My old-school boss was horrified at what I said and I am only now, 25 years later, realizing it

In 1999, I was the only woman in a group of men at a three-day offsite meeting. They were all sleeping in a big house on the golf course together; I was in my own little cottage down the street.

The first day, at our meeting in the big house, one of the guys – Bud – said he had hit a golf ball into the smegma.

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I was used to being one of the only women in the room.

I was used to the male employees taking male clients to strip clubs.

(My few female colleagues and I were not invited.)

(I wonder why we didn’t win the Big Accounts.)

I was used to the language.

I was used to the harrassment.

I was used to the men doing inappropriate things like rubbing my neck while I sat at a desk doing my job or kissing me on the lips when I thought I was just saying hello.

But I had never heard someone use this word in polite company before.

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I gasped as the blood drained from my face.

Bud noticed my response – nobody else had reacted – and looked puzzled.

Instead of doing the tactful thing,

Instead of doing the diplomatic thing,

Instead of doing the logical thing that everyone else in the world would have done, which would have been to whisper, “Don’t worry about it I’ll explain later,”

or, if he insisted on knowing now, instead of pulling him aside and quietly explaining,

I blurted out the explanation to the entire room.

Yes.

Using technically and anatomically correct language, I explained to a group of men I barely knew, including my new boss, who had hired me for a six-month stint at the factory he was trying to turn around, what the word meant.

That’s when the blood drained from Bud’s face.

I didn’t know! he told me.

I had no idea! he continued. I thought it meant a clump of grass on a golf course!

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Later that day, my boss said I should go back home – it was too expensive for me to be in a cottage by myself and of course staying in the house with the men was not an option.

It’s only now – TODAY, MORE THAN TWO DECADES LATER – that I am realizing he probably sent me home not because of the expense but because I had explained what the word meant to all those present.

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If I had known my reaction might have an impact on my career, I might not have rolled my eyes at the poor booth babes dancing half-naked at the Atlanta Poultry trade show in front of machines designed to transport eviscerated poultry corpses across the factory floor and asked my new boss and the VP walking with us why they didn’t just put up a sign offering blow jobs.

I’m sorry booth babes! I know you weren’t giving blow jobs at a trade show and I know you were not enjoying dancing in front of a bunch of old lechers, many of whom did indeed find and pay for female companionship later in the evening, some of them on my company’s expense account and I KNOW THIS because one of the sales rep turned a little green when I said something about the booth babes and told me I had no idea what really went on and how he loved his wife and refused to participate.

Wait. Even if I had known, I still would have rolled my eyes and said something. Because the VP was shocked not at what was happening, but that I said something about it. That I pointed out that this was not a good thing. Because what was happening was his normal. And exploiting women should not be normal.

I’m extremely frugal but I don’t ask friends to drive me 230 miles and not even pay for gas (and if I did I would sure buy lunch at least)

This happened over 20 years ago and I am still mad about it.

Yes I can hold a grudge why do you ask?

I was dating this English guy who lived in Brussels. We both worked for the same company, which is how we met.

He had to come to the company HQ in Memphis and wanted to visit me in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

I said fine but fly from Memphis to CR because the drive between the two cities is nothing but cornfields and it’s boring.

He ignored me and drove and when he arrived, commented that wow that was a boring drive!

Yes I answered. I told you that. I told you that.

His co-worker then went on to Chicago with the car and the British Brussels Boyfriend (BBB) stayed with me for the weekend.

Sunday night, BBB told me he had cancelled his Monday flight from CR to Chicago because if I drove him, we could spend more time together.

He did not consult me on this decision.

He did not ask if I wanted to drive the 230 miles to Chicago and then back again. (I did not.)

He did not ask if I had any meetings I couldn’t miss at work the next day. (I didn’t but that’s not the point.)

He did not ask if I wanted to TAKE A VACATION DAY to drive him. (I did not.)

I was pissed but this was before I was fully versed in the internet and greyhound.com.

(There is a bus! I just checked. Five hours – not much longer than it takes in a car – and $105.)

Now I am really mad, not just at him but at myself for not even thinking about the bus. I knew about the bus! I had taken it from Houston to San Antonio when I was in college.

Damn.

But anyhow BBB announced I would be driving him and LIKE AN IDIOT I said OK because I didn’t know what else to do.

(The nice thing about getting older is you no longer face these situations of feeling like you have no options. You realize that you did not create the problem and you don’t have to fix it and you can just say, “Dang I hope you can figure this out. Bye.”)

So I drove him.

When I stopped for gas, he did not offer to pay.

When we met my friend Lenore for lunch at a pizza place, he watched as she picked up the check.

When we arrived at O’Hare, he did not open his wallet and say, “Let me reimburse you for the gas at least!” which would have given me the chance to decline with a smile but I would not have declined because I was so mad by then.

