Journalist in Massachusetts
This journalist in Massachusetts talks about growing up LGBTQA+ and the sexual explorations that lead to her discovering and owning that identity. She also discusses at length her political views, which are often in opposition to her family’s views. She details the pregnancy discrimination she faced at her former job.
ANNOTATIONS
Learn More: “No-Fault Divorce,” Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [2]: “No-Fault Divorce States 2024,” World Population Review, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [2]: “Pregnancy Discrimination,” U.S. Department of Commerce, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [3]: “Is Pregnancy Covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act?,” shrm.org, August 16, 2023.
Learn More [4]: Nora Ellmann and Jocelyn Frye, “Efforts to Combat Pregnancy Discrimination,” Center for American Progress (blog), November 2, 2018.
Learn More: “Continuation of Health Coverage (COBRA),” U.S. Department of Labor, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [2]: Dan Witters, “1 in 6 U.S. Workers Stay in Unwanted Job for Health Benefits,” Gallup.com, May 6, 2021.
Learn More: “Birth Control,” National Library of Medicine (National Library of Medicine), accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [2]: “Reproductive Rights,” Women in the States, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [3]: Selena Simmons-Duffin, “Abortion Access Could Continue to Change in Year 2 after the Overturn of Roe v. Wade,” NPR, July 3, 2023.
Learn More: “In Vitro Fertilization (IVF),” National Library of Medicine, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [3]: “IVF by the Numbers,” Penn Medicine, March 14, 2018.
Learn More: Collin Tidy, “Common Side-Effects of Pregnancy,” Patient, September 23, 2021.
Learn More [2]: Annie Sneed, “Morning Sickness During Pregnancy: What to Do and How to Cope,” The New York Times, April 17, 2020.
Learn More [3]: “What Are Some Common Complications of Pregnancy?,” National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, April 20, 2021.
Learn More [4]: “Trends in Pregnancy and Childbirth Complications in the U.S.,” BCBS, June 17, 2020.
Learn More: “Family and Medical Leave (FMLA),” U.S. Department of Labor, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [2]: “State Family and Medical Leave Laws,” National Conference of State Legislatures, September 9, 2022.
Learn More [3]: “Parental Leave in Massachusetts,” Mass.gov, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [4]: Gretchen Livingston and Deja Thomas, “Among 41 Countries, Only U.S. Lacks Paid Parental Leave,” Pew Research Center (blog), December 16, 2019.
Learn More: “How Much Does It Cost to Give Birth in the United States? It Depends on the State,” AJMC, May 15, 2020.
Learn More: “Ectopic Pregnancy,” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [2]: “Ectopic Pregnancy: What Is It?,” Cleveland Clinic, accessed May 3, 2024.
Learn More [4]: Julia Ries, “Ectopic Pregnancy and Abortion Laws: What to Know,” Healthline, May 11, 2022.
Learn More [5]: “Interactive Map: US Abortion Policies and Access After Roe,” Guttmacher Institute, accessed May 3, 2024.
TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by Dan Swern
Interview conducted remotely
April 14, 2023
Transcription by Allison Baldwin
Annotations by Grace Romano
0:00
Today is Friday, April 14th, 2023, it is 5:11pm, this is Dan Swern. I am here virtually interviewing–
My name is [Redacted], um, and I guess we’ll start at the beginning, um, so I guess where we are going to start, um, you said to start with earliest memory, um, so I grew up, for better or worser, I guess one of the things that we could reference, um, one of the best things that ever happened for me was that my mom left my dad and I was five years old. It’s funny because my mom went on to become super right wing, um, at this point she is a big Tucker Carlson fan, and her– pretty much everything, everything that she has to say about anything kind of goes back to whatever Tucker Carlson thinks or whatever other Fox News talking head that she likes thinks.
[Editor’s Note: Tucker Carlson is a popular right-wing American news commentator.]
But she left my dad because he was using a lot of drugs, and he hit her all the time. One of the times that he decided to beat her up, he threw her down a staircase. I don’t know whether or not he knew that she was pregnant at that point, but she was, and she lost the baby. She got pregnant again as fast as she could because she wanted two kids. I frankly think that she, I once asked her, “Why did you have another baby?” I was a kid at the time, and I still remember her saying, “Well, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket,” and I just had this feeling that she thought that I was really fucked up [laughter], but that’s okay. It’s not okay, but I get it. I get wanting to have two kids in case something happens to the first. It’s very pragmatic when you think about it. And she always wanted a son. Well, she got very lucky because she had my brother. My dad could not be bothered to be there when my brother was born. I have no idea where he was, frankly, I don’t want to know where he was, but one way or the other, he wasn’t there. And I remember my mom taking me for a walk, about two to three weeks later, my brother was born in June, and this was like July or August. I remember it was hot out. And a walk in this case meant a walk around the house that we were living in at the time, it was in upstate New York and I remember saying, “You know how [our neighbors]”—those were our neighbors behind us—“you know how their mom and dad are divorced? Well, I wanted to let you know that I’ve decided I am going to get a divorce.” And it will be how it is with [our neighbor’s] parents. And [our neighbors] frankly were two of the most nasty girls I had ever met, so I immediately broke into tears because I assumed that this meant I was going to become a nasty girl. I wouldn’t say that’s what happened, but I would say that that decision colored– that decision to leave my dad colored everything I did for the rest of my life.
