In my thirties I recall saying to my mom, “I deserve a good job. I’m smart. Have a degree.”
Yeah, that’s not how it works.
I also remember, after a contentious couples therapy session with my wife, saying, “If I’d only gotten a marketing degree instead of an English degree.”
Again, bullshit. Your degree has little to do with what you’ll toil at for the rest of your life. Very few of us escape the grind. There are no free passes in life. Even a father with money provided little shelter when my mom began kicking him out of the house for coming home drunk. She made a choice that we all have to live with. Same thing with my wife. Except, I’m no alcoholic or philanderer. Might have had a romance in college with cocaine but I didn’t have the money stay with it once I quit the job with the coke dealer who loved my kamikazis.
I am here for a reason. That’s for me to figure out. A 23-year-old man-child cannot fathom a world of work he’s never joined. A messy kitchen to a teenager gets snarky comments, “Why don’t you ever clean the kitchen.” 90% of the dishes and mess were his. Hmm. Now, I remember him using phrases like “Yeah, he’s in the kitchen banging pots and pans.” He was referring to his spectrum-ish stepdad. I only understood the implications of this a month ago when he was forced to put his pile of dishes in the dishwasher. He’d probably not done it since he was 7 or 8, while I was still living in the family home.
“They aren’t banging pots and pans, they’re loading the dishwasher. It’s loud.”
He was not given boundaries and chores by his redo-dad and his mom. He had no summer jobs. Girls were allowed to sleep over on weekends when he was in high school? WTF? That’s why he has zero self-regulation and zero idea about how loud loading the dishwasher is. He also thinks his computer science degree is unnecessary and “just a piece of paper.” In some ways, he is correct. In most ways, however, having a college degree sets you apart from those without. A GED or HS diploma is really a low bar. By finishing college you demonstrate your ability to work the system, follow the degree path – however you manage, and graduate. No one cares what your GPA was.
I’m sort of in a similar moment in my life at sixty. Two jobs were on my horizon and promising. One is working back at our fancy organic grocery store in the coffee fetish area. The second is working for AARP doing my marketing thing. Again, I got my degree in English, not marketing. Today, that makes absolutely no difference. In the morning, yesterday I got a text message from Matt. I’m going to go ahead and offer you the job, can you come in Friday or Monday to do the paperwork? YES. Later in the afternoon, I missed an unknown caller from NJ. This is the home of the recruiter who found me for AARP. They didn’t leave a message. I called back. It was a no.
In one role I was going to make $63 dollars an hour. In the other role, $17 dollars an hour.
I start my intake on Monday.
The recruiter is a bit suspect. First, my interview was scheduled for early morning. The hiring manager was a no-show. When we did meet on Zoom for the interview things went swimmingly. It was warm, friendly, and energetic. Then she said, “This is a part-time role.” What? The recruiter had that wrong as well. “How many hours a week are you allocating for this job?” “24.” “Oh. Oh, great! I can easily make that work. FK.
Nothing I can do about that.
I can ask the Universe and god to provide. It’s my action and attention that’s going to keep me alive. Even when my wife was complaining about my employment, my depression, my lack of “taking responsibility for my actions,” I was powerless to make her change her mind. I couldn’t make her happy. No matter what I did or how I flexed.
Sex. Okay, I’ll just take care of myself for a bit. No pressure. Money. Sure, I just got laid off but you go ahead and “find yourself and your next best job” while spending rather than earning money. Best part: you intentionally don’t get a new job to put the mortgage and insurance pressure on me. For a year. Oh, and stay furious during the entire time.
The Hail Mary job came near the end. An SF-based marketing firm, great money, and a kickoff orientation in San Francisco for my first week.
“Come to San Francisco this weekend. The tickets aren’t expensive, the hotel is paid for, and my mom has already agreed to take the kids.”
I was always trying to reinvent our marriage. The optimist. “We can have a second honeymoon. The money worries are over, sweetheart.”
“No.”
“Can we discuss it?”
It was a no because she was already pulling out of the marriage. She was already building Excel scenarios for keeping the house versus selling the house. It was not going to be a high-wealth divorce. She was not in a mood to rejoin the carnival of hope I was peddling.
Hope was crushed in April. A pharma client, Bayer in Atlanta, was having an account review. They had paid us over a million dollars. The wunderkind of my bosses eye was the account lead and he’d done NOTHING. We didn’t have the results to show for the money they spent. He literally recycled the pitch deck, the PowerPoint that won the account, rather than a reporting and results deck.
I made a huge mistake. Maybe this is my blindside, as it was with my wife. I offered a glimpse of the numbers and data my project had uncovered. It was not what they wanted. A new account manager was joining the team on the Bayer side and she was looking for accountability. We gave her fluff. Correction, the star runner gave her fluff.
Also in the meeting was a shady character named Bob. I called him Bob Jr. since the boss was also named Bob. Anyway, Bob Jr. was attending the meeting for one function, to assure client success. He didn’t have a role on the project. He was there to make sure the client got exactly what they wanted. They didn’t.
