joanna vaught

I was fired on Monday.

Let me back up. I had to close my small business in November 2011.

Or should I start with: In February 2010, I was laid off from the company where I’d worked for over a decade.

Or: In August 2009, I bought my first home.

No, I know where I really began:

In October 2008, I moved with my husband and infant son from Portland, OR to Kerrville, TX to move in with my parents. The situation was always meant to be temporary. Our plan was that we would live with my parents for seven months (rent free, but paying our portion of the utilities) so that we could pay off all of our debt and save up for a down payment on a home in Portland. It was incredibly humbling, but it felt like a mature decision. We wanted a clean start! We wanted to do this the right way. If we were going to take on a mortgage, we wanted to make sure that we could swing that mortgage payment every month, even if “something happened.”

Living with my parents for seven months was wonderful and trying in all the ways that you might expect it would be. Have you seen that show Parenthood? Or: do you have a family? So, yeah, you know what I’m talking about. It was a regular tearjerker from day one. My parents were there to see my son take his first steps. My mom and I had explosive arguments and could barely speak to each other for days. My parents got to know my husband in a way that they never could have otherwise, and vice versa, which has formed a close bond between them all. I found myself reverting to behaviors around my parents that I was sure I’d left in my teenage years, and was extremely ashamed of myself, which led to periods of self-doubt and depression.

But at the end of our time in Texas, we had achieved exactly what we set out to do: My parents had seven months of being able to see their grandchild every day, and we had paid off all debts and were financially prepared to buy a house.

So we did just that. In May 2009, we moved back to Portland, and we closed on our first home at the end of July.

A few weeks later, the company for which I had been working for 10 years cut my hours in half.

I started looking for a new job immediately. Matt started looking for a job immediately. Our ideal situation of the first two years of Milo’s life of work-from-home mom and stay-at-home dad was crumbling around us. During this time, I had a few interviews, but they led nowhere, other than my getting my hopes up. I received no job offers. Our very small savings account rapidly dwindled as we found ourselves scrambling to pay our modest mortgage and bills every month. We became what is known as “house poor.”

In February 2010, I was laid off.

I immediately put up ads offering nanny services, and within a week or two, I was watching a few kids part-time. I continued to look for full-time work in addition to trying to find a few more kids to watch to fill in the hours so that I was working full-time hours.

As my little in-home daycare grew, I stopped looking for other jobs. I loved the kids. I loved being able to be with Milo every day. I began taking classes at Portland Childcare Resource and Referral and pursuing my license so that I could be a licensed daycare and take on a few more little ones. Our home began to look less and less like a home and more and more like a daycare as we devoted more square footage to the business. In December, Matt started working part-time as a delivery driver for Sweetpea.

By February 2011, I was working 48 hour weeks and collapsing in an exhausted heap at the end of my work days, but we were finally, finally able to pay our bills. It continued this way for five more months.

Then, in August 2011, I lost 4 out of 6 of my kids. One kid “graduated” to preschool, one had a parent lose a job and no longer required daycare, one had a new baby brother and the parents decided to get a nanny to stay with both kids, and one needed longer days than I was offering.

Between August and October, I struggled to replace the children I’d lost, but to no avail. I had always joked that childcare was a recession-proof industry, but if the recession gets so bad that neither parent can find a job, daycare is the last thing that they need.

In mid-October, I let the parents of the remaining children know that I was closing the daycare after Thanksgiving, and I began searching for a full-time job.

Between mid-October and the end of January, I applied for over 80 jobs. About half of them were out-of-state, because there were so few job postings in Portland that applying for Portland jobs took about 30 minutes every day, after which I would “work on my cover letter writing skills” by applying for jobs out-of-state. The truth is that if any of those jobs had led to a promising position, my family would have moved. Matt and I discussed this possibility, but we held out hope that I would find something in Portland so that we wouldn’t have uproot our family and sell our house in an upside-down market.

In January, I started to get phone and in-person interviews. Not a ton, but a dozen or so. The vast majority were with daycares and preschools looking for teachers, and weren’t even paying enough to cover our bills, but I went to those interviews, anyway, and put on my best hire-me face. I was eager. I was diligent. I worked harder at the job of getting a job than many people work at their full-time jobs.

One of the interviews was with a publisher of educational materials. The English major in me who’d fantasized about having a publishing job was elated. We met at a Starbucks and talked for an hour. Wait, that is not true. He talked. For nearly 45 minutes straight. He told me about the history of his company, about the position, about what he wanted the position to become, about the office environment, about himself and his vision for the company. He asked me hardly any questions. It was the weirdest interview I’d ever had, but his enthusiasm was contagious, and I definitely got caught up in it.