Actually, in a very good way. It made me realize that you don’t have to stay in a bad situation. You don’t have to stick around for things that don’t make you happy. Even if your neighbors judge you, even if your co-workers judge you, even if your friends judge you, your family judges you– and I’m sure my mom being the pretty, blond, conservative, [university] graduate that she was and is, that she dealt with a lot of judgment from a lot of people, and this was in the 1980s. It was before No Fault Divorce in the state that we lived in New York, she got screwed royally in that divorce. My dad made out like a bandit. Not that you would have known it. He was broke by the time he died. He was broke within five years. But she really got screwed. She lost everything. But she left with her two kids. And she left being able to raise her kids how she wanted, where she wanted, which was southern California. Now I have no idea why anyone would want to move to southern California. I have never liked that place. I grew up there. I think it is the pits. I think it is for the birds. As a creative professional, I would have done so much better if I would have stayed in [southern California] instead of moving to Massachusetts but I didn’t because frankly that place disgusts me. Everything about it rubs me the wrong way. But it was what she wanted at the time and she was able to do it. And that single situation informed every single decision I have ever had since.
5:00
I have always think outside the box and I always think, “Is someone making me physically stay here?” Am I being forced to stay here? Is there a time limit on my suffering? And sometimes if there is I’ll wait until that time limit is over. And, I guess we’ll get into this later. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I experienced pregnancy discrimination. They were trying to get me to quit my job. Very hard. Trying to get me to quit my job. And I didn’t. I stayed until I had that baby. Because I knew I wouldn’t have health insurance if I left. Yes, I could have paid the COBRA, but I was like, you know, let them fire me and let them look like assholes. Let me get COBRA, not COBRA, unemployment. And then I’ll have insurance when this baby is born. That sort of thing. But, for the most part it always goes back to you don’t have to put up with someone’s shit, and that goes doubly for social norms and what’s expected of you, and putting up with shitty men. No offense. The interviewer is male, we won’t hold that against him.
A little bit about me. I am going to be 43 years old in about six weeks. I’ve always felt like I am about three to five years younger than I actually am. I have always wondered if– I got my first period super late, I was 14. Most of my friends got their first periods when they were 10, 11, 12. I was about 14, so three to four years late. I started my career late, I got married a little late. I had my daughter at 38. Everything happened about three to five years later after it was supposed to on the calendar. I don’t know if that’s just because things for millennials seem to happen later, not things like first menses, but things like life events like getting married. I don’t know if it was economic. I don’t know if it was maybe I just didn’t get enough sunshine as a baby. Who knows? One way or the other I have always felt a little late. And, um, I guess the next thing that you would probably want to hear about is other basics. Yes, I– actually one thing that did happen early is that I lost my virginity to a girl. Very, very young. Way too young. I was way too young. I was 9 years old. I had a childhood best friend, her mother was a hooker, literally a prostitute. Whenever they were low on money, mom would go talk to a friend who was a pimp, and he would basically facilitate her selling her body. And my friend told me about this. I didn’t know what sex was at the time so she was like, “Oh here, let me show you.” And that started one of my longest relationships. She and I did that until we were 14, and, no, technically we didn’t know what we were doing, but she gave me my first orgasm. I will admit I love that girl. Um, people are always like, “How could you– what love was when you were 13?” Well, I didn’t. And before I stopped hearing– she ghosted me before ghosting was a thing, um, her family moved, her mom married a much wealthier guy.
I know. Her mom married a much wealthier guy and moved her to an area closer to San Diego. It’s [a city] in Orange County. And I called her a few times, like, “Why don’t you come up to [where I lived] and hang out with me,” and her family always found a reason not to give her a ride to [where I lived]. I don’t know if they knew something was going on between us, or if they were just like you need bougier friends now, or if they just didn’t feel like driving her forty-five minutes, which frankly some parents don’t. But one way or another they always came up with a reason at the last minute to not do that, and, uh, at some point she just stopped returning my phone calls. It was shortly before we started high school, And I just remember feeling so sad about it. High school was this weird period where I couldn’t get laid.
10:00
Guys or girls, nobody was feeling it. And it was very lonely and very sad. It just felt very lonely and very sad. I had a lot of crushes and nobody was into it. I had a theater teacher who was extremely influential in setting my life on a course, one direction or the other. And, she, um, on the plus side, she encouraged me to go to college, which I really hadn’t been planning on doing. My grades were not great, and my mom’s family had this idea that, unless you were like a top scholar, you were not going to college. And, by the way, if you heard a meow it’s because I left my cat in here and she just meowed. If she becomes a problem, I’ll kick her out, but otherwise I am just going to leave her here. But, any case, they had this idea that unless you were a top scholar, you were not going to college. The idea that you could go to a state school, just escape them, university, and it would– it would be fine. Or you could just go to the boring-ass regular college that isn’t, like, bougie was really foreign to them. My grandmother started college at 14. She went to [University]. Full-ride scholarship. My mom went to [university]. On a full-ride scholarship. And that I didn’t get straight A’s, that I wasn’t just like a stellar student, plus athlete, plus cheerleader. I was none of those things. Was just super like, “Oh, my god, what are we going to do with this kid?” To them. I ended up getting a full-ride scholarship to go to Germany my senior year. Unfortunately my high school did not accept my credits that I did there, so I ended up having to go to a school for dropouts, for, it was supposed to be for a year, it took me three months to work through the coursework I was supposed to do, so I guess I’m not a complete idiot.
