Long ago and far away, I was married. Let’s just call him “Jacko” for the hell of it. He was a gold-plated up-and-comer in the advertising business. We had an office romance, dated, moved in together and three years later, got hitched. Soon, the Wild Wild West came calling and Jacko was recruited to big-paying job in San Francisco. He went to work and I went looking. I’d had a nearly 10 year career clawing my way to the middle of a big time Madison Avenue ad agency and suddenly, there was no work for me. Once we’d bought the cozy love nest in the redwoods, the Audi and the golden retriever puppy, there was no turning back.
We’d been there nearly two years before I found a job in my chosen profession, television production, and for a reduction in pay and a humiliating standard compared to where’d I’d been, I worked my ass off. For that job, I often flew back and forth to Los Angeles, making a 4 a.m. trek to the airport a few times a month, sometimes commuting back and forth in one day. On one particular Thanksgiving, though, my job took me there for about a week. I arrived back home on Thanksgiving Day. I remember asking Jacko where he’d made a reservation for Thanksgiving Dinner. He looked at me crestfallen. “Huh?” he questioned, “You didn’t cook?” And he was serious!
Therein is the story of women working and maintaining a family. In the 1980’s anyway. From that moment on, the marriage became a series of sacrifices. When he worked, Jacko made great money and life was dreamy in big houses with limos and luxuries. Trouble was, Jacko could barely keep any job for more than a year. The minute he was fired, the perks dried up. Because my business life was second to his (that’s how it was in those days when men were the bread winners), he led and I followed. Just like the marriage, my career went into a ditch.
Recently, in a therapy session, I was asked to list opportunities that had been presented to me in life that I had grabbed and those I’d rejected. I reviewed the circumstances of those pivotal decisions that brought me to where I am today. (more on that later)
It turns out that there was a fork in the road about four years into our marriage when I had a chance to go in another direction solo. I remember it like I were sitting there now. My then boss, the head of a major ad agency production department, popped a $10,000 (read as triple that by today’s count) check out of his desk drawer. This was his inducement to stay and not to follow the bouncing ball of Jacko’s career path one more time to another city, this time a far less desirable one than San Francisco. I was further induced to stay by my supervisor who suggested I take over one of the agency’s major accounts. Here in New York, where we were living, I’d found and decorated a superior apartment (the place was cheap and well located). We’d spent a few bucks renovating too.
The marriage was troubled for the money problems that came with high interest (16% fixed rate) mortgages and lack of consistent work to pay for our propensity for high living. Not to mention hefty child support payments and the nasty back-and-forthing that results between exes. He lived in the mid-West, where the only job he could find was headquartered, and I remained in New York for as long as I could hold out. With the house in California and an apartment in New York, adding yet another residence in another city made our expenses prohibitive. While the distance necessitated planned, and often far more romantic interludes than we’d had in years, the situation became untennable until finally Jacko was making promises to me he ultimately couldn’t keep.
My friends and family saw the handwriting on the wall. Everyone who knew me urged me to leave the marriage and stay in New York, my hometown, the City I love and the place where the greatest career possibilities existed for me. I was still only 34 with plenty of road still ahead of me. Jacko was more and more desperate to have me move to the mid-West to be with him and finally after 18 months of commuting, I caved in, packed and left.
This was the decision that, I believe, has influenced my life ever since.
Today, as different from the early 1980’s, I think women can choose differently. Back then, there was no negotiating for both people in a couple. When your husband was recruited, even by a wealthy company, you were on your own to find a job for yourself. Most couples weren’t comprised of two working professionals. Women were liberated by the second-wave of feminism (1950’s-1980’s) which was largely concerned with issues of equality, such as the end to discrimination a la Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) but, apparently not all that much. Back then, I was one of few women I knew who wanted a job, not just an engagement ring, after college. To move to a city without a network or a vehicle for acquiring one quickly, meant no real way to find a circle of like-minded professionals. Back then, without a open system for parlaying a decade’s worth of corporate ladder climbing, there was no way to break in to a small, closed society of workers. Back then, to work in television advertising meant living in one of two places and San Francisco and the mid-West weren’t either of them.
Whomever said you don’t have to choose is full of sh*t! Let’s face it. None of us would rather have one OR the other but the truth is – there are only so many hours in a day and we each have only so much energy to go around. What then was a choice between my marriage to a man I loved and felt committed to, no matter what damage had been done already, and a job or career was, in my mind, not a contest. Today, if couples don’t get along that’s reason enough to split up. Until recently, 50% of marriages ended in divorce. Why things have changed, I’m not quite sure. I doubt it’s that women are taking their careers less seriously. If anything, my guess is that the gender slant of breadwinners is changing. Perhaps men are considering women’s professional lives more important. Perhaps both spouses are part of the negotiation when one is recruited to another city.
After my last exit from a highly respected New York advertising agency, I was never able to move vertically again, only laterally, at best, and was mostly relegated to compromising freelance jobs. Because television production is like any other “you’re as good as your last gig” industry, no good salary in advertising ever followed. By the time the marriage broke for good and I moved to a serious production city, L.A., I had very little to offer in the stiffest competitive marketplace in the country.
Now, I was on my own. I scrambled for work and got none. The Divorce Court judge saw a working woman who only needed “rehabilitation” to be back on her feet. My ex got away with murder and welched on what he did owe. Since then, my resume has been a patchwork of reinvention. I don’t regret any of the roads this history has taken me down. I would never have had the chance to find my other talents. I do feel sure though, that, had things been more equitable, there could have been an easier way.
