What do I do?

I’ve been filling in forms. School application forms to be precise. Often times when it comes to the bit about Family Details I am unsure what to put. Name: obvious. Nationality: no problem. Occupation: this is where it starts to go wrong.

I always baulk at writing ‘Mother’ in these boxes. Is it my generation of highly-educated superwomen, or the one before us that fought so hard for women’s lib, that makes me feel this is not ENOUGH? Whilst it would be honest to write ‘Just a mother’ I am inclined to think I need another occupation.

Supermother of four? Breed mare (thoroughbred of course)? Housewife? Sorry, I draw the line at that. And anyway, with all the home help there is available in Hong Kong no-one would consider that a valid way to fill your time.

The more American ‘Homemaker’ makes it sound as though I sit around reading House and Garden type glossies, consulting with an interior designer and heading off to Pimlico to choose a beautiful piece by David Linley or some such. And what does a homemaker do when she’s finished making her home anyway? Move out and start another one? What if she liked the first? Is she an unemployed homemaker? No, that won’t do either.

Back in London there were kindly folks who would tell me, every so often when I doubted, yes even in 2008, that home was the best place for me to be. Put like that it sounded as though I might be a liability in the work place. Come to think of it, I probably was a liability in the work place.

There were a number of workplaces actually: my first job post university was with a gap year charity based on the Isle of Coll in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. I seem to remember I was forever in trouble for giggling during meetings or for chatting when I should have been working quietly at my desk.

When I left Coll I qualified as an EFL teacher and, nervous that I would be conspicuously tall and blonde turned down a job in Tokyo in favour of one teaching English to jobless former socialists in east Germany soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unbelievable really.

I should add that this brief spell of teaching has entitled me, in the past, rightly or wrongly, to put ‘Teacher’ in the Occupation box although I never seem to be the sort of teacher that people actually want. A school I was trying to get one or other child into rang me recently to discuss the application and asked if I was interested in doing supply teaching. Are you primary or secondary? she wanted to know. Neither. Nothing as useful as that.

Still in eastern Germany I managed a side-step into a small firm producing wooden toys that needed a bilingual sales and marketing assistant. Low moments of that job involved cold-calling on Kindergartens throughout Germany with my briefcase of wares as I sold puzzles and board games around the country.

From there I returned to England to work in direct marketing for a mail order company selling historical (hysterical) artefacts with tenuous links to Britain’s past to the Germans, and other nations gullible enough to buy such tat. There was seemingly a limit to the number of Victorian nightdresses and Celtic brooches that could be sold worldwide and soon after I left to join my new Pioneering Accountant husband in our first joint overseas adventure, the company went down the pan, due, I am told, to over investment on overseas operations. Draw your own conclusions.

In Frankfurt I recreated myself as a Research Consultant for a high-end American head hunting firm and would sit on the telephone, day in day out, trying to persuade Germans that I had a better job for them in tile manufacturing or fashion design or insurance. It felt like a non-job. You have to be very charming and very good at selling. I was neither.

I continued part time and from home for a year after our first child was born but was forever being caught on my mobile in the supermarket or in the sandpit, once even with my trousers down, quite literally, in the changing room of a dress shop, completely unable to remember the details of the position I was meant to be selling to that particular candidate.

That, in essence is the story of my brilliant career. With one embarrassing admission. On arrival in Hong Kong, yet another opportunity to recreate myself, I can never resist, I was asked by my son’s teacher what I do. I’m a writer, I replied smoothly. Oh wow! She enthused, you’ll have to come and talk to the class about how you work and how you put stories together and get your work published. We’ve never had a writer in the class.
Er yes, great idea, time to go. I replied and hurried off.
That’ll teach you, said my husband as he followed me out.

But at long last a friend has thrown me a lifeline to my missing identity in the form of this so I have decided that from now on I will fill in all occupation or profession boxes of awkward, nosey and demanding forms with “Geek Mum”.