Was This It?

I am a rather open person, as most of my friends know. Perhaps that is the Finn in me, saying what I think, and also what I feel. My friends know that I can go on quite a rant in response to the question "How are you?", and I often receive a response stating that I make too much of small issues. I guess a "Fine, thanks" would often do instead of a two-page analysis on relationships, work, and life in general.

My "rant" today will be the other side of the coin of yesterday's post, where I asked whether moms (including myself) sometimes use children as an excuse to be lazy and not even look for a job. Today's post is a more pessimistic follow-up on some of my reasoning from yesterday: it is just damn difficult to find a decent job as a mom, no matter how much passion, energy and time you invest!

Sure, there are hundreds, thousands of successful working mothers. At the dentists today, I just read Brigitte's (a German women's weekly) main story on Minu Barati, who is the (very young fifth) wife of Germany's former Foreign Minister, Joschka Fisher. She had a child at 21, but boxed her way through theatre school, internships and jobs and just produced a rather successful film. The angle was less on motherhood and work and more on work as a famous spouse, but nonetheless, yet another success story (albeit in a rather privileged situation).

I realize that I have entered a small crisis. The "Was This It?"-crisis. Will I ever find a job that I want to do, that I can do, that I would even be considered for? What an earth am I doing in a city where most jobs (the few that are here, as the labour market in Berlin is rather weak, especially for social scientists) are in effect only open to Germans? The German Federal Health Ministry in Berlin, where I interned very briefly after my studies, had once ever before employed a foreigner, and he was a second-generation Turkish immigrant! As all of us foreigners here know (and rant about), nearly-perfect German is always IMperfect German, and if you're lucky enough to make it to be considered for an interview in the first place, the first reaction is always "oh, how do you speak such good German?". Well, maybe I have spent 21 years in a German-speaking country?!?

I hope I'll be feeling more optimistic and "constructive" tomorrow.