What Now? An Unemployment Update

A week before I was laid off, my second child was born.

I was fortunate - The company honored my parental leave in my severance. So, while things had changed, my situation wasn't urgently dire. Instead of taking my paternity leave in March (when my wife would return to work), my "leave" started immediately in December. I got to bond with my newborn (Zayd), spend time with my eldest (Noah) during winter break, and got to enjoy time with my wife before she started work.

Now, nearly five months after being laid off, I'm reflecting on how I've spent unemployment so far, why I haven't landed a job yet, and where I go from here.

I do this partly to keep myself accountable, but also to update those who have either checked in on me or are watching from the sidelines. Thank you to everyone who has reached out or offered help through referrals.

Now, let's do that unemployment review...

For those first few months, I took a casual approach to the job hunt. I wasn't eager to take just any new job. (This was a privilege, thanks to severance pay and unemployment benefits.) For the first time in my life, I could pause and take a calculated approach to my next step.

Ultimately, I decided my next job had to meet three criteria if I was going to rush back into work. Those requirements were:

• Remote work (or conveniently located near Noah's school and/or a daycare option for Zayd): Between morning drop-offs and afternoon pickup times, plus commuting time, you really can't get a full workday done in an office while managing the children's schedules.

• Putting my people skills to use: There is a positive correlation between how much I've enjoyed past roles and how much interaction I've had with others. Here's that graph:
   

  

  I'm happiest when I'm solving problems alongside people with backgrounds that complement and differ from my own. I like learning from others and solving problems outside of a coding environment. If I was going to rush back into work, it wasn't going to be so I could stare at an IDE (basically, a coding terminal) all day just so I could stick my 3-month-old in daycare.

• Propagating good into the world: The world has a lot of problems right now. The two biggest ones on my personal radar are (1) the US-backed genocide in Palestine and (2) the horrific ICE abductions that are sweeping the US. If I could find a way to counteract either of these atrocities, or otherwise put some good out into the world, while sustaining my family financially, that would be the best of all worlds.

A nice bonus to all of these would be if I could somehow pivot my engineering experience into something that overlapped with my passion for books and/or children's education. That wasn't a requirement, so it doesn't make the Big 3 list of requirements, but if I see a job that hits this point, I'm basically going to apply.

So, with those three criteria in mind (remote work, people skills, and propagating good), I applied to a few jobs here and there. But in the back of my mind, there was always one nagging thing:

My wife would start a job in March, which would leave us with a 3-month old baby and no childcare. I mean, sure, if I got a job then we could afford to put Zayd in daycare, but that idea didn't resonate with us. When we had to put Noah in daycare at 18 months old, even THAT felt young to us at the time, so we weren't eager to put Zayd in daycare at just 3 months old. Given that, I knew when I was laid off in December that I would likely enter full-time dad mode in March when my wife returned to work, unless somehow the PERFECT job came along before then, meeting all my criteria. With that knowledge that I was the first option to care for our son in March, my motivation to apply waned early on.

Still, I couldn't just do nothing for those first few months. Instead of hunting diligently for jobs, I explored writing as a full-time endeavor.  Conveniently, I was already enrolled in a year-long workshop with the Highlights Foundation. As part of the workshop, I had to deliver a novel manuscript draft by mid-February. The timeline overlapped almost perfectly. I would work on my manuscript for the first three months while my wife was home with the baby, then I would take over the childcare when she went to work in March.

(Side note about the manuscript: I've been working on this manuscript on-and-off for nearly 15(!) years. I've put it down for years at a time, and written chunks over and over again, but never dedicated significant focus to it until now. This was a new experience. I got to do some long-overdue character plotting and revising. There's still lots of work to do, but I met my deadline and got the draft done!)

March brought the real test. My wife returned to work, and I was a full-time stay-at-home dad. I still credit my wife with doing the hard work during this time. Between inconsistent sleep during the nights, starting a new job, and pumping to ensure a steady supply of milk for the baby, my wife has managed it as well as anyone could. I owe her all the credit.

It's funny... I always joked about aspiring to be a stay-at-home dad (my college roommates will confirm), but when the time finally came... I was nervous to be alone with my own 3-month-old baby.

When our eldest son was born, my wife was home that whole first year and a half. I think we only tried to feed Noah a bottle once (where he promptly freaked out at me), so I had some lingering nervousness heading into this new situation. 

While on dad duty for those first few weeks, a slew of questions constantly ran through my mind:

• When did the baby last eat?
• When will he need to eat next?
• Do I have enough milk on hand?
• What if I need to heat up milk while I'm out?
• When do I have to get Noah from school?
• What if the baby's asleep and I need to wake him up to get Noah?
• What if he poops while we're out?
• What if he doesn't sleep in the car?