But, in any case, my drama teacher, on the one hand, she steered me in the direction of going to college and told me, like, "Hey, it’s okay that you’re not super-stellar-great at everything,” um, that not everybody is. She had told me that her husband had gone to community college and then transferred to a four year school, and he was doing just fine in life, and that it was okay to be that. And she went to, like, a regular, normal college, in California, so it was not like she was super bougie. But, on the other hand, one thing that she did do that kind of put me behind the eight ball was that she told me there was no such thing as bisexuals. That they didn’t exist. That you were either gay or straight. And you could not be both. You either had sex with the same gender or you didn’t. Now, at that point in my life, I had had sex with women. I had not had sex with men. But I did know that I liked men. So, I found that very confusing. I was like, “Okay, so does this mean that all of my experiences with my ex-girlfriend are not valid?” Does this mean that I was just faking it that whole time? Does this mean that I was just really desperate? Does this mean that I can’t have sex with men? So, that was very confusing for me. I have no idea how she feels about things now. Apparently she is the principal of my high school now, but I’m not in touch with her. She’s not on Facebook anymore. I think she got worried during the 2020 election. About people seeing things she posted and freaking out so she deleted her Facebook. Sometimes I do feel like I want to sit down with her and be like, “Hey, you did all these great things, but I want to let you know this one thing you did really screwed the pooch. Don’t do that to other kids.” But, at the same time, the world has changed since 1995 when she said that to me, so maybe she feels differently now.
I ended up going to college in Ohio, and the reason for that was I met a guy when I was going to study abroad in Germany. And I really liked him. I fell very much in love with him. And he was in Ohio. I consider him to be my first boyfriend. Okay, I can’t say unfortunately, because for him this is fortunate, um, he is not attracted to women, and part of dating me is what made him realize. He was like, “Okay, everything about this girl is perfect. She’s awesome, I’m just not attracted to girls.” We are still extremely close friends. He is actually taking me on the most expensive paid vacation to Europe in June, and he was in my wedding. He was my bridesman. So, that should show you how good of a friendship, how good of a friendship it’s been.
15:00
Just not romantically. But in terms of a friendship, that was definitely meant to be. And one way or the other, he brought me to Ohio. I left California when I did– it was ill advised. I knew that my family was only going to support me leaving home if I left to go to college. One day, I went into the bathroom and I found a pair of my panties covered in cum. And my brother had been making comments about how, you know, I was going to have to lose my virginity sometime. I had, I actually already had sex with a guy by then. But, like, my brother had been making comments like that, and his friends had started making sexualized comments about me. I didn’t know whose cum that was on my panties. I don't want to know, but I was like, okay, it’s not safe for me to be here anymore. I had happened to be on the phone with my friend from Ohio at that moment, and I broke into tears and he just said, “Come to Ohio, Come to Ohio.” It’s safe here. So, I ended up applying to [university] and got accepted. I ended up having to pay disgusting amounts of money to go to school there because I was out-of-state. And my family would not—I tried to get them to—they would not let me do this, just let me move to [Ohio], hang out for a couple of years, get residency, even six months would have probably been okay. Technically, it’s supposed to be a year, but, you know, let me file taxes for a year, work at a café or a restaurant or whatever. They wouldn’t let me do that, which was ridiculous. But they were just convinced that I would be, as my grandmother put it, “hanging out,” which was the worst thing ever. I ended up in debt for a very long time. As a result of that. My family did pay for a couple of years. They stopped paying. I dated a guy for a little while, another guy, who was also in Ohio, and who turned out to be super abusive. And when we broke up, he mailed a copy of my diary to my mother. And she found out about all these horrible things I had been doing. Just like typical early twenties stuff like smoking weed. And drinking. Just being a 20 year old. Having sex. Being bi. You know, basically just being myself and being 20 and my mom flipped out. And frankly, I was talking shit on my mom in my diary. You know, stuff kids say about their parents. You know, people, even kids who love their parents and have good relationships with them go through periods of rebelliousness and are going to say, “Wow, my mom wasn’t as cool as she thought she was.” And my mom could not handle that. So, she cut me off and I ended up paying for two years of college on my own. I had those student loans until, sorry I just realized my face went urrr, sorry, just thinking about those student loans is frightening. I had those student loans until I was 36. My husband paid the last $6000. He got a really big bonus and was just like, “You know what, I’m gonna help you out,” and I was like “Wow, you didn’t have to, but thank you.”
So, yeah, with the guy who was super abusive, I got pregnant twice. The first time I, the first time I didn’t know. The only reason I know was that I had an OBGYN appointment. I had a period that just felt super crampy. My periods are, generally, are really bad. Um, I generally don’t talk about this with men. It feels a little awkward, but this is your job, so I’m sure you’ve heard worse. So, yeah, my periods are, until I had my kid, after I had my daughter my periods weren’t a problem anymore. I don’t know how that worked. If I had known that my period would get so much better after having a kid, I would have had a kid twenty years earlier. Even if it would have made the rest of my life harder. But I did not know that. And my periods were always bad, and I had a really bad period one month and I had an appointment with the OBGYN six weeks later, and they commented that there was a large scar inside my uterus, and that I had to have had a miscarriage, so that was kind of sad. And I told my then-boyfriend and it was in front of all his friends. To me this just felt like open information at the time. I wasn’t embarrassed. I wasn’t weird. But he was super, like, yeah, in hindsight that was a little weird, I shouldn’t have done that, but to me it just felt like something you tell everybody like, “Oh I had a miscarriage.” It just felt like nothing I would want to hide, for whatever reason.
