I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. ---Diane Ackerman
The question was posed several months ago by an acquaintance from my romance writer days.
“Is the library your career now?” she asked.
My initial thought was that I’d never really considered any of the many jobs I’ve had in the past 47 years a “career.” Since I began babysitting our across-the-street neighbors’ four raucous, under-the-age-of-six boys at the age of 12, the right work for me has always seemed to materialize at exactly the right time. But had any of the work I'd done ever evolved into a bona fide career?
I’d added part-time sales clerk at the local department store to my resume shortly after my 16th birthday. The minuscule paycheck and 20% discount made it possible for me to buy a really delicious prom dress and an old rattletrap car and also save for college. Then, as a freshman at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, living at home, I used my learned-at-summer-school typing skills to snag a part-time job as an office clerk at American Cyanamid. Five afternoons a week, 2-5 p.m., I typed, filed, telexed, key punched and worked the switchboard. Skills honed, I was then able to work full-time all summer, filling in as my co-workers went on vacation. The money I earned at Cyanamid and the promise of a holiday/spring break/summer job there the next two years allowed me to transfer to the University of Missouri in Columbia to complete my degree in secondary education.
Working at Cyanamid made me realize that I much preferred working with adults to working with children, so following my graduation, after a half-hearted attempt to secure a teaching job, I gladly signed on as a full-time permanent employee there. My salary was much higher than I would have made as a teacher, I worked with people I liked a lot, and I was more than happy to stay there until I married and moved to Houston two years later.
My first job in Houston – believe it or not – was as a circulation assistant at the Houston Public Library on McKinney. How I loved that job! The books, the people, the old (for Houston) building, with its eerie back staircase, all in the heart of downtown… I started thinking about getting a master’s degree in library science, but the closest college to offer courses was Sam Houston State in Huntsville, and my husband quickly nixed the idea. In fact, he didn’t like the hours I worked, which included some nights and an occasional Saturday, and he didn’t like my salary, which was pretty low. Trying to keep the peace in my very young marriage, I quit after only nine months.
Temp work for Kelly Girl led me fairly quickly to my next job as secretary, answering to a gang of engineers at Marathon Marine Engineering Company. I loved that job, too. I was earning lots of money and working with people who respected me and appreciated my efforts. Within a year, I’d advanced to administrative assistant to the company president, a job I enjoyed for more than five years, until I left…in a snit.
Thirty years ago, things were a little different in corporate America. The glass ceiling was much lower, and as a result, many intelligent women, including me, were “kept in their place” by the men who always seemed to be in charge of everything. Back then, it was okay for me to fill in for the office manager while he was on vacation, in addition to keeping up with my administrative assistant duties, but there was no way my boss was going to give me the job when it became available. Of course, I didn’t know that until I asked for the job, fully expecting to get it, and my boss, a truly nice man, told me as kindly as he could that the office manager’s job was a man’s job, and he was going to have to hire a man to fill the vacancy.
To his credit, Mr. Bradbury offered to pay me the same salary, but his “no, dear, you can’t have the job” knocked my legs out from under me. I was stunned. Then I was hurt. Then I was truly angry. A month later, having found a job as an administrative assistant to the owners of Harvey Travel, I resigned.
I’d always wanted to travel around the world, and the opportunity to get my foot in the door at one of Houston’s premier travel agencies seemed like a good one. The owners “promised” they would let me train to be an agent – my ultimate goal – but first they wanted me to organize their extremely chaotic, messy office and catch up on their piles and piles of correspondence. Four weeks later, mission accomplished, I told them I was ready to start my travel agent training, but I soon realized it wasn’t going to happen. They wanted me to sit quietly in my tiny office, rearranging travel brochures, typing letters to a son’s camp counselor and/or making restaurant reservations.
Three months into the job, I found out I was pregnant, and a couple of months later, unwilling to pass up a chance to tour California for three weeks with my husband, I gladly resigned.
For eight years I was a stay-at-home mom. There was nothing I wanted to do more, and I loved (almost!) every minute of it. My lack of income earned me second-class-citizen status with my husband, however, and that was a terrible place to be for someone who had always paid her way. When my son was four years old, my husband went so far as to tell me that if I wanted a say in how money was spent in our household, then I had to earn it. Of course, he also made it clear that if I went back to work, I’d still be solely responsible for the care of our son. He was too involved in his “career” and earned too much money to have to take time off to attend to doctors’ appointments or pre-school pick-up, and he had no intention of spending his vacation time at home simply because, having started a new job, I wouldn’t be able to get away.
I'd always been an avid reader, and in 1984, desperate for an emotional outlet, I began to write. My good friend, Anna, offered encouragement and also got me started reading romance novels. The stories and the characters spoke to my heart, and within a few months, I began to explore the possibility of writing a story of my own. Here was a chance to work at home and (with luck!) earn a little money. Here was a chance to regain a little confidence in myself and my abilities....
No comments:
Post a Comment