These seem like mundane questions, and they probably are for the short 30-minute intervals surrounding school drop-off/pickup, but for that first week, these questions dictated every moment and decision. As much as possible, I tried not to leave the house because the task of transporting and warming milk (without letting any go to waste) was more trouble than it's worth when everything at home was so convenient and familiar.

Now, nearly two months in, I've built a better intuition for when the baby is hungry or tired. I don't panic as quickly when he cries for a minute or two, because I know what to do. But that first week? If that baby was 5 minutes off his schedule I was not prepared for it.

I think I have a better appreciation for "mom brain" now (and I don't even have the physical toll of breastfeeding). But when half your mind is constantly occupied with these questions, it gets hard to focus on much else for long stretches. (Zayd would literally only nap for 30-minutes at a time, while needing to eat every 2 hours, and staying awake for just one hour stretches... That constant shifting is pretty time-consuming.)

I've delivered software on tight deadlines before, but it's a whole new level of operating efficiency when we're talking about several inter-day deadlines to keep a helpless human alive and developing. Sometimes I wish I could add the new skills I've developed to my resume. Something like:

• Balanced competing priorities to meet multiple stakeholder deadlines with 100% delivery success (i.e. Never missed picking up or dropping of Noah at school while handling Zayd's dirty diapers, naps, and feedings)
• Optimized processes and logistics to enhance client output by 67% (i.e. Zayd grew from 3 months old to nearly 5 months under my watch. I'd call that a 2-month increase over a 3-month baseline... 67% improvement)
• Met customer deliverable timelines on limited budget (i.e. Feeding the baby. A milk budget is still a budget, right?)

Got other suggestions? I'm all ears.

Jokes aside, I appreciate how difficult it is for moms to reenter the workforce after focusing on their children for years at a time, seeing as how I've only done it for 2 months and I'm already slowly losing my mind.

With the non-urgency for me to find a job while I handle childcare, I often ask myself if I'm making good use of my time. I don't want to squander this opportunity to be with my sons, but I want to make progress on my personal goals. Sometimes, I get comments like "You're doing great! You're raising your kids. That's a lot on its own." and I appreciate that, but it's also not enough. I often ask myself: What greater purpose am I fulfilling with my life?

I have this constant nagging need to be working toward something important. But especially now, when I see videos of children being bombed in Palestine, raising my own two kids feels like a drop in the bucket. When I see the video of Rumeysa Ozturk being kidnapped off the street by unmarked ICE agents, I think about how privileged I am to be free, when she just wishes that she could be in my position so that she could continue her doctoral work.

When I contextualize my situation in the broader world, I feel the need to utilize my skills to benefit those who can't benefit themselves. And although I'm not quite sure how to channel that feeling, I know that simply existing and surviving day-to-day for the benefit of my own family is not enough anymore. I think about the families in Gaza who's goal right now is simply survival, and I realize that I am immensely blessed and privileged. I just need to find some positive outlet for my skills of writing, code, communication, education, and heck, maybe even parenting.

When I was laid off, and then again when Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted, and then again with each new report about jobs that have been eliminated by DOGE... I realized that much of this blessed lifestyle is precariously perched on top of corrupt governments and institutions. (And I don't just mean this administration. I mean this entire capitalistic system.) It doesn't make answering my question any easier, but it does put it into context.  Everything is temporary, and there are problems much bigger than mine. How should I spend my time? How can I balance caring for my kids with fulfilling a greater purpose?

I've been on LinkedIn much more lately, and I saw a post there recently about Palestine. My first instinct was: "That doesn't belong here. LinkedIn is for professional content." But I was wrong. There is no separation anymore. If we continue to compartmentalize the reality of the world with our own wellbeing, we enable others to be taken advantage of at our expense. It's not enough for me anymore to take care of my family and allow others to suffer. I won't just take any job at one of the local military contractors near DC, perpetuating a terrible hierarchy while providing for my family financially.

Zayd is now a little older (almost 5 months), my severance and unemployment benefits are expiring, and I need to ramp up my efforts to reenter the workforce. But that doesn't mean I'm looking for just any job. I'm looking for a way that I can improve the world and provide for my family while doing it.

If you have suggestions, I'm all ears. If you have connections to opportunities you think might be good for me, I welcome them.

Thanks for reading.

This blog post is part of the #30DaysArabVoices Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature Arab voices as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by National Book Award Winner Shifa Safadi (and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog series).