20:00
And my ex was super upset about it actually, that I had told a mutual friend about it. He was super mad. He started hitting me not long after that. And I don’t know if it was connected, or if that was just his pattern of abuse and he was just going to get worse around then anyway. But one way or the other, it wasn’t that long afterward.
The second time I miscarried, I knew and I hadn’t told him yet. Because he was always so moody and he was always sulking about something. His personality reminded me a lot of my ex-girlfriend’s. She was also always really sulky and moody, and the only thing that would make her stop sulking was if I had sex with her. With him it was the opposite. If I wanted to have sex, he would just start sulking. And he always said to me that I was like a nympho. That he felt he couldn’t respect me because I wanted to have sex all the time. And, you know, like, I remember we went three months without having sex, and we were like 20 years old, which I don’t want to tell people how to be at 20, but it seems weird to me not to have sex for three months when you’re living with somebody and you’re 20-21 years old. I don’t know. But anyway, at one point, this time I didn’t want to tell him because I knew he was going to do that again. Things had felt better. And it’s the weirdest thing. We got into an argument. We were in the bath together and we got into an argument about feminism, and he kept insisting that feminists were horrible people. And basically, more or less that feminists were raping men, raping men of their dignity and their ability to be men and so on and so forth. And at one point during the fight he pushed me into the water, and he held my head under water, and I couldn’t breathe. And I passed out and came to a minute later. I miscarried about two days later. I have no idea if he was responsible for that. It could have happened anyway. I miscarried once with my husband. He wasn’t my husband at the time, he was my boyfriend, but I miscarried once with my husband years later. Frankly, I am convinced that my uterus is a toxic environment and the only person that ever survived is my daughter and that is because she is the most stubborn person I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.
But I have never forgotten that, and honestly that was juxtaposed with an argument about feminism. Like, this is why we need feminism. And this is why we need, you know, reproductive freedom and birth control and so on and so forth in this country. I often give thanks for the fact that I did not get pregnant. I can’t say did not get pregnant. Did not actually have a baby with my ex. He was super pro-life. He was super anti-abortion. He thought that abortion was this horrible horrible thing and I would have, honestly I am such a people-pleaser, at least I was then. I’m not anymore. I would have kept the baby. To satisfy him, and my mom would have probably pushed me to keep the baby too, and I would probably be still living in Ohio. I probably would have never finished college. Literally, I would have never married my husband. So, I feel that everything– I wouldn’t live in Massachusetts. I probably wouldn’t work as a writer. I mean, who knows? The world has a funny way of doing things, but thank god. Thank god I didn’t have those kids with my ex.
So, yeah, then breaking up with him kind of ruined my life because my mom cut me off after that. I know for the longest time my ex kind of gloated about how he ruined my life. And I’m like, “Wow, if you get off on that, there is something wrong with you.” I like to think he’s gone on to be a better person. He’s married. He’s on medication now. For being bipolar. Apparently he was bipolar, which, and I hate to say it, and this is not a dig on bipolar people at all, but I was not surprised when I found that out.
25:00
And apparently he also had ADHD, which is why he couldn’t sit through class. I remember that. He failed so many classes while we were dating and he always blamed me, said I was distracting him. But I am glad that he has found ways to better himself. I sincerely hope that his marriage works for him. He has since become– he has revised his opinion on abortion since then. I don’t know if it’s tied to me or not, and, um, however, he is married to an asexual, so I guess maybe my sex drive was too high for him. But, anyway, moving right along, my husband, the man I ended up marrying, was my ex’s roommate. My husband and I met in a debate group. I met my ex in the debate group too. The first words my husband ever said to me were, and I quote: “We’ve already heard what you had to say, now shut up and let someone else talk.” I will never forget those words. At the time when my husband and I met he was also fairly right wing. This was Ohio. Those people are different. I’m sorry, but they are. And to be fair, at the time, things were different than they are now. But my husband was actually president of his high school’s young republicans group. He started out super right wing. And at the time I think I was saying something about the importance of art and how it needed to be funded in public life. And I guess that deeply offended my future husband, who at the time I thought was just an asshole. I spent years and years not liking him. Years and years. It changed when he found out I was majoring in, no minoring in economics, and we actually sat down and had a talk about economic theory, and he realized I wasn’t dumb. Um, cool. And I became president of that philosophy group and I gave him a role. I honestly just needed someone that I knew would take care of tech issues for our group’s website, and I knew he would do it, so I asked him to do it. But he took it real, he took it as, “Wow, this person likes me.” And the truth is, I never, like, actively hated him or anything. I just thought he was really rude. But once I paid him enough attention to give him that website, he decided I was cool and was willing to be nice to me occasionally. But I still think I didn’t really like him, until one day apparently my ex was talking trash on me to a group of people, um, it was his roommate and a bunch of friends they were all hanging out. The guy who is now my husband was also his roommate. And, I’m just going to start using names now because that is going to make it so much less confusing when I am telling this story.
