Baby Boomer Women are Useful and Very Valuable!

One of the many common threads between the Baby Boomer Women I work and talk with increasingly centers around their feelings of both being adrift and inadequacy.

As more than one woman has lamented “I just feel so useless. The kids are gone, a monkey could do my job, and it just seems like no one even notices me when I go to dinner or shopping – I feel useless and invisible.”

There was a time when it was that we only heard about how men feared becoming useless. Likewise, it was a time where we rarely heard of how women also feared becoming useless and irrelevant. While men were terrified of being deemed worthless or insignificant through disability, retirement, or even obsolescence in their workplace, women’s concerns were centered primarily around their families not needing them anymore.

Now, though, that fear of women’s uselessness has spread to the end of their careers and their impending retiring from their work-a-day world.

As women see their children growing up to pursue their own lives and their input at work being overshadowed by younger co-workers, they begin to feel as though their value has greatly diminished.

Many times, this feeling of uselessness is heightened even more so when the woman is no longer caring for a child or two at home while at the same time she is either gearing back her work activities or retiring from a career altogether.

These were women who had generally married young, became housewives and had children: it was what was expected of them, only after they had fulfilled these expectations did they begin emerging from their homes to enter the workforce.

Later, after these women have contributed in the workplace they increasingly find themselves being displaced by any number of a vast possibilities which can include economic factors, changing employment demands, and although not readily admitted to; ageism.

The issue of ageism was brought up in a recent conversation with a woman who expressed still another concern to Baby Boomer Women.

“Over thirty years I worked my way up from being a part-time clerk to being a Senior Administrative Assistant. Since the company closed their offices here, I have struggled to find any kind of real job. I have applied for jobs where I would earn half of what I used to, but I get told that I am over-qualified. I spend my days searching for anything. Where do people my age find jobs? I’m too young not to work, but too old to find work.”

Such stories of older workers too young for retirement but too old to find jobs where they can bring the full breadth and depth of their knowledge and experience to bear are becoming more and more prevalent. Sometimes struggling for months if not years to find jobs, Baby Boomer Women bear the brunt of the issue of age discrimination as it severely compounds the crises these women face.

All of this said, how are Baby Boomer Women coping with this and other ordeals to move on with their lives and regain their self-esteem and a sense of usefulness and relevancy?

As they have all the other hardships they have faced in their lives: by accepting them as part of their struggle, looking for ways to not only combat them, but to use those very stumbling blocks as stepping stones to take them where they want to go.

One example of this is as an out-of-work real estate agent in the Charlotte, NC area is doing: she is working as an off-site resource for different real estate firms by doing paperwork necessary for their daily operations.

In Gainesville, FL still another Baby Boomer Woman is putting years in the travel industry to work as she continues to build a small consulting business catering to high-end clients who are looking for non-traditional getaways.

Many Baby Boomer Women are looking to their years of managing their households and are starting small businesses centered around the skills they honed as mothers and housewives. As each week goes by we hear or read of someone starting a specialty baking, sewing, decorating, or gardening business.

Will these micro-businesses grow to more than a one or two person venture – probably not, but that is not the most important aspect of these businesses. As these businesses allow the women who found them an income they also provide something even more important: a restoration of the woman’s pride, her sense of worth, and the knowledge that she had never really lost her value and usefulness.