The Eleven Years I Cannot Explain Away

The field is called career history and it goes back ten years, and yours does not.

You typed and deleted it four times last night. Career break. Too vague, apparently. Family commitments. Sounds like an excuse for something. Raising four children. True, and you stared at it and felt something go tight in your chest, and deleted that one too.

Eleven years. Twelve if you count the one before the first was born when you were already too ill to work and nobody knew why yet.

You were not idle. You have never been idle in your life. You ran a house on a budget that would frighten a treasury, you managed four separate school systems and two sets of medical appointments, you settled disputes daily, you handled a bereavement, you kept a marriage alive through a redundancy that was not yours. You did the accounts for the football club for six of those years and never once got a wrong figure.

And there is a box that wants ten years of career history, and there is nothing in your hands that will go in it.

So you typed career break in the end, because it was the least apologetic of the four, and you sat back and understood something with an unpleasant clarity. You have begun describing your own life as a hole in a page.

The psalm counts the years the other way

There is a psalm written by somebody old who is not finished.

O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:17-18

Look at how he counts. He is not listing posts. He is naming a continuous line of God teaching him from his youth up to this exact minute, with nothing in it marked as an absence.

Hitherto. Up to here. Everything included. There is no field in that psalm labeled career history and no stretch of it filed under gap.

That is the accounting God has always used and it is not the one on your screen. You are not a woman with eleven years missing. I am not putting my own opinion over you. Scripture says God has taught me from my youth and hitherto have I declared Thy works, Psalm 71:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a kitchen at eleven at night with a form open.

Nothing on this page is advice

I am not going to tell you how to write the form. Not one word.

I do not know your field, your town, or who is reading. Anyone who has not sat in front of that box has no business suggesting a phrase, and there is a specific unkindness in implying that the right wording would have solved this by now.

So no tips. No suggestion that you are approaching this wrongly. Nothing here reads a closed door as a report on your effort. Scripture never once reads a shut door that way, Revelation 3:8, and the Holy Spirit does not assess a woman by how quickly a system agreed with her.

You have not been overlooked while you were at home. That is a settled thing, and it did not become true this week because you needed it.

Where the word gap came from

Here is what actually needs putting down, and it is not the form.

Somebody taught you that word. Not a person, exactly. A system did, and you learned it the way people learn the language of the room they are standing in, and now you use it about yourself without noticing.

Gap. As if there were an absence there. As if eleven years of continuous, skilled, unpaid, unslept work were a stretch of nothing that has to be accounted for like an alibi.

That is a lie with a form around it, and the fact that a database cannot represent something has never once meant the thing did not happen.

You have eleven years of the hardest management work there is, and none of it went missing. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, Hebrews 6:10, and the Holy Spirit keeps a fuller record than any employment history field ever built.

The thing under the tightness

When you typed raising four children and something went tight, that was worth noticing.

It was not embarrassment about your children. It was the anticipation of a stranger's face reading it and filing you, and you have watched that happen to friends and you know exactly the small change in tone it produces.

That anticipation is doing something quietly, and Scripture has no part in it, Psalm 71:18, and the Holy Spirit is not the one rehearsing the stranger's face with you. It is teaching you to arrive apologetic. It is producing a version of you that walks into a room already conceding a point that nobody made out loud.

Do not go in like that. Not out of defiance, but because it is not true, and going in agreeing with a falsehood costs a person more than a rejection does.

You are not required to apologize for eleven years of your own life. Scripture says she opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness, and she looks well to the ways of her household, Proverbs 31:26-27, and the Holy Spirit does not treat that as a career break.