[My husband] is the guy that is now my husband. [My ex] is my ex. [My ex] was apparently in the kitchen and he was just going on and on about how horrible I was. I was all of the pricks under the sun. [my husband] came into the room to make himself some dinner, um, [my husband] makes himself some dinner and as he is leaving. Twenty minutes later, [my ex] is still going on and on about me. And [my husband] sort of just stops and–
I’m going to insert here that, in the twenty years that I have known my husband, I have never heard him say anything bad about any of the people he’s worked for. Ever. Every once in a while he’ll be like, “Ehhh, he doesn’t make great business decisions.” Or, “Yeah, I don’t think he’s particularly trustworthy.” He’ll say something like that. I’ve never heard him say anything bad about his dad. And even though his mother is an extremely difficult person, he has never been unfair when he’s talking about her. He just not, like, talking trash on people that have been close to you. There was also a girl that he dated that, um, I knew while we were in college, she has said horrible things about him. I have never heard– I’ve heard my husband say that he thinks she’s weird or that he thinks she was unfair to him. I have never heard him say anything about people. He just hates saying bad things about people and hates it when people do. He thinks that it’s just horrible.
Um, he turned around, as he was leaving the kitchen, and he said, “Hey [my ex], how long did you and [Redacted] date for?” And [my ex] says, I think he said, two and a half years, which is how long we dated and [my husband] was like, “Well, if she’s so horrible, why did you date her for two and a half years?” Mic drop. Leaves the room.
30:00
I was working that night. It was a Friday night and I was working at an all-night computer lab, that being a thing that was more important back in 2002. And before everyone had their own computers and their own phones that basically are miniature computers. And [my ex] didn’t know it but I was still in touch with his best friend, [Redacted]. It’s not like [Redacted] and I hung out or anything, but we would message back and forth and catch up on our lives and so on and so forth, and a couple of the girls that [my ex] had dated after me were, in [Redacted]’s opinion, just not high quality people. So sometimes [Redacted] would just message and be like, “Why does this guy have such horrible taste?” But he, [Redacted], messaged me, on AOL instant messenger [unintelligible] and he was like, “Hey, if you’re worried about people trash talking you, just to let you know, it’s not [my husband].” And he had told me what [my husband] had said and done and said, “Hey, sometime you ought to go on a date or something with him.” I was like, “Nah. Dating wouldn’t work. He’s too conservative for me.” “Eh, you should take him out to lunch.” So, I think I started another conversation, in another window, at right that second, with [my husband] and was like, “Hey, do you want to grab lunch sometime?”
Um, [my husband] did like me and he asked me, he didn’t ask me on a date. He asked me to be his girlfriend. At that time, I said no. Again, it was because– partly it was because I was leaving. I was going back to [California] and, which is where I’m from, and he was going to [Massachusetts] for grad school. Part of it was that and part of it was that I still thought he was too conservative. And, honestly another thing was that he had really bad BO. I told him about the BO finally and he fixed that. But I went back to LA, um, when I finished school and he did go to [Massachusetts]. And my family is extremely right wing.
They are super right wing. My grandfather’s boss for a little while was George H.W. Bush. And he actually served in the military alongside one of Dick Cheney’s older brothers. I do not remember his name. I am sorry. He’s from the same town in Wyoming that the Cheney’s were from. He knows them very well. He knew them. He’s dead now. My grandparents, though, were– they were security republicans. If you watch, there was a movie, not a movie, a tv show, there was a tv show made about the history of Phyllis Schlafly. I can never say her name right. It was called Mrs. America. And it shows that basically what she was concerned about initially, it wasn’t feminism. It was that Russia was going to smush us in terms of spy operations, which she realized the way that she could get people to actually pay attention to her was by bitching about feminists.
[Editor’s Note: Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative American activist and attorney, was a vocal opponent of the feminist movement's push for equal rights, same-sex rights, and abortion access.]
My grandparents were the same kind of conservatives that she actually was initially. My grandfather had been in the US intelligence core in the army. He ran spies out of Heidelberg. And he helped found the CIA. He worked in the Pentagon for a long time. And my grandmother, she just, they were a really republican family from Kansas. They were frontier Jews. I do come from a Jewish family. They were Jewish cowboys, which I think is so awesome. It’s a pity they were so right wing. But they were actually Jewish cowboys. They helped found Kansas City. But they had been republican since before like, yeah, before the Civil War. Probably founding members of the Republican Party. God, that feels weird to say. But they were hard core, and when I moved home after college and I brought all these ideas with me, they were– my grandmother was college-educated. I don’t remember what she majored in. I want to say it was French or Latin, but I don’t remember. My mom, also college educated, went to [univeristy]. She had a Masters in Social Work, of all things. Part of the reason she became so right wing was because she was a social worker and she would tell these people how to fix their lives and they wouldn’t listen to her. I mean, I know from volunteer work that I do, um, with disadvantaged children that it’s not that easy. We don’t all have the same resources, um, internal or external and it’s not as easy as saying, “Here’s what you do.” It just doesn’t work that way, but my mom, quite frankly, has white savior syndrome.
