The Year I Got Laid Off and Found Myself (Sorta)

What happens when your career hits pause… but the rest of your life keeps going?

In this honest (and sometimes funny) solo episode, Elissa reflects on the past year since getting laid off after 26 years in the workforce. From job loss grief and imposter syndrome to the weird freedom of unscheduled days and a happy dog who thinks she now lives at home forever, this is a candid look at identity, parenting, and reinvention in midlife.

Along the way, Elissa shares what surprised her most: how her daughters didn’t flinch when she stopped working, how her value was never tied to a paycheck in their eyes, and how, slowly, she’s learning to see herself that way too.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, sidelined, or simply in between roles, professionally or personally, this episode is for you.

For more reflections on parenting, career pivots, and trying to make sense of what comes next, follow along on:

Threads: @elissa_igetitfrommymom

Substack: https://igetitfrommymom.substack.com/ 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:12 The Day Everything Stopped
• 2:50 The Schedule Is Gone… and So Am I?
• 4:11 The Imposter Syndrome Spiral
• 5:30 What My Kids Taught Me Without Saying a Word
• 6:24 The Podcast, the White Space, and the Shift
• 8:14 Being Home When They Barely Need Me
• 9:11 The Quiet, the Rebuilding, and the Lessons I Hope They See
• 10:07 Closing Comments