The next morning, flying out of Atlanta, I got a voicemail from big Bob. Bob of the hillbilly beard, nowadays. “Don’t contact the client in any way. We will talk when you get back.”
Fk.
I began emailing my allies. To Bob Jr, “You were in the room. Can you report on what happened? I mean, you saw the PowerPoint presentation and how Stacy (not her real name) became furious. That was not my responsibility or my presentation. I was there for a website kickoff meeting.” Needless to say, Bob Jr. did nothing of the kind. To Michael, the account manager I created my PowerPoint deck with, “Hey man, what the hell happened? Can you give me some insight into what you’ve heard?”
“Stacy was very upset. Now, Bob is looking for a sacrificial lamb.”
I was emailed by Bob Jr. It was Friday afternoon before I landed back in Austin. “Please meet me at the office tomorrow to return your equipment.”
I was fired. My marriage was toast. My wife would lose more of her rational mind and go even darker and more disconnected. “Fuck You” began to blurt out of her from time to time when she got frustrated.
Next, I made a terrible mistake. My wife was away at the beach with her best friend and the kids. I had some time. I lied. I scrambled to replace the income with some freelance projects I’d been discussing with some former colleagues. I did not tell her I got fired. I couldn’t face divorce head-on at the same time. I couldn’t do it.
I demanded Bob Sr. meet me for coffee. “You owe me a conversation.”
“It’s out of my hands at this point,” he said. He lied.
He needed to save the wunderkind because that little shit too about 50% of the business travel off big bearded Bob’s plate. He needed that kid. He did not need me. The bus was fired up and I was thrown under it.
Here’s an odd thing about Bob Jr. In a conversation several months earlier at a group happy hour, he began to talk about his experience at Dell. “We built this great new tool called Dell Multimedia Works.”
“Um, Bob?”
“It was remote sales automation.”
“Yeah, DMW was my project. I created the idea with Kenny H from Dell. I never heard your name before this job.”
So, Bob Jr. was the laptop man. Our conversation was short. “You were in the room, Bob. Can’t you tell big Bob what happened?”
“It’s all done. There’s nothing more to be said.”
“But you see that this is bullshit, right? You see that I’m a sacrificial lamb?”
“Did you have an extra power supply or a monitor from the company?”
In my conversation with big Bob on Monday I asked, “You know the meeting was about reporting current results and work for their million dollars, right?” He nodded. “You also know that my role and presentation had nothing to do with prior work? I was there to kick off the website project. Not connected to the failure. And you’re still firing me?”
“It’s out of my hands,” he said. He was the VP of Innovation and Marketing. It was 100% in his hands.
The lack of trust became the rope that I hung myself within my failing marriage. It was hopeless anyway. The great job, great money, great benefits, had not improved my wife’s mood, nor encouraged her to actually get a job.
Her divorce attorney told her, “You need to get a job if you’re going to try and keep the house. The court won’t approve it if you don’t have a documented and steady income.”
She had a job within a week.
And the trap was laid. We were going to do a collaborative divorce. Save money. Not use lawyers. Cooperate.
Just a few weeks before the finalization of the decree we were putting the contract together for the parenting plan with a Ph.D therapist who specialized in this work. This also appeared to be going well until the kid-schedule day. 50-50 shared parenting had been the agreement. My wife changed her mind.
In that therapy appointment, I lost 90% of my parenting rights (non-custodial parents are second-class citizens), lost 70% of my kid time, and agreed to give my wife the familial home “in the best interest of the children.” But nothing she did up to that point or after that point would have any consideration about the “father of the children.”
She could’ve cared less.
I don’t think there was much I could’ve done to save my marriage that I wasn’t already doing. Her unhappiness seemed to be pinned on my actions or faults. She was covering up her own deep sadness with anger and rage at me. As I see her behavior surrounding my son’s struggles I can forgive myself. I could not have saved my marriage.
I got a massive reset. Tried a few reboots. Recommitted to recovery for myself and my soul. And in a declaration of “massive action” I started practicing Aikido. I also signed up for a Divorce Recovery group. Learning to attack and be attacked helped me over the next year. “Time on the mat” was the phase for working on your life and your form and your mind.
I spent a lot of time on the mat, flat on my back, wondering how I was ever going to get up again. Aikido taught me one other key principle of my reemergence.
Love your attacker. With empathy and compassion we recognize their aggressive attack and disarm them gently, without harm. We love our enemy. In doing what’s best we prevent them from hurting us or themselves. We protect our enemies from harm.
A great metaphor for how to get through divorce. No matter what your ex does, take the higher road. Don’t respond to fire with fire. Respond with coolness and practicality.
“Your ex-partner is like a convenience store clerk. You want to get in, get your Slurpee, and get out. You don’t need to know about their life or hear about their shitty day.”
I would start hearing about my kid’s shitty days. Mom didn’t recover well. Didn’t marry well. Isn’t well. Not for me to take inventory, but I see the damage now with a lucidity that comes from distance and reflection.