35:00
But also just like never got it. Frankly, I think she kinda lacks empathy. Yeah, it’s kind of weird getting to a point in your life where you can look at your parents and be like, “Wow, I think I have actually surpassed you.” In terms of empathy and in terms of just generally not being a dick. But, anyway, yeah, I came back from college with all these ideas about these things; it was 2004. And at the time, it was the election between John Kerry and George W. Bush. And my grandparents did not appreciate that I voted for John Kerry. I want to say that at the time I didn’t even consider myself that liberal. I considered myself a libertarian at the time. I had minored in economics. At [university]. Which is part of Chicago school. And I’ve often thought—little segue here—I’ve often thought– bringing about to their worldview would honestly have not have been that hard at that point because I was already a libertarian, which, quite frankly, is a gateway drug to republicanism. I’m sorry, but it is. I’m glad I stopped at the gateway drug, but they could have, you know, when I think about it, if they had– all my grandmother had to do was make some phone calls, talk to some of her friends, say, “Hey, doesn’t your son work at Disney? Doesn’t your son work at Boeing? Doesn’t your son work at Taco Bell?” Or some other Orange County corporation. “Hey, my granddaughter just graduated. She’s having a hard time finding a job. Do you maybe think you could sit down with her and maybe find an internship for her? Maybe find some job as like a secretary for her? Don’t you think you can do that?” It would have taken, I don’t want to say that there’s jobs growing on trees or anything like that, but once you got the connections, things kind of work. But she refused to do that. Saying it was my responsibility. She was like, “Well, you have a degree. You shouldn’t have a problem.” It doesn’t work that way, toots. And, you know, my uncle was super involved in the Elks. It wouldn’t have been that hard to talk to a few guys. I was 24, 25 at the time, no, yeah, 24. It wouldn’t have been that hard to talk to a few of his friends, like, “Hey, your son is 26, is he seeing anybody? Could you introduce my niece to a few people? You know? Get her in with the right crowd.” You know? “Is he single? Is he seeing anybody? You know, she’s cute. You know, he could go on a few dates with her.”
It really wouldn’t have been that hard to do. It really wouldn’t have been. And the reason why I say that is they did that for my brother. My brother was going down a bad path when he was in his early twenties. He got really into drinking, drugs, and my uncle introduced him to a few of his friends, and they got him an apprenticeship as an electrician. My brother ended up getting a full-ride scholarship to go to [University in California] specifically to be an electrician, to be part of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He’s now the CEO of an electrician firm basically, and there’s pictures of him with Kamala Harris in his office. My family hates her, but hey, she helped my brother along, in terms of he does environmentally friendly installations, which in California is a thing. They have special provisions for it and stuff and, you know, it looked good for Kamala Harris to get buddy, buddy with him because he was doing environmentally friendly stuff, and it looked good for him to be with Kamala Harris, so there’s all these pictures of him with Kamala Harris in his office, which is just hilarious to me because I’m like, “Oh, man, I hope you know just how cynical you both were being.” I mean, she, Kamala Harris, she had to have known, but still. It’s kinda like, “Okay,” But they did that for him, but didn’t do that for me. I’m not sure it’s because they had seen what happened with me and they had been like, “Oh, we better not let that happen with her brother.” Or if it was because he was a boy or they just liked him better or what. And, yeah, my brother is right wing as fuck. So, anyway.
40:00
Anyway, one way or the other they could have helped me with that, but they didn’t. I ended up getting an internship with my city’s redevelopment department. Those people were mean. And then, on top of that, my family kicked me out in 2004. Because of the election. They didn’t like how I voted. It started with– my grandmother put a tape of John Kerry’s–
Yes, an actual VHS. We’re going old school now, VHS, an actual VHS of John Kerry’s concession speech. She put it on my bed with a bow on it. Like, that was just next level petty. And then, they didn’t kick me out right away. It took about six months. The last straw was, I sat on a– the last straw was when I sat on a– there is this old, um, what’s the right word for it, it’s not a bench, basically a really weird table/bookshelf, and it had a glass on the end pieces, and I sat on the glass and it broke under me. It’s just– it's one of those things that happens. It really shouldn’t be a big deal, um, I was able to get the glass replaced. It cost me twenty dollars. Yeah, twenty dollars now isn’t what twenty dollars was then, but it wasn’t really that big of a difference, I mean, come on. And my grandmother threw a tantrum, moved everything back to me voting for Kerry, and was like, “You just expect everyone to take care of you while you destroy things. You’re a Democrat!” And she let me know that I wasn’t welcome there anymore. And I went to– it wasn’t really an Internet café but there was a boba tea place I liked that had a computer with Internet access, this being the kind of thing that you did back then, and I just went online and posted on my Facebook, no not Facebook, I’m sorry, this was before Facebook, on my LiveJournal. Remember LiveJournal? And just posted about what happened. I was just like, “I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t know how much longer my grandmother is going to let me crash there. It looks like she wants me out tomorrow.” And the first person to get back to me was the guy who is now my husband.
And he was just like, “Yeah, we had sex before.” He lost his virginity to me actually. And I found out not that long ago that even though we both dated other people, apparently I am the only person he has ever had sex with. I cannot say that for him. At all. I’m kind of a slut. Yeah, but I can say that for him. And I have asked him a few times, do you want there to be other people? We can make that happen. He’s like no, “I only want to have sex with you.” That’s kind of sweet. But, in any case, at the time he said, “We’ve had sex before, We’ve been friends with benefits. I’ve always thought we could be more. And I would really like it if you came to [Massachusetts] to live with me. But you’re going to have to come to [Massachusetts] to do that.”
I was in the [California] suburbs. And I had an internship that I technically had another month at. I talked to my boss and I told her– she was a hard core George W. Bush fan so I couldn’t tell her why I got into a fight with my grandparents, but I did tell her, I was like, “I think I am going to need to leave. I got into a huge fight with my grandparents and they don’t want me there anymore. And my boyfriend,” I started calling him my boyfriend at that point, “my boyfriend wants me to come to [Massachusetts] and be with him.” And she was like, “You know what, just go, you have like three weeks left,” and she actually paid for me for two more weeks, which she did not have to do. I remember it was three days between the fight and when I left. Three, maybe four, days. And I just loaded everything into the back of my car. I left so much stuff, but loaded what I could into the back of my car and I just drove to [Massachusetts]. And that was that. I’ve been here for twenty years now. Starting my career was hard. I didn’t know anybody here, except my boyfriend, who honestly had not been trying to meet people when he was in grad school.
