Home / Writing / The Avenue to My Real Life
On September 15, 2020, I interviewed my mom about her working life for a behavioral science class at DePaul University.
I asked her to start at the beginning. She had earned a teaching degree, then discovered during student teaching that she didn’t much enjoy teaching.
“Couldn’t believe it was still 10:15,” she said.
She needed a job, preferably one where she wouldn’t spend the morning wondering how it could possibly still be morning.
She was in her late twenties when she entered the workplace, having spent those early years raising my brothers. I did things in the other order: I spent my twenties and most of my thirties working, and became a mother at thirty-seven. When we recorded this conversation, that part of my life was still ahead of me.
She found work at Bergner’s, supervising the children’s department. The man who ran the store introduced her to people by marveling that she had never worked.
She was still irritated by this introduction when she told me about it decades later. Having raised two children, she had some grounds.
The job taught her how to schedule employees, manage a department, and handle customers. It also involved long hours, little money, and occasionally closing the store with a night watchman she considered alarmingly frail. After shutting down the computers upstairs, she had to turn out the lights behind her and make her way through the dark store.
She ran through parts of it.
Eventually, she noticed that the people making the most money weren’t necessarily the supervisors. They were the salespeople earning commission in the men’s department. She wanted to apply.
She was told she couldn’t have the job because she might need to measure a man’s inseam.
As Mom pointed out when she told me the story, she could have asked a male colleague to take the measurement. Besides, most men knew their inseams.
She moved into custom draperies instead.
There was a whole world behind that department: a woman making curtains in an upstairs apartment, installers, people who made valances. Mom liked learning how it all worked. She was less enthusiastic about selling hundreds of dollars of custom work to someone who would have been perfectly happy ordering curtains from JCPenney.
She would tell them so.
This was not because she could comfortably afford to lose the sale. She had children to support. There was never much extra money.
“I was relieved that I was that kind of person,” she told me.
Then: “You don’t know what kind of person you are until you start working.”
What stayed with me was her relief at discovering this about herself. Money was tight, but she could still tell someone to buy the less expensive curtains elsewhere.
She moved on to selling Yellow Pages advertising over the phone. In the interview, she had to pretend to sell an ad to a grocery store. She thought about what she would want to know as a customer. Could she get in and out quickly for milk? Was there prepared food she could take home to her family after work?
The questions sounded familiar. In my own work, I wanted to understand what someone needed, what might be getting in their way, and how we could make the experience better. Mom was imagining someone tired, on her way home, who still had to feed her family. We worked in different fields, but I recognized that desire to understand someone well enough to do right by them.
She learned to sell over the phone, and she made better money. But the deadlines were relentless, and sometimes she inherited customers who had been sold far more advertising than they needed. Before she could sell them anything, she had to give them a reason to trust the person calling.
That experience helped her get a job in auto leasing at Country Companies. She loved cars and knew how to sell. She would learn the rest.
“I could sell cleanly,” she said.
She could explain the terms, answer questions, and tell someone when the arrangement wasn’t right for them. She built relationships with customers who returned and referred other people. She liked being the person calling with an answer.
I was proud to have a mom who was educated, intelligent, and good at her work. I looked up to her, and when I imagined my own working life, she was the person I pictured.
She was especially pleased about finishing at 4:30: home in time to make dinner, with most weekends free, a steady salary, and a pension. Listening to her list these things, I could hear how much they had mattered.
“It was just the avenue to my real life.”
It was a job worth keeping. There were also years when keeping it took a great deal out of her.
She described paperwork left at a shared fax machine that had helped her work out what male colleagues were being paid. There were promotion requirements that changed before she could meet them, she said, and years when her base salary stayed the same. She started keeping copies.
Her heart would pound as she went to the copier.
She gave the file a name that sounded considerably less polite when said aloud: “whale oil beef hooked.”
The file name was very much my mom. So was making sure she had the paperwork.
When she finally challenged her boss, she was prepared to lose the job. She knew where she would apply next. She had even asked a colleague to bring her a little box from her desk if she wasn’t allowed back in.
She kept her job. Her boss did not.
I asked how she had known to document it all. She said she had been so angry that she made copies. Otherwise, who would believe her?
Later in the conversation, I tried to reassure her about my own workplace. We valued diversity and inclusion, I said. We had a woman CEO.
“So did we,” she answered.
I kept going, describing the people I worked for and why I felt good about them. She hoped that meant things were changing.
At the time, I meant it. I loved the people I worked for. But over the years, the leaders I trusted left or were let go, one by one, and my feelings about the place changed. Listening now, I’m struck by how much of my reassurance rested on people being there.
I told her that what I remembered most clearly was the life outside her job. We had time together, things to look forward to. Whatever had happened at the office, she had made room for us.
“It was just the avenue to my real life,” she said.
She took pride in her work, too. She liked knowing the answer when someone called. And if a customer was getting a car for Christmas, there would be a big bow on it, even if she had to make it herself.
Then, at the end of the day, she wanted to come home.
I knew about some of the difficult years. Still, hearing her tell it all together—the jobs, the money, the customers, the trips to the copier—gave me a fuller picture of the working life behind our family life. She had been figuring out how to provide for us while keeping hold of herself.
She had been retired for years by then, though she was hardly short of things to do. In Bishop Hill, she helped with festivals and volunteer projects, making things to sell to support the town’s historic buildings. The pandemic had put much of that on hold. She missed getting together with everyone.
Once we had worked through my questions, we carried on talking. She had ordered a peach pie for company the next day. There was a new card game to learn. She was taking my wedding pictures to coffee with her friends again, because not everyone had seen them yet.
Eventually, the conversation wandered back to work.
I explained that uncertainty was part of why I was taking classes. Nothing was guaranteed. I wanted to be prepared if I found myself needing another job.
She understood why I wanted something to fall back on. Even the teaching degree she hadn’t wanted to use had given her that.
“I didn’t want to be dependent,” she said. “I didn’t want to be beholden.”
I had started the call asking how she had found her way through work. By the end, I was telling her what worried me about finding my own way. She listened, and answered as my mom.
“You don’t want to ever feel like you’re at somebody’s mercy,” she said.
Watching now is bittersweet. My mom’s health has declined rapidly this year, and our conversations are different now. In this recording, she’s telling her stories, making me laugh, and bringing out details I might never have thought to ask about. I’m so glad we have it. I look forward to sharing it with my children, so they can see and hear their grandmother reflecting on her life.
