Let it Snow! Cause I Have Nowhere to Go

Today, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson pleaded with residents to stay home because tomorrow we're going to get a whopping 40 centimetres of snow. This news has already struck fear into the icy hearts of OC Transpo managers who are asking LRT operators to practise breaking in snow (news! The winter started months ago!).

I will stay home, watching my puppies playing in the snow, because I am still unemployed after 10 months. This week, I applied for jobs as a communications adviser, a writer/editor, and a sales clerk at the grocery store. If I'm lucky I'll be packing fish on ice within a week.

If I haven't heard from the grocery store by next week, I'm pulling out all the stops and applying at Costco and Home Depot. They pay an extra dollar an hour, or so I hear.

It's been a very disturbing winter. I'm turning 64 in July, and I currently earn $400 from CPP. I will have to wait until next July so I can top up my earnings with the Old Age Pension rounding out my pay to about $1000.

Hopefully, Scott won't die in the interim or I'll be out on the street with the dogs begging for kibble.

Thankfully, my husband is only turning 16 on Saturday, so I have the benefit of being married to a much younger man (or an older one if you don't apply the bleeding Leap Year Birthday designation).

Funny, I hadn't expected to be this impoverished at this time of my life. But being a single mother for much of it pretty much laid out my destiny.

I have a very strange resume because, mostly, I worked part-time while raising kids. Some years -- like those when I worked as a speechwriter for the Minister of Health -- I would have a bonanza of cash coming in. Other years, it was drip, drip, drip. Two hundred dollars a week for writing lifestyle columns for the Ottawa Citizen, six hundred an issue to edit a medical journal, five hundred beans for an article for a trade magazine.

Not enough to even pay CPP or income tax some years.

Thoughts of the snow storm bring me back to the year 1998. That was a helluva year in which I was getting $500 a day to work in a government department writing strategic documents for three months. In reality, the job involved filling in for people on stress leave and listening to employees hurl venomous attacks at their manager who sat huddled in her office and communicated only by email.

I didn't care. It was a freelancer's bonanza.

Until I hit what I thought was a single mother's worst nightmare: a school strike. I had two school aged kids, so I had to work from home because I couldn't leave Marissa and Stef  alone or the neighbours would call the authorities. Finally, after two weeks, the strike ended, and I was back on the road to Gatineau for some adult time.

Then came the Ice Storm. At least I wasn't the only government employee who stayed home, but that again, was for two weeks. After the ice-laden branches were finally cleared from Ottawa streets, I happily returned to work...for about three days.

Then Stef got chicken pox. Then Marissa.

It was like I was being punished by the Single Mom Gods.

After the pox left my house, I happily returned to work. The manager opened the door.

That was a bad sign. She didn't renew my contract because I was deemed unreliable.

About the same time, I read a research paper on women's employment which revealed a significant fact. The single mothers who remarried were the only ones who had a chance of getting off the ferris wheel of shit.

And so I got married.

Unfortunately, the damage had already been done.

My resume looked like a piece of Swiss cheese with holes all through it. Missing years, like the time Marissa got run over by an OC Transpo bus (I see a theme, here!) Or that wonderful day after Nick returned home from a fun-filled life on the streets, and I saw both of my boys being frisked by the police for drugs.

Or about three years when the boys stopped going to school.

Good times.

People don't tell you when you have kids that the hard part only starts after they become teenagers.

I can't put any of this on my resume. Hiring managers don't care.

They only care that you have a spotty resume, and somehow you missed the whole indoctrination period.

And people think that after a single mother's kids are grown that they can get up, dust themselves off, and start picking up a paycheque.

I have news.

By the time the kids are finally ok, and you can stop worrying about them, you wake up and you're old, and your boobs sag, and your arches have fallen. Your hair turns into a Brillo pad, and it's either so long you look like a refugee from Woodstock or you've turned into Mrs. Foreman on That 70s Show.

Sometimes I feel like I went to sleep and I was discovered 25 years later, locked in the LRT at Tunney's Pasture. Hey! It's not a stretch. (Third OC reference. I'm on a roll!)

Look, I'm not too old to work. I go to the gym everyday, I have a photographic memory, I can beat any millennial at Zelda. I don't smell bad, or have to ask how to use the shared drive, or spend all my time drinking tea in the cafeteria while reminiscing about the good old days, cause I don't have a lot of good old days.

I am Rose.

Here me Roar, and Scream and Shout.

I'm here, I'm dressed, and I'm ready for work.

But nobody cares.

It's pretty depressing.

That's why I'd gladly take that job at the grocery store.

Grocery stores still hire old people last I checked.

They also take criminals, so I have that going for me.

Sure, you have to wear a hairnet, but then there would be no need for hair dye and foils.

As I look out the window and watch the snow begin to fall, please forgive me for giving Viggo the puppy a big high five. I have no sympathy for SUV-loving, cottage owning, road warriors plowing through the snow on a Thursday. At least they have cookies waiting for them at work. Plus a paycheque which is superannuated.

Let it Snow. Let it Snow. Let it Snow. 

I have dogs, a big yard, at least three good work coats, and a coffee machine that makes lattes.

I'll just sit here in the snow.

Somebody will find me, eventually.