45:00
Something I’ve heard and I’ve, okay, so one thing I will say is, grad students everywhere have a miserable time. It seems. I am honestly convinced that grad school is where smart people go to feel horrible. Sometimes I wish I had gone to grad school. I would probably be farther along in my career if I had, but then I look at just how miserable everybody is when they’re there, especially if they do it right out of undergrad and I’m like, “Oh, I’m glad I didn’t do that.”
But I’ve noticed in particular that people who come to [Massachusetts] for grad school don’t make the local friends. At all. And, um, [Massachusetts] is an alienating place to begin with. It is not a friendly place. I will say this as someone who has lived in three US metro areas and has had extended stays in Europe. I felt more foreign my first two years in [Massachusetts] then I did during my year in Germany. I felt more like a foreigner here. Even though I’m a native-born American. Was actually born not that far from [Massachusetts] in upstate New York, and this is, you know, I speak English with no foreign accent. I mean, unless you count my Californian accent as foreign. I did still had my Californian accent then. I probably still do to some extent, although I’m sure it’s done weird things since then. Every once in a while I’ll drop my r’s and say weid instead of weird when I’m not thinking. For whatever reason it gets particularly bad when I am talking to my daughter. I have no idea why. I guess “Oh, she’s a native born Massachusettan, I have to address her in her native parlance, but in any case it was hard. I didn’t know a single soul here, and honestly I was dealing with the trauma of having that horrible boyfriend. And, on top of that, I’m not going to get that deep into this because I feel like it’s a different story, there was another guy who I had dated right after my ex who I fell deeply in love with. And he dumped me. And to this day, I think his dumping is stupid. We could have made it work. Even twenty years later, every once in a while I’m like, that guy and I could have made it work out. But, um, I was dealing with that. I was dealing with my family expelling me from the family. And trying to start a career and trying to make it work with a new boyfriend and trying to get used to a new city.
All of it together was too much. And my first two years here, three years, honestly, were really hard. I ended up getting a job at a call center. Um, it was a large travel, like, packaged tour dealer firm, um, I was actually trying to get fired. One thing I will say is that every time I tried to get fired I would get promoted. Every time I try to take a job seriously and show how into it I am, at best my contract expires, at worst I get fired. Or get laid off. And this was one time where I was actually trying to get fired. It was dealer packaged tours, um, they specialized in senior citizen tours. Um, I started being aggressive with the customers. I get pulled into a little room, I was expecting to get fired. At the time I didn’t realize that you don’t get unemployment if you actually are fired for cause. But I’m actually just too nice to ever cuss out a customer or anything. It just isn’t in me. Cussing out little old ladies and little old men. You know, if I told them to go fuck themselves, they might never get over it. So, I was always like, “No, we can’t do that!” That kind of thing.
I get pulled into a little room and I’m like, “This is it, I’m getting fired. Yeah!” They were like, “We just want you to know that we really feel good about how you’ve been controlling this cause. We think that you’ve been doing such a great job and we really like your tone. We like that you’re not afraid to just get in there and, you know, tell the customer when they’re wrong.” “Oh, thanks.” “We have a very special job for you.” And it became my job to call up people and tell them when my company fucked up their trip prior to their departure. I was able to work a Monday-Friday schedule, which honestly I miss working a weekend day. It’s been fifteen years now since I’ve worked during the weekend at all. You know all of my jobs have been Monday- Friday since that. I honestly miss having a day off during the week. It was so great. You would walk into a store and you were all alone.
50:00
You know, you didn’t have the 50 or 60 year old ladies. I shouldn’t say that because I am going to be a 50 year old lady in eight years, seven years [oh my god!], but you know you didn’t have all of these 50 year old ladies shopping and, you know, so on and so forth and it was so great, you didn’t have– and you had the whole store to yourself. Or, you know, you had a whole restaurant to yourself. You would roll into a restaurant at eleven o’clock in the morning. There’s some restaurants that are technically– they’re open for lunch but nobody goes there. It was like, let’s spread out and just chill. You just can’t do that anymore, Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday, they’re like [unintelligible]. So, basically yeah, I basically became a professional bearer of bad news.
I developed a drinking problem. I probably shouldn’t laugh about that, but no seriously I developed a drinking problem. I started drinking on my way to work. I would just get those little nip bottles. And I had this thing of coffee that I would bring with me, and, you know, I would just remove the top and drink a little bit on my way to get the booze and then pour it into the coffee mug and take it on [my way to work]. Drink on [my way to work] and [redacted], go in and get to work buzzed. Most of the time I wouldn’t drink while I was at work, just there was no convenient way to do that, and also the idea of sitting there and being like, “Hey everybody [slurred words],” was a little much for me. But I would then go home and drink an entire bottle of wine by myself, every night.
My skin was horrible. I had acne, like, everywhere. I was massively overweight. And, actually, if I look at pictures of myself, my skin had, like, a blue color to it. Now, there’s a lot of blue in my skin anyway. I’m under bad light, so you can’t tell right now, but I do have large undereye bags and there’s just a lot of blue hanging out in my skin. I don’t know, maybe I’m part Norse or something. One way or the other there is. But no, like, seriously, there was– I was blue.
