, except when home with my first babies and I in physical and mental shock from the toll of it. Now, it seems I’m too old for the latter and overqualified for the former. And I draw the line at physical, personal care of highly disabled kids. My back and my ego couldn’t take it.

So, I smoke in the garden on £30 tobacco bought after a jobseeker’s appointment so dehumanising that my only recourse was self harm. It’s far from ideal, but the deep and lonely silence from weekdays spent alone is insurmountable after all the effort I put in.

This weekend Jonah missed the finals of the European youth championships by two places and today he comes home. I understand the pit of his unhappiness. He has tried so hard and yet failed. It was his last opportunity for glory at this competition. Like me, he has aged out. Perhaps he is kicking himself for choosing the wrong path, a fragile basket to put all his eggs of hope. In the meantime, his university course has languished and he had exams still to take. He returns home today and I need to paint a smile on. I know what it is to have been almost good enough, but not quite, my whole life, and I fear for his mental health.

It’s time to stop feeding his ego, I told Tom, or he’ll end up washed up like me. He told me not to be so stupid, but my depression knows no bounds right now. Luckily my little one keeps me from the brink. Lana, who is already in the throws of early puberty, is up and down like a pendulum, and needs me to be a rock, although I am little more than a castle build of sand.

We are tossed with the tides of the bigger problems our nations faces, and there is no escape. Tom at least is solid. It’s always ‘one more year’ until we can plan a future that gets us away from the gilded prison have made for myself that I call home.