What's not on your resume?
Finding work when your greatest accomplishments are not on your resume.
Today I am taking a step sideways to address a matter not directly related to urbanism, growth and municipal politics, unless you consider all matters of equity to be part of how cities grow.
This is a republication of a blog post I wrote in 2018. My daughter graduated from Royal Military College last week and it reminded me that the time, effort and commitment I have poured in raising my children will never appear on my resume, yet I can see it shaping the world every day.
I have been looking for work lately. We moved back to the city last May, my children are all in school and my husband is working from home. Sounds like as good a time as any to finally launch into a career. I'm 45 but I don't feel it. Maybe that's why not finding work easily never crossed my mind until now?
I spent the last 20 years getting two law degrees, a patchwork of unrelated experience and, oh, raising productive members of society. One of my children asked me once if they would get a reward for graduating high school. I said, "With the amount of privilege you have, I expect you to graduate high school!" There is no virtue in finishing high school when you have been given every advantage society, geography and history can throw at someone. You have to put your back into squandering this much unearned advantage.
My three oldest children have gone beyond graduating high school. All three are serving in the Armed Forces, all of them have achieved a certain measure of academic and personal success. All of them are fluently bilingual, polite with waiters, kind to children and animals. Not to detract from their own merit, but none of this happened in a vacuum. They grew-up in a loving and nurturing environment that gave them the space they needed to blossom. They didn't have to worry about their physical or emotional safety, they had good role models and a cohesive extended family. This nurturing environment came at a cost to many people over several generations and was served to my children on a silver platter.
But of course, I can't really write this on my resume. It's real though. Providing a stable environment for children to grow-up in happens over years. It happens over the job opportunities we turn down because the commute would add 4h of daycare to our children's days. It happens over the promotions we refuse because we can't make the 7:00 am issues meeting. It happens over the internships we don't apply for because we can't move to a different city for 8 months. It happens over the travels we can't make and the reputation for not being a player we earn for ourselves. It happens over taking the boring translation job we can do from home over the stimulating speechwriting job we cannot. All the forks in the road where we put our families ahead of our ambitions amount to children who grow-up with parents who are physically and emotionally available to them. It also amounts to a very. boring. resume.
Someday someone will see my resume and wonder what's in the negative space around the bits and bobs of disjointed items. And that person will hire a motivated, engaging and emotionally intelligent person who will take their mission and make it hers because that's what raising a family teaches you. Someday, someone will see what is not on my resume.
Oh my gosh, I love this. So well said.