Cristina is an equilibrist mom. She is 40 years old, two children, respectively 2 and 7 years old, a partner and a dream: to become a teacher. She decided to give herself another chance after the many job disappointments that came from her first pregnancy, when she was promised a permanent contract that never came. Neither after the first birth, nor after the second.
“With the first pregnancy after two years of project contracts they could have offered me an indefinite period of time, but since I was in the fifth month of pregnancy I was sent home”, says Cristina who today is one of the 42.6% of mothers between 25 and 54 years without employment, as the report reveals “The Equilibriste: motherhood in Italy 2022», Presented again this year by the international organization Save The Children on the occasion of the Mother’s Daywhich is celebrated on May 8th.
“I waited for Giovanni, my first child, to go to kindergarten to start sending out the curriculum hoping to get back to work. I found a job thanks to acquaintances that at the beginning promised me the indeterminate but at the end of the pregnancy, when I could go back to work, they did not reintegrate me ». Then came the pandemic with the lockdown. At that point, of course, everything stopped, Cristina stayed at home and started sending again
applications only starting from September 2020 also ranging at sectoral level, but says: “The
the problem was always my age and the issue of reconciling work-family commitments “.
As the Le Equilibriste 2022 report points out, only a little more than 1 permanent contract out of 10 among those activated in the first half of 2021, is in favor of women. In 2020 alone, more than 30 thousand women with children resigned, often for family reasons also because they were not supported by services in the area, lacking or too expensive, such as nurseries (in the 2019-2020 educational year only 14.7% of the total number of children aged 0-2 had access to the service financed by the Municipalities).
But Cristina did not give up. “I got up thinking about my children and my partner, we have always strengthened ourselves and our network of friends. Now I have resumed studying to take the master’s because I would like to undertake the path of teaching. My true nature has come back to the surface, especially when this summer we discovered that my husband had leukemia, I wanted to make a change and I got involved ». Returning to university at the age of 40 was surprising for Cristina. «It’s not easy but thanks to the online courses I managed to organize myself well with the family, studying in my spare time when the children are at school. Today I feel good, I am full of expectations again and this is good. In these cases, age doesn’t matter inside me, I forget I’m 40, I go to class with the twenty-year-olds and I feel equal even if my cultural and work background is different ».
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Source: Vanity Fair
