It is time to update my resume?

Posted by Offer Tsuriel on November 9, 2009

guess it’s clear by now that working at home isn’t for everyone. It’s one of those situations that looks great until you actually try it-much like parenthood.
Even those of us who’ve managed to find the secret rhythm of household happiness sometimes question whether we made a mistake climbing onto the Daddy Track. These questions usually arise during times of crisis, such as when a child is projectile vomiting into a toilet that won’t flush. Or when credit card companies send Final Notices.
No problem, you might say. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just go back to a real job. But it’s not as simple as that. For one thing, working at home spoils you. Could you really face coworkers, office politics, and some boss chewing on your neck all day after enjoying the freedom of life at home? For another, all those neckchewers out there in the corporate world will have forgotten you ever existed.

 

gOnce you’ve worked at home for a while, you’re locked in. (I mean that figuratively, though I’m sure some stay-at-home spouses are literally locked in their home offices until they get some work done.) You’re committed to rearing the children, keeping the house and, oh by the way, getting some of your own work done. Returning to the suit-and-tie world would mean locating child care, a cleaning service, and getting new tires on the car for that daily commute. Who can afford all that? You’d have to juggle your whole life. And your working spouse, who’s been so understanding [hal ha!) about your need to stay home, won’t be too pleased to hear you want to turn everything upside down all over again.
But say you’ve overcome your spouse’s objections [or she’s kicked you out of the house) and you’re determined to go out there and get a regular job. How to explain the gap in your resume? Will you have the paperwork to quantify what you’ve been doing since you bailed out? I’m here to tell you, potential employers won’t care that you’ve successfully survived working at home. They won’t care that you did laundry, made beds, and mastered the weed-whacker. And they won’t see that tending a couple of children equates to managing your own firm, not unless you had the foresight to name your kids Dot and Com.
Employers will be suspicious. They’ll wonder whether you had some kind of mental breakdown that led you to stay home. They’ll suspect you’re too much of a free spirit to toe the company line. They’ll figure that some failure of personality or business acumen prompted you to come crawling back to the corporate world.
And even if they understand why you left and why you want to return, they’ll be jealous of the time that you had away. No doubt it’s just the sort of “early retirement” they’ve always dreamed of, but have been unable to pull off themselves. Of course, they only believe that a home business equates to retirement because they’ve never tried it. Most people think of working at home and it translates into “working on my tan.”
We who are out in the trenches of the home front know that we’ve never worked harder for less pay. We know that your standard eight hours in an office is nothing compared to the twentyfour-hour-a-day, high-stress, high-demand life of a work-at-home parent. We know that sinking feeling you get when you decapitate a sprinkler head with the lawn mower or when you hear a mysterious ticking sound somewhere in the house.
Let’s face it, when most of us jettisoned a normal career in favor of working at home, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. We didn’t have a survival guide to working at home. We were winging it. And many of us crashed.
If you’re at the stage where you’re considering bailing out to work at home, you might want to think twice. Consider the lessons you’ve learned here in Trophy Husband and make certain you’re mentally, physically, and financially ready to face the challenge. And if, like me, you’ve already made the move, recognize that you’ll never be happy going back to a regular job. Despite all its computer crashes, childhood crises, and cruel isolation, working at home is habit-forming. Once you’ve tasted the Joy of Sweatpants, nothing else will satisfy.
So cling to those moments when everything clicks, the children are well-behaved, and your home-based career seems to be taking off. Those moments are damned few and far between, but everyone is a little slice of heaven.
Still, you might want to update your resume regularly-just in case.