That was a Monday. He had me come to the office for a second interview on Tuesday, where I met his wife, who also worked for him, and two employees I would be working closely with. On Tuesday and Wednesday, he sent me follow-up emails requesting additional information.

On Thursday, he made me a job offer. The offer was below even the very lowest salary which I’d set at the bottom of my required salary range. I consulted with my father, who was in HR, and my good friend Kevin, who has been in HR forever (and wrote Let’s All Find Awesome Jobs, which you should get right now), and following their advice, I counter-offered with the bottom of my salary range. He compromised and said that he would pay me at the midpoint between his offer and mine for the first three months, after which he would pay me my requested salary. I agreed. It would mean that my family would continue to struggle even after I had a job, but three months didn’t seem too long.

I started the following Tuesday, and for the first couple of weeks, things were going well. My coworkers were smart, I was being praised daily for my work, and I was getting into a good groove.

Then, there started to be signs that things were a little off. The biggest tip-off would be when I asked about the person who’d had the job before me, and why he’d left. My coworker dodged the question a bit and lowered her voice and said that he’d only been there a couple of months, and it wasn’t a good fit. So I asked about who’d been in the position before him. At this point, my coworker really hemmed and hawed, and so I sat down and said: “I think maybe you should explain this me.”

At which point it came out that I was the fourth person in the position since June 2011, and that my boss had fired the first two people within one month of hiring them.

What you’re thinking now is: “GIANT RED FLAG, Joanna. I hope you started looking for another job right then.” You’re right. I should have. There have been very few regrets I’ve had about my decisions in the past five years. My biggest regret is that I bought a house, even though everyone in my life seemed to think it was a great decision. My other regret is that I heard this piece of information, and I didn’t immediately think: “Oh, okay, I need to get the hell out of here.”

My coworker immediately followed this piece of information with: “But he really likes you! And I really like you! Don’t be worried. And please, please, please don’t quit!”

Because I am a moron, I said: “I’m not going to quit,” and I buckled down even more. I worked harder. I had been working at learning the business and doing everything that was asked of me, but now I morphed into super-employee. I bent over backwards and turned my life upside down. When it became clear that we needed to move Milo to a new preschool to accommodate my work schedule, we started him at a new preschool which cost $250 more per month than his old preschool, but that opened at 7 AM so that I could be at work by 7:30. My boss said that he wanted me to take over the marketing role, so I checked out 8 books about marketing from the library, and started reading them in my extremely limited free time. I worked through lunch every day. When my entire family came down with the same chest cold, I stayed home in the morning with Milo, and then when Matt came and relieved me, I went into work and put in 6 hours with a fever and a wracking cough.

And then I was fired. I was told that I had done a great job, but that it wasn’t a good fit. I got two weeks of severance.

So here we are, three years after we made the decision to move in with my parents and two years after we bought the house. We have hardly any income. We are in an upside down situation with our house where we now owe more than the house is worth. The job market in Portland is nonexistent. We have no family in Portland. We have many good friends here, none of whom can provide job connections because almost all of them own their own businesses, are unemployed, or work in industries where they, too, are barely able to pay their own bills, and that is without having a family to support.

We are strongly considering foreclosing on our home and moving to Texas to live with my parents until we can find work in Texas. At least in Texas, we have family and a huge network of friends who will support us.

We honestly don’t know what else to do.

Are we supposed to stay in Portland indefinitely, waiting for this recession to end and for the job market and housing market to turn around while we work 2-3 jobs each, handing half of that income over to pay daycare for our son, getting support from the government, getting help from my in-laws when we can’t make the bills ourselves, and never seeing each other, never saving any money, never seeing our families, alternately treading water and drowning?

Is that what we’re supposed to do?

Because that seems like certain misery, and I’m having a hard time understanding exactly what it was that I did wrong. What did I do wrong? I have worked my ass off every day of my adult life.

I have been tight-lipped about all of this, both here and in my personal life. If you know me, you might have known bits and pieces of this, but probably not the whole story. The whole truth is that this is all a huge source of shame for me. I come from a long line of hard workers, of no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone, buckle-down, do-a-better-job-than-the-next-guy-and-smile-while-you’re-at-it type of people. It has killed me to have to apply for government support, to accept help from my in-laws, to admit that I need help at all. The day that I filled out the application for food benefits, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for 10 minutes. I want to be better. I want to do better.

I have to believe that it will get better, that if I have to make choices which hurt right now, that I am still moving in the right direction, and that I’m doing it for my son, so that he can have a good life. I have to believe that.