My First Job
When I first left the Christian patriarchy movement and moved to Michigan, I knew that I wanted to work, but I didn’t know much at all about how to get a job. As a stay-at-home daughter, I hadn’t been allowed to work outside the home because that would mean being under submission to a man who wasn’t my father. The only thing I could do to make money was teach piano lessons from my parents’ home, which ended up being a significant reason I was able to save up enough resources to eventually leave.
In Michigan, it seemed like there were endless opportunities, but I had limited options and very limited experience. I didn’t have internet in my apartment, so I would spend my days at the library looking for job openings on the computer and submitting applications. I applied to more jobs than I could count, from retail work to babysitting jobs, anything entry level that didn’t require any college education. I got a few interviews, but I had zero practice, and I felt so inexperienced, even though I was in my mid-twenties. Another snag was that I shared a car with my husband, making it difficult to find a job flexible enough to correspond with his work schedule.
When I finally got a job slicing bread at the bakery within walking distance of our apartment, I was over-the-moon excited. I had finally landed my first job on my own, and even though it was part-time and paid minimum wage, it was enough to get me started in building my confidence that I could do something new with my life. Because it was an early-morning job, I was able to start taking college classes and still teach piano in the evenings. It gave me personal freedom, and it was exactly what I needed at that time in my life.
I realize now that my resume at the time was subpar and that selling DVDs on eBay isn’t exactly a good example of sales experience. I wrote a little about this in my essay “Going Dutch,” recently published in Dunes Review. I wanted this piece to be more lighthearted than some of my other essays, and I can now laugh at my naivete and inexperience that first year when I was trying to adapt to the outside world.
Here’s a short excerpt:
Having no previous job experience at the age of twenty-five, I somehow managed to get hired at this little hole-in-the-wall Dutch bakery down the street from my first apartment. I have an inkling that this only happened because my desperate resume included the job description “church pianist,” implying a respectable upbringing. Like many of the Dutch descendants in West Michigan, the bakery owner is Christian Reformed, which means the shop is closed Sundays and employee tasks are strictly gender-segregated…
You can read the rest in the Dunes Review.