Medium Writer’s Challenge 2021 Honorable Mention Winner
When Your Life’s Work No Longer Works
Working for a living isn’t living
My first paying job? Babysitting, age 12. Mom would pick me up from middle school and drop me at the trailer park just in time to meet sweet little six-year-old April as her bus pulled up.
April and I would walk up the hill to her place where I’d fix her a snack and wait for her mom to finish driving her bus route. Most days it was only half an hour, but it didn’t matter. Every Friday, April’s mom pulled up and handed me $30 cash. It was a sweet gig.
Making money was intoxicating.
From there, I had a very brief stint faking like I was making phone sales for a portrait company. My shift was from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm. All I remember is me and 5–8 other kids roughly my age sitting in tiny little cubicles like the ones inmates talk across the glass to family members except ours weren’t see through.
We stared at a bulletin board that held our script and the list of assigned phone numbers we were to punch into our green push button phones until we reached someone who didn’t slam the receiver down before we got ‘hello’ out.
Throughout the summer, I may have sold one portrait package.
Mom wasn’t happy about that gig. “Once you start working, you’ll never stop.” I was 14 — I don’t even know if it was legal for me to work then. Turns out Mom was right. I worked nonstop for the next four decades.
What that job taught me, beyond the fact that I didn’t have a future in sales and people hate to be called during dinner, was that I liked showing up for a purpose and seeing my name typed across a paycheck. I didn’t much like calling strangers, but I liked recording things, and I thought I might like to have a desk of my own someday.
I liked work.
The following summer I was hired at a new restaurant, Sea Galley, opening in our small town. I learned so much from that experience. Every kid should have to work in a restaurant at some point. It’s there where I learned what teamwork, goals, and customer service meant. Happy customers meant returning customers, and everyone from the hostess to the dishwasher has an opportunity to make an impact.
Those lessons stuck with me.
In Chinese astrology, I was born in the year of the horse which I’ve always equated with being a workhorse, solid and dependable. That’s who I am — the girl who shows up and gets shit done.
I grew up in a family that believed in roll-up-your-sleeves hard work, thrived on it. Dad didn’t care how late you stayed out, how hard you partied, you were getting up the next day to go to school or work. Don’t feel well? If you felt good enough to go hang with your friends, you feel good enough to go to work. End of story.
My work ethic has served me well over the years. After high school, I went to secretarial school during the day and worked at Sea Galley on the nights and weekends.
After I graduated from secretarial school, I became [insert drum roll] a secretary! These were pre-historic times when women wore skirt suits with skillfully-tied scarves bound around their necks, itchy hosiery bound around their legs, and natural-looking make up. No blue eye shadow ever!
We were expected to sit outside our [male] boss’ office, ready at a moment’s notice to show off our skillset by doing highly-proprietary, vital things such as getting him coffee, taking a letter by shorthand (Google it), and setting up his tees times, all while ticking off the minutes to happy hour.
When I started working in the ’80s, there were no sexual harassment videos or classes. We had to figure out on our own how to stealthily back out of a manager’s office after he called you in to look at his wildlife porn. Look at that schlong on that moose, will ya? Or giggle nervously as he unzipped a plastic penis from a carpenter’s apron he was going to unveil to the engineers at the next trade show. Funny, huh?…Hysterical!
With every experience, I walked away with something — a lesson or a mentor or a new skill or a new friend. But, for the record, never a good memory of a droopy plastic penis. The pay may have been substandard, the boss may have been a complete perv, but I never left empty-handed.
If the conference table needs to be wiped off, grab a rag. If there’s a piece of trash on the floor, pick it up. If there’s a dirty coffee cup on the desk, clean it.
Years later, I parlayed that skillset into an organizing/concierge company I founded. For two decades, clients called on me to organize their closets, clean out their basements, return their cable boxes, pick up their dry cleaning, etc. If it was legal, I did it.
That company grew over the years and became my identity. There was nothing me and my team couldn’t do.
Work was my purpose and served me well enough for a time. I bought my first house before I turned 30. I was financially independent. From outward appearances, I was ‘together’ and ‘successful.’
I was also lonely, depressed, and drinking heavily.
What hadn’t work taught me over the years?
How to take care of me. How to just ‘be’ and feel good about me and my life without a paycheck, business card, or clients needing me to sort their papers or manage their affairs.
The high I got from depositing a client’s payment was short-lived, and then I was left alone with just me, my thoughts, a bottle of Chardonnay, and a pack of Marlboro Lights.
Ironically, my tagline was “Life just got easier.”
I was making everyone’s life easier, except my own. I was helping other people’s dreams come true while ignoring my own. I didn’t even know what my dreams were any more. Did I even have dreams?
In 2011, I had emergency bypass surgery. I was 44 years old. It’s what my surgeon referred to as the ‘widow maker.’ Two of the arteries carrying blood to my heart were 99 percent blocked.
It was a wake-up call.
Luckily I had broken up with Marlboro Lights years before. It was time to pull back on the alcohol, step up the exercise, and get serious about eating better. More importantly, it was time to discover who lurked beneath my work shield and how to better manage her stress.
When I allowed myself time to dream, I remembered my love of writing, painting, and drawing. I permitted myself to spend whole Sundays on the couch reading, followed by a nice, hot soak in the tub.
In the process of discovering myself, I learned how to love and care for myself. A couple of years later, I discovered the love of another person.
And then the real work began.
None of my jobs prepared me for how to be a good, loving wife. Strong and independent? Check! Knows how to balance a checkbook and budget for groceries! Check! Can make a decent meal in the crockpot? Confirmed.
But, I don’t know how to be soft or as accepting as I could be or flirty and sexy. My lingerie is a pair of dirty sweat pants and a tattered tee. And, I’m horrible at praising or tossing on the accolades. I fail miserably at expressing gratitude for all he does on a regular basis and biting my tongue when it wants to engage before my brain.
But, I’m working on it.
Work was utterly useless during my brother’s three year battle with leukemia except for helping me navigate all the bone marrow donor forms. Work didn’t teach me how to react when he died before I got a chance to lie on a table and transfer my good cells to him. Work didn’t teach me how to forgive myself for all the wasted years leading up to his diagnosis when we didn’t talk.
But, I’m working on it.
Work didn’t prepare me for the hardest, best job of my life — how to care for my blind 210-pound wheelchair-bound dad. I was clueless as to how to help in and out of the bathroom safely or transferring him in/out of bed or the car.
Work was useless when it came to admitting him into assisted living and calculating how long he could afford to live there.
None of my jobs prepared me to walk out of his tiny room — the room where he spent nine months in almost solitary confinement — for the last time and leave him alone to die from COVID-19. No employee manual or operating procedures guidebook addressed how to manage the crippling grief or cope with the guilt.
But I’m working on it with the help of a therapist.
Work is how you make a living, but it’s no way to live.