What do you do when your life choices have moved you away from the job market and shifted you off your career path for several years? This is, I think, a big question facing many women who feel they have been forced to choose between being a Mum and having a career. Are the opportunities offered to us by politicians really an option?

When I met my future husband in 1982, my head was full of all the usual bright ambitions of home, children and career. I was quite young, nineteen, in fact when I got married and by the time I was twenty-two, I had two children to care for. I made the decision to leave work and become a stay-at-home mum because I wanted to bring my children up myself. This was something I’d always felt was important and would still stand by today. So for fourteen years I put all my energy into turning my children into self-reliant, well-balanced people.

What I hadn’t expected was the speed with which things would change in the world outside motherhood. By the time I was able to start thinking about my career again, all the decent jobs were only being offered to university graduates. Gone were the days when you could get a job, start at the bottom and work your way up based on initiative, personality and experience. It seems that three years of learning how to party, get up late and avoid deadlines is all the life experience that you need to qualify you for the responsibilities of a high flying job. A decade and a half of life experience, coping with the unpredictability of managing a home and family through all manor of chaos, on a tiny budget and with no sleep, apparently counts for nothing!

The Government answer to this, of course, is adult education programs, which all sounds like a wonderful idea until you consider what that would really involve. For my family, for example, this would mean that, theoretically, my poor husband would have to support three of us through university at the same time on one very stretched salary. As my husband actually works, grants would be very minimal and loans would just be storing up debt that we really can’t afford to add to our mortgage. To study the subjects that I would need to further my particular career, I would either have to move my entire household to a different area, (which would cost thousands), or leave home myself for three years and rent, (once again more expense plus the separation . . . no wonder the divorce rate is so high!) Bizarrely, the only way I could afford to do this would be to ditch my family, get divorced and go it alone, not ideal.

My daughter is currently at university studying in a way that I never had the opportunity to. Obviously I am extremely proud of her but it does sadden me terribly that I am forced to feel resentful of a system that has allowed her to achieve so much. Why is it always the case that Governments can only nurture one idea at a time? How hard can it be to give equal value to qualifications and experience?

My worry for the future is that the continuing trend of giving precedence to qualifications over experience, is going to lock out a whole section of potentially excellent employees, people who, by their very nature thrive on initiative and adaptation. Basic skills, you can learn in just a few years but you need experience and instinct to keep a business afloat through all the ups and downs that will certainly come its way, and that takes decades to learn. How long is it going to take, I wonder, before Governments realise this oversight and decide to do something about it. I’ve listened to them for years droning on about how important ‘the family’ is and how you should ‘be there’ for your children. Yet the small print should read, (provided you don’t want any recognition for it when you try to go back to work!) Perhaps all pregnant women should register as self-employed and take NVQ’s in housewifery, although I don’t know who would pay for that, another opportunity for a student loan scheme maybe.

So for me, at the age of forty-one, it seems I have missed the proverbial boat. This is the thanks I get for staying at home and preventing my children from becoming bored, joining gangs and generally making a nuisance of themselves. I’m basically left with very few choices as to what to do with the twenty-five working years I have left. After drifting from one job to another for the last ten years, I have come to the conclusion that the only employer, who will allow me to progress without a degree, is myself! So I have decided to give it a go and set up my own business running a commercial website for myself and other people like me. It’s not proving easy on a budget of, well . . . nothing and as for a learning curve, I’d say it’s probably shaped more like a spiral! But it’s getting there and at least I know that it’s up to me how far I choose to push it and if things go wrong, I know I am more than qualified to cope.

The website is a selling outlet for small-scale artists and craftspeople who can't afford to 'go it alone', called Random Crafts. I hope eventually to encourage many people to sell through the site, which will enable the selling costs to be kept right down. This would be of obvious benefit to anybody who is in the same position as me and maybe, even be the start of many other successfully self-employed, recently redundant parents!

Cheryl Lucas

www.randomcrafts.co.uk