(You should know that he mentioned more than once that he was a millionaire – that he was good at investing. But he lived like a monk, without even his own washing machine, washing his clothes in the sink or taking them to the laundromat, and keeping his TV in the apartment basement so he wouldn’t watch too much.)

(WHAT WAS I THINKING?!)

One month after he got back home, BBB broke up with me.

I did not shed a tear.

I did, however, mention to him that I would like him to reimburse me for the gas. (I should have asked for 50 cents a mile plus compensation for the vacation day.)

He did not answer.

Months after that, when I had moved to Memphis (with the same company), a co-worker came to my office (those were the days when people had offices)(and good insurance)(and good vacation time) with an envelope.

“I was just in Brussels for a company meeting,” she said, “and BBB gave this to me to give to you?”

The envelope had $39, which I guess covered the gas but nothing else.

I just rolled my eyes.

Six months later, he emailed me that he had to come to Memphis for work and could he see me and I had to let him know ASAP because there were only two cheap seats left on the flight.

Not two seats.

But two *cheap* seats.

That he wasn’t even paying for.

I would rather leave money on the table than leave time on the table

I have been feeling guilty about not working for money.

It’s not just our culture, which seems to equate a person’s worth with her income, but also people I know. A college acquaintance, a very high earner, wrote on facebook, “people retiring at 58 is silly unless your health is compromised and you are about to die at 60…. Try to grow a pair and realize that it’s a journey.”

She did clarify that she meant someone who liked her job should keep working, but I have never liked my job enough that I would prefer working to not working. I have always worked because I needed the money. That’s been my main motivation. I needed to pay my rent and buy food.

The luxury of having a job that you also find fulfilling and worthwhile?

That is something most of us do not have.

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My grandmother wanted to be an artist. She wanted to study painting in Paris. I didn’t know this until I was in my 30s and I asked her if she could have done anything in her life, what would she have done. My aunts and uncles didn’t know this until I told them.

My grandmother had to leave school, which she loved, after 8th grade. My mom still has my grandmother’s school notebooks, with careful (and beautifully done) drawings of the cross-section of a cell and insightful essays about Christopher Columbus. She loved learning.

Before she married my grandfather at age 28, she worked as a maid in Chicago, walking the miles back to work on her day off rather than take the streetcar so she could buy a candy bar with the nickel instead.

Once she married my grandfather, who had bought his parents’ farm, she, too, became a farmer, getting up before dawn every day to trudge through the northern Wisconsin snow to the barn to milk the cows, sewing her clothes and her children’s clothes, washing those clothes (including diapers) in the washtub and then putting them through the wringer and hanging them out to dry, growing and canning their produce, baking bread almost every day.

I don’t think it wasn’t until after her children and four foster children were mostly gone from the house that she started taking painting classes. Once a week, she went into town for her class with Mr O’Brian. She painted what was beautiful in her world: mothers holding babies, children, puppies, and flowers.

Had she actually gone to Paris, she would not have been considered a Great Artist if she had continued with these themes. The domestic sphere not Art unless a man does it. (See Jennifer Weiner vs Jonathan Franzen.)

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My grandfather, who also had to leave school after 8th grade, had dreams. He had traveled to California to work with the CCC. He loved California and had wished he could stay.

He was an avid reader his whole life, keeping a globe next to his armchair so he could find the places he was visiting on the page.

My other grandparents also were not allowed to continue their educations after 8th grade. My grandmother persisted as best she could by getting a job at the library, working or volunteering there the rest of her life. My grandfather died at 59 from a stroke. (A stroke he would have survived today thank God for modern medicine.)

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Mr T’s grandfather also didn’t go past 8th grade and worked the line at Ford for 40 years.

Forty years of backbreaking work. Forty years of getting up early, filling a lunch pail, and trudging through the harsh Detroit winter to a loud, dirty factory. Forty years of dealing with bosses and no power and no way to say no or to protest.

In his retirement, he and Mr T’s grandmother bought a small place in Florida. Grandma Mr T died early and Grampa Mr T spent what remained of his retired life without her.

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When I was in college, my farmer grandparents, by then retired, drove to Texas to visit my family in San Antonio. My mom drove them to Houston for the day to visit me at college.

I was the first of 26 grandchildren to attend college. My mom’s younger siblings had attended local state schools (my mom dropped out her freshman year), but my grandparents had not been able to pay for anything, so it was a low-budget experience for all of them. My uncle told me he could barely keep his eyes open during class because he would work until 3 a.m. at UPS, getting only a few hours of sleep every night.

I still see my grandmother, standing in the middle of the quad, wearing her worn but clean and tidy cloth coat, carefully-mended stockings, and sensible thick-soled laceup shoes, and clutching her pocketbook in front of her as she beamed in delight.

