How to look 10 years older and tank your career in one easy step!

There is a moment when a stay-at-home parent's job title shifts from "homemaker" to "straight-up unemployed."

When that happened to me a few months ago, I considered making a resume.

I thought about how to re-brand myself and sell my new "mom" skill set. But making awesome waffles, tricking my kids into cleaning the toilets, using chia seeds to replace eggs in baking, keeping a quarterly blog, none if it seemed very...skillful.

Then, through the dense fog of motherhood, I had a vague recollection from before kids: I once had a real job. At a real office. Writing for a real magazine. Maybe I could do that again.

Abandoning my crazy resume idea, I called up my journo friends who were still in the biz, bought them drinks and then held out my cap.

They were kind enough to toss me some assignments. I wrote a few small articles and many top ten lists (You know the type: Top Ten Biggest Celebrity Butts, Top Ten Baby Nicknames, Top Ten Nicknames Celebrities Give Their Babies' Butts.)

Really, though, my friends couldn't help me much. They were too busy barely hanging on to their own jobs.

They told me horror stories about top people getting the axe, mass layoffs, biweeklies turning into monthlies, established freelancers clawing each others' eyes out over custom content work (soul-killing, sponsored puff pieces on corporate execs).

Around the same time, I saw a depressing rumination by Eric Reguly, who was covering the winter Olympics from Sochi. The talk at the bar was that--while the sports were fanatstic and everything--he and his fellow hacks were more excited about just being there, given the current state of journalism.

But two weeks ago was the real kick in the pants, when a robot broke a story for the LA Times.

Quakebot is his name. And his story wasn't half-bad, either. Straightforward, all the details were there. I'm pretty sure I've written worse pieces. Certainly nothing that got half as much media coverage.

I realized since I dove head-first into motherhood a decade ago, I didn't know journalism anymore.

It used to be about getting a good story, and telling it well. Now it's about getting any story, and telling it quickly--before a robot scoops you. However you have to do it--barf out stream-of-consciousness tweets, Instagram your cleavage--anything goes, as long as you get eyeballs on it.

The game has changed, and if I'm going to get back into it, I'll need a lesson in how this whole self-promotion thing works. But I'm done with journalism school, and my friends can't help. I don't have any marketable cleavage.

So, who to turn to? Who can give me advice on how to resucitate my career?
 
Maybe I should take Quakebot for a drink. He might have a top ten list for me.