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Welcome back to, I Get It from My mom, the podcast where we talk about the things parents and children should be talking about, but sometimes avoid. I'm Elissa host mom, emotional Barometer for my household, and someone who until recently had a LinkedIn headline that actually made sense. Today I'm flying solo. No Ava, no Maggie. Just me. Again, frankly, we're finding our summer schedules are a bit hard to coordinate, but not to fret. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled family content soon enough. Lots to talk about regarding going off to college, but it's my turn again to be in the spotlight, and we're talking about my past year. In an episode, I'll call. The year I got laid off and try to sort of, kind of find myself, let's get into it. It happened kind of like a breakup, but with fewer tissues and more legal sounding emails. I'd been working full-time for 26 years balancing work, motherhood, project deadlines, appointments, babies, and laundry that somehow reproduces when no one's looking. Then one day I got the call, well, actually I got a Sunday night email scheduling the Monday call for structure elimination. Thank you for your service, yada, yada, yada. Frankly, I wasn't fully surprised the company was, and continues to go through a lot of downsizing, unfortunately, and I knew my role was at risk, not reflective at all of my performance, just my position. In fact, much of my team, including my boss, my peers, and my subordinates were eliminated that day and many, many more have unfortunately gone through similar rounds of restructuring since then, and I wasn't even loving my job at the time. I had worked so hard for so long to constantly move up and take on more responsibility and make more money that I found myself owning capabilities and responsible for work. I was a bit too far for my interests and skills, but nevertheless, I found myself going through all the stages of job loss that come with this news. Fear, stress, sadness, fear, madness, fear maybe at the beginning a little too much optimism. So I first, I tried to make the best of it. I'm Marie Condoed my entire house like I was on a home organization show for moms In denial. I walked the dog a lot. Very long walks. I made very detailed grocery lists and cooked a whole bunch of meals. I hadn't cooked in a while. I got to relax at the beach and be there for Ava as she shopped, packed, and went off to college for the first time. I even flirted with the idea of finally working out again. But underneath all that, I was a little lost. Without the structure of work, I wasn't sure who I was. I'd spent years being busy, too busy being needed, being efficient, being everywhere at once. I defined myself so often by my career and my paycheck. Suddenly, no one was waiting on my reply. No one needed a Zoom link. My inbox was quiet. My phone was quiet. My calendar looked like an empty snow. Globe blank, no matter which way I shook it. Here's where the mom piece comes in. I had built a system where every moment of my day was defined by either being productive or useful to someone or something else. Without that, I kind of felt invisible. I didn't know how to define myself. So let's talk about the fun part, the spiral. I've applied to countless jumbles things to no avail. I have stared at LinkedIn so long. I feel like I'm no longer qualified to do anything, including things I've already done and done my, well, I must say at must hire pay grades. I have had many initial interviews and then gotten ghosted, including just by recruiters. I called, I've rewritten my resume 74 times. I've updated LinkedIn so much. It looks like I'm launching a startup called Please someone hire me. Notice me. Anyone please LLC. I've questioned whether I will find my footing again and what that footing is, but meanwhile, my kids, they've been unfazed. No. Why aren't you working? No. Do you just like stay home now? They just kept being them, asking for snacks, for getting towels after showers. Needing help with social drama and also definitely still thinking I'm in charge of laundry, mood management and cooking dinner. In their eyes, nothing has really changed. I'm still the default parent just now. I have a lot more time to answer their texts and FaceTimes and run their errands. And here's why. That's a good thing and important. They never define me by my job. I did. I was the one who tied my worth to how in demand I was to being busy, to being booked and productive and slightly overwhelmed at all times. But my girls, they still just saw me as well. Mom still come to me for comfort and advice and very specific hair product recommendations. They haven't been embarrassed that I'm home, even though I am home a lot. They haven't asked when I'm going back to work. They've just adjusted. That acceptance, that's a gift because they remind me our kids aren't watching us to see if we're crushing it at work every second of the day. They're watching how we respond when things fall apart, how we handle change, how we speak to ourselves in the in between. So at some point, once the closets were organized and the novelty of weekday errands were off, I got bored. Very bored. I don't know how to sit still. And in that boredom though, something interested has happened. I started having time to think again, dream again. Maybe be a little creative. For the first time ever, I thought about conversations I wanted to have. I scribbled ideas in notebooks. I talked to friends about career shifts and creativity in motherhood and midlife and the mental load. And eventually I sat down to record a podcast episode with my daughters, and that turned into, I get it from my mom. Was it perfectly planned? Nope. Did I know what I was doing also? No. Do I still have any idea of what I'm doing? Definitely not. But it felt like something that was like mine hours and that mattered more than perfect timing or a LinkedIn job update. I've explored social media more to help promote this podcast. Check me out on threads or a substack. I'm still learning to be on camera for TikTok. Not fully comfortable with that one yet. I'm also partnering with a friend and former colleague on building new platforms and applications that are intended to help busy women to ease their burden, to find community, to get stuff done. That's exciting. I've learned a lot doing it and more news to come on that hopefully very soon. Now none of this is making me money. And financially, I assure you this is very stressful and David and I are doing our best to be balanced with the children, but they've of course noticed changes we've had to make. But I'm doing my best to remain on top of and optimistic in this crazy job market, but also focused on what else I can do in the meantime. And this part is weird. I'm home now in any way. I never was when the girls were little, but now they don't need me as much. They make their own meals if needed. They take their own subways. They manage their own lives. Ava doesn't even live here nine months of the year, and yet I'm here available, present every single day. I wander around the house like a retired cruise director whose guests are all off doing something on their own. But the beauty is I am here when they do need me for the late night venting for the, can you help me figure out what to email this teacher for the, do I sound crazy if I say this to my friend? For the, can you make me this appointment? I'm not central anymore in the work sense or in the dependence on me sense, but I'm still steady and there, and maybe that's more valuable than anything I was before. I've also loved to learn the quiet again, not just the absence of noise, but the pause, the space to think, to reflect, to grieve what I've lost and imagine what might be next. Here's what I hope my daughters take from this season of my life. That reinvention isn't linear, that you don't need to have it all figured out at 18 or 38, or am I now 48? That failure, boredom and starting over are not signs of weakness. They're signs of, I don't know, being alive, being human. That confidence doesn't come first. It comes after you start doing the thing. Most importantly, that just because someone is home doesn't mean they're not doing something powerful or meaningful or brave. Even if I'm often napping, I'm such a good napper, thank goodness for time, for naps. So this year cracked me open in ways I didn't expect and made me softer, yet also scrappier. I've been figuring things out slowly. I definitely don't have a perfect comeback plan. I love one, but can't seem to figure that out, but I started a podcast of starting to hopefully maybe build a business. I started listening to the ideas that used to get drowned out by the noise and meetings and subway commutes and stress. I've had more time with my girls and David, whether they wanted this much time with me or not. I've had more time with my dog, who, let's be honest, is the most grateful for this new chapter, and I've spent more time with myself, which is a complicated relationship, but we're working on it. We've learned that we prefer jeans to sweatpants. We've learned that we like sleeping in a little bit or going back to bed. We've learned that we will never again wear heels because we are only comfortable in sneakers or flip flops. So if you're in the middle of a shift or just stuck in the weird space between what was and whatever's next, same, I see you. You're not behind. You're just figuring it out. We're allowed to start messy. We're allowed to become something new and we're allowed to still want a paycheck. We're also allowed to be content to have the only title for ourselves right now, be Mom, and that works for me. Until next time, I'm Elissa, and this is, I get it from my mom.