“I will never retire”: My mom on freelancing, layoffs, and 9–5
Ceil Diskin is a single mother who raised her twin daughters in a magenta pink house and never yielded in her pursuits at making a living as an artist. Now, her family lives in a different — pink strictly on the inside — house and her daughters are grown up and in college. (Full disclaimer: I am one of those twin daughters.)
It’s 8:30 pm and Diskin is home from a full day’s work in New York City. She’s just finished making herself dinner as she goes to sit down at her desk and eat while she works on a freelance assignment. And on nights she’s not working on freelance you can guarantee she’s working on her textile company.
This is not the first time Diskin was a freelance artist while still working a 9–5 job. “I sold pictures I’d photographed to magazines on the side. While I worked for a graphic design firm I did CD labels for record companies.”
She went solely freelance in 1991, before she had a family to support, after having built up a significant enough client base. But out on her own she struggled to maintain a steady income.
“The freedom is nice,” she said. “It’s more about doing the work you want to do. You don’t have to deal with a boss or coworkers which is nice, but you also have to deal with clients which is its own thing.”
However, in June of 1996, she had to return to working a traditional full-time job to be able to support herself and her daughters.
“It’s one thing if it’s just you, but if you’re trying to support a family on your own it is as you would say, precarious,” she said.
But in 2011 she was let go from her full-time position as creative director for a publishing house in a series of downsizing due to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
“I had built a career for 30 years and I was downsized in my early 50’s. Because of age, I was bounced out,” she told me.
From the spring of 2011 to the fall of 2016, she supported her family solely off freelance work. She hustled, networked, went to trade shows. She was riding a wave of high hopes with her entrepreneurial spirit as the board beneath her feet.
Growing up, I watched my mom work relentlessly. I couldn’t keep up with all of the balls she had in the air. A woman of many hats, her textile business had her wearing the hat of the designer, marketer, manufacturer, all of it.
And that pressure to be everything on your own can be lonely, she said. “A lot of the burden is on me without a partner and if I had one it would be different.”
In September of 2016, she again returned to a 9 to 5 job, as creative director of the marketing department at Israel Bonds in New York. Now she has a steady income. “Without a steady income everything just dwindles and you don’t have a leg to stand on,” Diskin said. “The most important thing, what gets me out of bed in the morning is a steady paycheck.”
After everything she’s been through in her career and all that she’s seen, my mom isn’t sure anything is secure. She still needs to freelance. The extra income helps her support my sister and me as we attend college, and pay off the debt she accumulated while she freelanced full-time from 2011 to 2016.
My mom is amongst the sizable baby boomer generation, a generation that’s unable to retire from the workforce. According to a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of older adults in the workforce increased over the past 20 years. In 1996, 46% of people ages 60–64 were working; that percentage rose to 56% in 2016.
In the past 10 years people of retirement age are not retiring. There could be many reasons for the increase, the recession in 2008, the increased cost of living, skyrocketing college tuition, stagnant wages, rising income inequality so those at the top get more and more and everyone else gets by with less and less.
Some people don’t retire for personal rather economical reasons. Maybe they have a dream they’re chasing and they’re not ready throw in the towel. My mom is a combination of those who feel they can’t retire for reasons both financial and personal.
“I’m reaching an age now where people retire,” she said. “I will never retire. I will never stop working. I want to be able to realize all that’s in me as an artist. Right now I don’t have that time or expanse of time but I hope that more and more I will.”
