Work History
A sneak peek
Since I’m furiously finishing my book manuscript, which is due this month, I didn’t have time to write a substack. So, I’m going to share a portion of the book, which is about intentional decision making about work and career. It will be available next spring, and you’ll hear more about it as it gets closer.
Let’s think about a kind of work history that isn’t the history of the jobs you’ve had or the work you’ve done, but the history of your unique understanding of what work is and the role of work in a person’s life. What are the stories you tell yourself about work - work in general, your career or specific industry, the role of capitalism?
Stories about work can change, depending on the season of your life and your perspective. Here’s an example.
When I was a teenager, one night after dinner, my father was talking to my sister and me about careers - a common occurrence. My mother stopped him and asked him, about us, “What if they get married? What if they want to have children?”
My father stopped talking. He was silent for a moment. It was clear he had never considered this. It was a revelation to all of us that my father, for all his planning and direction for our future, had never considered that one or both of his daughters might want to be a mother. We were in high school. It was the end of the 70s. Neither one of my grandmothers worked outside the home, and they had four and five children, respectively. Both my grandmothers had their first child in their twenties and their last children in their forties. My mother hadn’t worked outside of the home for years. But my father just disregarded an entire cultural narrative when it came to his plans for his daughters. That was, at first, a powerfully supportive story for me, that gender roles are fungible, a product of a cultural imagination that could be unimagined if you had the intellect, desire and conviction to reframe them.
However, when I did have children, I felt like I had failed my father. He was dead by then, so I couldn’t reframe the narrative by talking to him. But I remember being home with my newborn son, just a few months after he was born, feeling like I had wasted my college education because I had kids right after college and didn’t go to work immediately at a big corporation. That was not a helpful narrative, or one that was especially useful or accurate.
When I did get to corporate America, I was three years behind my peers because I stayed home with my kids until my youngest was three. I felt vaguely embarrassed that I had kids in my twenties, when my work peers didn’t have children until their thirties or forties.
And yet just this past weekend I went to a party and ran into one of those peers. She told me that her son just left for college. Many of those women who had children in their thirties and forties are going through menopause when their kids are going through puberty, or paying for college a few years shy of retirement. Now I’m glad I had kids in my early twenties, and can be a youngish grandmother.
There’s plusses and minuses to every decision, especially about when to have children. The point is that my narratives about being a working mother have continued to evolve throughout my life.
Who taught you about work?
Think about your childhood. Who taught you about work? What lessons did you take in from your family and culture? Who got to work and who didn’t? Whose work was valued and whose was not? Was work something that adults seemed to enjoy, or was it oppressive or dangerous? Were the adults proud of their work?
Most of my understanding of work came from my father. He dressed up in a suit and tie and went to work in an office. He travelled often. I knew where he worked but I didn’t really understand what he did.
But I learned about who got to work from my mother. My mother was a very intelligent woman who was going to pursue a graduate degree in oceanography when she met my father. This was in the late 1950s. She said she had turned down the graduate program to get married. She told this story often; it was important that we knew that she was smart enough to go to graduate school. She never explained why she thought that getting married meant she couldn’t go to grad school. Which is an example of how narratives form our understanding of our place in the world. The only women on my mother’s side of the family who worked were divorced or widowed.
When my father started graduate school, they moved from the Seattle area back East, shortly after I was born. I can’t imagine getting into a car with all your possessions and driving cross country less than a week after your first child was born. But that’s what they did. I was born in August, and his classes were starting. A man’s graduate degree and career was worth any amount of uprooting.
When we lived in Seattle in the mid-seventies, my mother got into the University of Washington law school. I remember her studying for the LSAT, and how she seemed different to me, happier, engaged. I was in middle school, and the thought of my mother going to law school seemed cool. Then my father was transferred to Los Angeles for work, so we moved, and she never went to law school.
She stopped working after that, and poured her energies into real estate. We moved so often that she would fix up the houses they bought, and then when we moved again, make a profit.
From what little I understood, I think she made money for the family that way. I know that our houses kept getting bigger and bigger, as they tried to reinvest to not have to pay taxes on their capital gains.
The narrative in my family was that my father had the career. My mother’s work, in or out of the house, was never considered work. No one ever made a comment on the fact that she was the one who turned down opportunities for education and career if they conflicted with her husband’s job, or considered the work entailed in raising children, buying and selling houses and moving every couple of years.
What work is important?
My father’s father, Ernest, was a retired carpenter. My mother didn’t get along with my father’s family, but to everyone’s surprise, my grandfather found a wooden bed somewhere and fixed it up for my mother. I think it was a peace offering, a desire to stay connected to his oldest son’s family. The bed had a dark wooden frame, with curved wood and elaborate carvings on the top of the headboard that you could remove for a simpler look.
My mother didn’t like the bed. I slept in it for most of the time I was growing up. I would stand up and take the carvings off the top of the headboard and look at them. My grandfather had carved them to replace the originals that were missing or damaged. I was fascinated by what he got the wood to do. Whorls and tendrils in an arch with wooden pegs that slipped easily in and out of the top of the headboard. He told me that the original frame of the bed was made from wood that was heated and then bent, so it curved in majestic, rounded flourishes with no corners, only smooth curves.
My grandfather touched wood like he appreciated it, savored it. I remember all his tools hung neatly on pegboards in the garage that he used as a workshop. He wasn’t a warm man, and we didn’t see my grandparents often because of the conflict with my mother, but I remember how he talked about his work. He said that his brother Anselmo, who was still in Italy, was the real artist, a woodcarver, an artisan. The way my grandfather talked about art taught me that artists were important. He would listen to opera and cry. He spoke English, French and Italian and he told me that he read Les Miserables in French and he’d stay up into the night reading, hiding the light from his parent. Writers, artist, craftspeople, were important, valuable, gifted.
One exercise that might be useful here is to do a work timeline. Write a long line and start at one end with your first job. Mine was delivering the Washington Post to my neighbors. I had to get up very early. I was thirteen or fourteen.
What are the jobs you had and what did you learn from them?
What jobs represented inflection points? Your first job as an ICU nurse, or the job you got when you left the military.
You can decide what you consider to be work, and I invite us all to open the aperture to include caring for children or sick family members, our art, participation in any community engagement or social action.
Consider the narratives you got from your family about work, as well what stories you were told by culture and the media. Were these supporting or limiting or both? What did you learn from your work history? How does this impact any decisions you are making about your work or career now?
I’m going to leave you to consider this, until the book is done, and you can see how it all fits together to create a guide to intentional decision making about work.