Let’s go back in time a few years. Its spring of 2007 and its Memorial Day weekend and my family and I getting ready to go to the local fair that happens in town every year, called the Lakeside Festival. My father is upstairs in the shower, while the rest of us are waiting downstairs watching TV. That’s when my mother hit us with the news. She told us that my father had lost his job. My mother always had a strange way of telling us important things. She would just kind of blurt it out randomly. It felt like all of a sudden my entire world was crashing down around me. I had all of these thoughts rushing through my head. I literally just broke down; I didn’t understand how all of a sudden they could just take his job away from him.
My dad was a Senior Account Executive for a company that sold computers to schools and other government agencies. He made well over six figures per year, and that’s why he lost his job. The company couldn’t afford to pay him anymore. He had worked for this company for almost thirty years and worked his way up to his current position. Another issued arose from this. When my father started his job, in his contract, there was a non-compete clause. This meant that my father couldn’t get a job in the industry for six months after he left this job. My father used this time to get his resume together. But after the six months the economy had completely crashed and there weren’t any jobs out there and my father’s unemployment was running out.
My parents at this point were also running out of their savings and all of their stocks have been sold. My grandparents took over the tuition payments for our private schooling so that we wouldn’t have to change schools because my parents couldn’t afford it anymore. They also helped with a lot of the other household bills.
In total my father was out of work for two years and it had a lasting effect on our family. My parents ended up getting divorced because of a lot of issues that my father had developed over time because of the stress of being out of work, as well as the sudden death of his younger sister in 2009. My mother took us and left at the end of the summer before my senior year of high school because she didn’t feel that it was good for us to be in that environment anymore. It has also ruined my father’s relationship with my brother and sister who no longer speak to him.
