Mid-40s in the UK, young family, just been made redundant after 15 years. Just a cry into the ether really.

Hi guys,

Got a call that the company was "looking at the possibility of making your role redundant". Met to discuss options (not really a choice here, but the package being offered is more than Statutory so can't complain I guess), with me making the decision today to take the offer.

No-one is indispensable I know, but came as a big shock. Been with the company for so long, worked with mostly the same team for those 15 years (team of five, just me being made redundant, so far) so to go from having what I thought was pretty a pretty stable job, to not within such a short space of time is proving hard to cope with. The most worrisome aspect though is that I have a wife and two young kids, plus mortgage. The package does give me a few months to find something, but I know that time will vanish quickly, and we have very little back-up in terms of savings.

But also the shock of this has me unable to leap into job-hunting. Even trying to get a CV together after so long just immediately overwhelms me, let alone thinking what kind of thing I want to look for (and will I even have that luxury as someone on their mid-40s, do I just need to grab whatever the hell I can get? Probably). I don't really have any network contacts as such, it was I guess what people would call a hybrid role in a seasonal business. Was a small business slowly becoming more corporate over the 15 years, not much networking happening.

My wife is trying to be positive, she is a child-minder and can likely take on an extra child if needed, which won't bring in much more but will help. But I don't want to burden her. The kids know something is up, they actually loved coming into the office and people there have seen them grow up, so it will be hard to tell them, but I know kids are resilient as hell and will move on (way quicker than me). My wife pointed out this sucks but we lost my Dad 18 months ago and her Father had a stroke around the same time, and if this had happened then, well I don't know what we would have done. Trying to find the positive, but it's tricky. Plus the job was marketing/sales admin/database stuff, depending which season it was I would be focused on a different role, which made it interesting but I don't match up against someone for a 100% marketing role, as an example. But I guess I am damn good at multi-tasking. But also I am no spring chicken in terms of age.

So many thoughts, as you can tell! Need to be positive in front of the kids, and realistic (this is a worry for our family) but positive in front of my wife. But man this is hard. Realised I was emotionally fragile during my dad's passing, so I know I need to be careful of spiralling, and I will do. Just hard. It's about to be half term here so my wife has said just take week with the kids, being paid until end of month anyway. Think she's right.

Anyway that's it, thanks for reading all that.