I was getting to have the college experience that people dream of – I was immersed in learning in a setting of great beauty.

I was living part of her dream and she was delighted.

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My dad died when he was 62.

He was not retired.

For years, he had talked about renting an RV and driving around the country with my mom, visiting all the parks. I rolled my eyes because at the time, that sounded dumb, but now? Now it sounds great. I mean, except for the driving all day and living out of an RV – but spending my days walking in beauty? Is that a bad thing?

I’m not 62 yet, but I can see it from here.

I think a lot about how I would want my last years to be if these were my last years.

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When Mr T’s parents died in 2015, we already knew he had been disinherited. But because his parents were so lazy about their death preparation, they hadn’t bothered to update their IRA beneficiaries. Mr T was the secondary beneficiary on his dad’s IRA, which meant that despite his dad’s wishes, Mr T did inherit money from him.

It was a life-changing amount not in a “Wow we have so much money we never have to worry about money again” way but in a “Well if we add this money to what we have already saved, we can think about retiring a little bit early, especially if we live very modestly.”

(PS This is a warning to keep your will and other financial information up to date. You could accidentally leave money to someone you want to disinherit!)

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A dear friend – who makes a ton I mean A TON of money and also holds a position of great social status – asked me, when I quit my last job, how I could walk away from the money.

I can see how it would be hard to walk away from a very high salary and a job where you are the boss and are respected and people know you have Made It.

But I was making less money than I made three years out of college. I was the lowest-ranking person in the group and the person of last resort for dealing with crap. It’s easy to walk away from being a cog for very low pay. It’s easy to walk away when your entire career has been a series of just jobs and you’re kind of a professional failure.

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I think about all that human potential – so much intelligence, so much yearning – unrealized.

I think about my grandparents, working so hard every single day that they looked old even in their 40s.

I think about how they didn’t complain.

And I think about the dreams they held in their hearts. The dreams they never got to fulfill.

And then I don’t feel guilty about not working for money.

If all you see are penises, you think ectopic pregnancies can be transplanted and periods can be contained by squeezing your legs together

What don’t we usually find in the women’s room?

Men.

Which is another way of saying we don’t find people with power.

Which is why when a friend jokingly sent a photo to Mr T of the friend and his senior executive co-workers, all out of town on a client entertainment beach trip, standing in front of the urinals in their scuba gear, I got furious.

(Nothing against the friend – this is the water he swims in.)(Haha.)

Mr T did not understand my anger.

“That’s the power structure of the company,” I said. “Of the world.”

“They’re all men. This is how they develop their bonds. This is how they hang out with each other. How they decide whom to ask to play golf. How they decide who has ‘executive presence.’ How they decide whom to promote. How they decide whom to invite into the power circle.”

“This is how the system perpetuates itself. By making decisions in a room where women are not allowed.”

(It should go without saying that everyone in that photo was white.)

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Last week, I was at a talk. One of my state’s Supreme Court justices was also at the talk. I had never met her before, but after the talk, I saw her in the ladies’ room. She was the only other person there and she was wearing a fabulous jacket so I complimented her on the jacket and we started talking and I told her how happy I was that she had been elected and how Mr T and I had campaigned for her and how my Bonus Daughter in another state had written postcards for Justice’s campaign and to keep up the good work.

She thanked me and said she was giving a speech in another state soon and wasn’t sure what to say or how to reach those voters about abortion and I told her that when I had campaigned, I had been in a conservative neighborhood but almost every single older woman I had met had told me that although she personally would never have had an abortion, she would be damned if she would tell other women what to do.

One woman was a retired nurse. She said she was against abortion for herself but she started to cry when she told me about the ten year old girl who came into her ER after being raped.

“We took care of it,” she said. “We never even let her know. She didn’t need that on top of everything else.”

My state’s current law, since Roe was overturned, allows no exceptions for rape. Or the age of the girl who might be pregnant.

(Quick reminder although I’m sure none of you need it: By definition, any girl who is pregnant – unless a state has Romeo and Juliet law, which my state does not but also doesn’t really matter as most underage pregnancies are a result of adult predators – has been raped. The age of consent in my state is 18. By law, a girl under 18 cannot consent to sex. No matter how grown she looks.)

The best way to get the law changed is to get more people with vaginas on the court and in the legislature.

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Mr T and I were at a play. The executive director of the theatre said that one reason they are doing big renovations next year is because there aren’t enough women’s rooms, which makes intermission too long.

“Why don’t they convert one of the two men’s rooms to a women’s room?” Mr T whispered to me.

“Because then men would have to wait and we can’t have that,” I whispered back.

And because men will never willingly give up their power.