The Working World

Love in the Time of Layoff: A Security of Her Own

I’ve always harbored an entrepreneurial impulse. With Marco still freelancing a few months post-layoff, and with dreams of starting that family underway, I’m starting to plan. And plan big. The nester in me craves a far steadier financial environment in which to raise our imaginary kids. Sure, I wish financial stability would just drop in my lap, but that dream is about as realistic as the stork.

I’m starting to realize that, given our respective industries, if financial stability is going to happen any time soon, it might be up to me.
The entrepreneurial itch and I go way back. While still in graduate school in the late 1990s, I took a leave of absence and followed the siren call of the tech boom. I put dissertation writing on hold and went to work as a content strategist for a start up in Silicon Alley. While the start up tanked, it was a good effort. I learned much. I like to think of that period as this English major’s MBA.

These days, I hustle. My work life is a hodgepodge of writing, speaking and consulting, and I’m constantly on the make. It’s a highly satisfying life, but a highly exhausting one too, and it’s becoming harder to imagine more of it with kids in the picture one day.

In a previous life—and a previous marriage—I longed for the freedom and success I have now. Married to a high earner during years when the economy was strong, I could have basked in the luxury of not having to hustle but decided to suffer from an inferiority complex instead. Light years later, in a marriage that is everything I had hoped marriage could be, I find myself ready to trade freedom for security, should security present itself to me. In my previous marriage, security came from my man. This time, it would come from me: a gift to us both. It might be difficult to achieve, I know, but it would be twice as certain and twice as sweet.

It’s a good time to dream big. Old systems are collapsing all around us, making the dream of filling the void a tempting proposition. “Make it new!” poet Ezra Pound famously urged his modernist peers. And that’s the siren call now calling to me.

So when, a few weeks ago, an admired colleague tapped me to consider starting something with her, I leapt. I am readier than even I knew. I fantasize, now, of starting a company before kids arrive, laying the groundwork so that it’s off and running, allowing me to structure my life in a more humane way. I’d gladly trade the hustling of a solopreneur for the hustling of a group ambition. Whether the venture succeeds is out of my control. But I am ready to take the chance.

Deborah Siegel is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild and creator of the group blog Girl w/Pen. Read more of her Love in the Time of Layoff columns here.

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