Juggling who does what
Like many, we both needed to work. After all his “meat-grinder” jobs in Connecticut, his RTP software support job was much less stressful. So much so, in fact, that he was the one who covered all the daycare “sick calls.” Now, it was my job that was the problem.
I was working first at a university research lab that was supposed to be “mom-friendly.” For many reasons, that turned out to be a fallacy. After several months, it just kept getting worse, so I looked for another job.
Somehow, I landed a very good one at a pharmaceutical research company. Yes, it was high-stress and fast-paced, managing data review and validation for clinical research trials. It was stressful in a different way than the lab was, but at least I was better paid. I had the skills, so I took it even as it would turn out to be the wrong direction for me, and for what our son would need. But one step at a time.
A need for a new path
All through the 4 years of that job, that Pooh song kept reverberating in my mind. Then add in the teacher’s words about our son not being able to read.
Even worse, the evaluation we had done by a psychologist showed learning issues and ADHD. The psychologist told us we’d come in just in time. He noted that if things had gone on any longer, what he usually sees is that the child gives up and doesn’t try anymore. So that was the good news. The rest of the news involved the challenges we were facing in what he would need.
The AIDS project
At work, I was on a high-pressure project for a new AIDS drug. We were using a new, very rapid-paced, reduced-timeline method for the FDA submission. Every time I turned around, another deadline was cut.
Yes, it was for a good reason – people were dying of AIDS. At that point, HIV was a death sentence. Thousands were dying all over the world every day. And the people leading the project had friends who’d already died of it. There were only 2 or 3 drugs available, and at that point, all they did was buy someone a bit more time.
This drug was a new direction, and it was having such promising results that even the FDA was pushing our company to get the submission in faster. It was absolutely the right thing. Unless you were the parent of a young child struggling in school.
The good thing was that my part in this project would finish in the early summer of 1995. AND the company was merging with another…which meant layoffs, and payoffs to leave voluntarily. I chose the latter.
While I was never meant to be a corporate person, and I knew I needed to be home for my son, I will always be grateful for that opportunity to play a small role in the 1995 approval of that drug. It didn’t take very long for the FDA to approve it. And it was the beginning of making AIDS a chronic disease, rather than a death sentence. Even as some thought they deserved it.
Yes. On one of my business trips to audit a contractor whose work I was managing, an older man sitting next to me on the plane declared that if they chose that life, then they deserved to die. I was livid and told him how appalled I was. He was a blustering old fool. His wife, who I think was long-suffering, looked at me with sympathy. I still rage at that attitude. So despite how difficult it was to manage it all, I am grateful to have been a part of turning that disease into a chronic one. But once that was done, I needed to move on.
On to our son and the world of freelancing
Where my son was concerned, NO “career” mattered to me. If I died a successful career woman, but lost my son in the process, I would never consider my life a success. Yes, I had to work, but what always mattered most to me, drove me, was to make sure he never knew what emotional abandonment was.
I set about working with the school, tutors, and therapists for testing and guidance. And…I had to figure out a way to bring in some money. I needed to bring in something, even as there would be no replacing what I’d been earning at the drug company. You never know what you can do when you have to.
It’s like the book I was reading at that time said, “It’s only too late If You Don’t Start Now.” It was written by a therapist named Barbara Sher and was the perfect inspiration. Anytime I felt like “I will never…whatever,” I read her book, and recited that title like a mantra.
I had always wanted to make a living writing. That was my best option. But a LONG shot. No matter how many adult evening and correspondence courses I took in free-lance writing, home businesses, and such, breaking into selling articles or books seemed impossible.
But there are all kinds of writing jobs, and you do what you have to. So I did editing for a local self-publishing company. Until I had to get a lawyer to get them to pay me what they owed.
Next, I parlayed that experience into a copyediting job. I dug down deep for courage, cold-called New York book editors to convince them I could edit for them…and managed to get a couple of jobs. Those led to assignments to write two CliffsNotes books. So it wasn’t riches, but the bills were getting paid. And our son was getting the help he needed
Meanwhile, I kept trying to learn. I took night courses in essay writing, freelance businesses, writing children’s articles and books, and kept submitting. But at that point, I was getting nowhere.
As any freelancer will tell you, while you’re doing the current job you landed, you’re also always hunting for the next one. It’s scary, unpredictable, and exhausting.
That’s when one of the online writing groups I followed posted an ad for a “cultural lexicographer” to “Americanize” dictionary entries for a British publisher.
I had to take a test to see how well I could pick up on cultural and language differences in the definitions. Thanks to growing up in a multicultural town of immigrants, and my work for the British drug company, I passed with flying colors. That job went on for a couple of years and paid well. And I didn’t need to hire an attorney to get paid.
At the same time, a friend from the drug company I’d left started her own “IRB,” an independent review board that protected people in research studies. She wanted me to be on her board.
“Protecting people” appealed to me. And it tapped all my years of hospital and research lab work, my editing and pharmaceutical experiences, and my writing skills. It involved reviewing all the research materials to make sure the documents for any people in the studies were thorough, correct, and protected their rights.
It wasn’t writing the great American novel. It wasn’t the writing I’d dreamed of. But it paid the bills, and it let me mostly work from home before that was even a thing. That way, I could be there for my son. And for the next 10 years, it also gave me the privilege of protecting thousands of people in the hundreds of research studies I reviewed.
A first small, but huge victory
As far as my wish to write the great American novel, I kept trying to get articles published and kept taking correspondence and night courses. Sometimes I despaired of ever seeing my dream of being a writer come true.
But again, that iron rule – the kids come first. So take care of our son. Pay the bills. Work on the dream whenever I could fit it in.
One day, I tapped that well of deep sorrow I had felt while working full-time and having to leave my son in daycare in the mornings. I wrote all the things I felt in my heart. I wasn’t a bad Mom and yes, that was life. We had to work. He needed to be in daycare. But I had still hated it. So I penned a piece that became my first professional “clip” published in a local parenting newspaper.
It was small, but huge to me. It was a start. And it was enough to later get me assignments from Boys’ Life magazine.
I would also end up doing articles for a nature magazine published by the museum I would eventually work in. And somewhere in there, I self-published a book about my fifty years of visits to a place Ed and I loved, Colonial Williamsburg. But more on those two later.
For now, it was enough
For now, all of this was enough to keep paying the bills, helping our son catch up, and to feel like, yes, I was a writer. The “novel” could come later.
And it would have to anyway, because about that time, Ed’s job changed. That’s how the job market rolls. The years of “even-paced” positions came to an end. His new job came about when he took a risk and wrote a software book for the company he discovered. That led to a job offer that would become the next 11 years of drinking from a firehose…until Ed almost died. More on that later.
Hell of a ride
As to the job, Ed described the pressure as, “Working for a startup is like driving full-speed toward a brick wall, hoping that when you get to the wall, it moves.”
To give an idea of how close to the edge those companies ran, at his first startup job, they had only started offering health insurance to employees the month before he was hired.
Yet again, we were taking the gamble and rolling the dice. But that was the work that was available, and we weren’t rich. So again, we shifted who covered what. That’s what our teamwork in Bailey and Company was all about. And we dug in and held on for the next hell of a ride.
To give context
Just to give context, this was the same time we were struggling to hang on to our marriage and had just finished our marriage course. At the same time, we were trying to save our son’s future, look after my husband’s increasingly sick parents back in Connecticut… and wage battles with my father.
I will write more about my father as well, in a short bit.
For now, a bit about my own therapy and healing, especially in two problem areas — friendships with women…and God.
Soul Mosaic 
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