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Soon after New Yorker Geralyn Lucas was laid off from her television job in January, she took her 2-year-old son to the playroom of her apartment building. She realized she had never been there before.
Within minutes she had inadvertently broken all the cleanliness rules. “I wore shoes,” confesses Lucas, 41. “I brought food. I changed his diaper. I didn’t know those things weren’t allowed.”
When she took Hayden to his playgroup at a toddler center, she had to ask the little boy for directions to his class. And when she went to the pediatrician’s office, the nurses were so used to seeing the nanny that they didn’t recognize Lucas.
Lucas and other laid-off women like her are involuntarily experiencing the life of a stay-at-home mom, and they are getting to know a lot more about the details of their children’s daily existence. They are also discovering some of the things they have been missing.
Though the mass layoffs of this recession have so far affected mostly men, more than 800,000 women have lost their jobs since the end of 2007. For the mothers among them, it means that, suddenly, Mommy’s home, often for the first time in many years.
For many of these women, unemployment has no doubt been terrifying. But for some — particularly those who have the financial resources to ride out the storm — it has been a precious opportunity to get to know their children a little better.
Mary Quinn, a 48-year-old mother from Greenwich, Conn., was laid off in December after 18 years at a Manhattan investment company, but a severance package has bought her some time to find a new position. After years in which her husband was the main caregiver, she is finding the time off with her children to be an unexpected blessing.
She is savoring small pleasures such as picking up her 11-year-old daughter, Paulina, from school and having a little snowball fight on the way home, or trying out new recipes with Isabelle, 17.