A friend was concerned about me, and she’s actually, to this day, my best friend, was concerned about me and she got me a job at her company. They fired me within six weeks. I was just too traumatized working there. They wanted me to score credit reports sitting there, which I just couldn’t do. I’m bad at math. And when I think about it, probably now it’s something I could figure out. I’m just less anxious about these things these days, like, “Oh, I’ll just plug something in and figure it out.” You could plug it into something and figure it out. But back then I was like, “Oh my god, how am I going to do this?” I look so dumb.
And, yeah, they fired me within six weeks, and in front of my best friend and a guy I had a crush on by another guy I had a crush on. So that wasn’t awkward at all. It was really awkward. I ended up breaking up with my then-boyfriend who is now my husband, we got back together. I broke up with my boyfriend, he was just so shitty at the time when I was unemployed. He just comes from a family where they always had money, and the idea of not having money was just so foreign to him. And also, I love him, the man lacks empathy. I don’t know what my deal is with people who lack empathy and why I’m attracted to them. I think about that. My mom lacks empathy. My grandparents lack empathy. Oh my god, I’m having a breakthrough moment. I like, actually I have always known this; I like short bitchy blondes who remind me of my mother and that is my husband. Um, philosophy bitchy blondes. Also a disproportionate number of people that I have dated have been WASPS from the midwest. I guess I just really like really WASPy people from the midwest. Anyway, I broke up with him because he was just so shitty during the period when I was unemployed.
[Editor’s Note: WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It describes upper-class white Americans of Protestant faith with ancestry from northwestern Europe, particularly the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) and parts of northern Germany.]
The good news is, I got a job in media. And that was actually how I got into my career.
55:00
I was at a party. It was a gay pride party. So, they tell you when you’re unemployed that you should go to lots of parties because that’s how you meet people, so I would go to parties, and I would go to parties and drink, and I would talk about the guy that fired me, and I would just go off, “Oh this asshole named [unintelligible], he fired me, and he did it in front of my best friend,” and one girl at the party looked at me, looked at me like I was an alien, and was like, “What is it that you do anyway?” And I was like, “My background is in client services. My background is in client services, but I’m looking to get out of client services.” She was like, “So, you mentioned that I have an ‘I hate my job’ blog. You know HTML, right?” “Uh, I know a little bit.” I did a little bit. And she was like, “If you shut up about this guy for the rest of this party, I’ll hire you. I just got promoted. I’m looking for someone to replace me. Just shut up about [that guy] and I’ll get you the job.” And she actually made good on that promise. She did. She was a horrible boss, actually. She, uh, there was a guy I was seeing at one point, right before my thirtieth birthday, he was a local DJ. He was trouble. He was trouble. And, um, and I was still seeing the guy that would go on to eventually become my husband as well. They knew about each other. I wasn’t cheating. [My husband] knew about– the guy’s name is [redacted]. Please don’t use him, in whatever you end up doing. He would probably not appreciate me using him, so I’m going to ask that you not. In any case, they knew about each other.
And, um, I asked [redacted] if he would be okay, my birthday party was at my house that year. And at my apartment. And I asked [redacted] if he would be okay with [my husband] being my date for the night. He said that would be fine, and he asked me if I would be all right with him hooking up with anybody else he met at the party, and I was like, “You know, that should be fine.” I actually didn’t care that much. You know, I’m not like possessive or anything. But, [redacted] ended up hooking up with my boss. They had sex on my bed at my thirtieth birthday party. I’m sorry, but that was just gross. Also, it was, okay, my birthday is at the end of May, so yes you have long daylight hours, but, like, dude, it was still light out. It was just ridiculous. I was nice to [her], my former boss, I was nice to her for another, the rest of the time I had to work with her. When she left that company I, kind of like, I’ll still respond to her if she sends me a message or something, but I don’t want to be her friend. Like, that was just gross. She also got a cat that was identical to mine while I was working with her, which I thought was a little weird. They were both black and white tuxedo cats. And she also dyed her hair to match mine, which I also thought was very weird, so I’ve often wondered. And one time she got drunk and she told me that she was jealous of me because she felt that I could walk into a bar and have sex with anyone I wanted. She’s wrong. I cannot. I really can’t. But also that was just weird. That was just weird. Whatever her deal was, I thank her for giving me my start in media.
When I worked for her, I just wrote HTML code on spam ant. Little by little there was more and more writing that made its way into my job. Until they actually gave me a job in the editorial department. That’s when my life actually started, as far as I’m concerned. Things got a lot better for me at that point. Finally I felt like I was doing something that felt meaningful and something that not anybody could do, so that was a good thing. Since then I have worked for, let’s see, let me think, how many media firms I’ve worked for.
1:00:00
I’ve worked for five media firms and that's– I started at that company in 2008, so since 2008 I’ve worked for five media firms. My experiences have always been good until they are not. That could probably be applied to any job. They are all good until they are not. I have found that, as I am getting older, that it’s not as easy as it used to be. I feel that there is a period when you are young, when you are young and fresh-faced and cute things are just a little bit easier. You do have issues with people not taking you seriously, and I have never experienced, other than [my old boss], I have never experienced anything that I would consider sexual harassment. I am aware that it is a– well, actually, no, I can’t say that, which will probably bring me to the story that you will find most interesting based on our first conversation.
So, in my third media job, I started that job when I was 37, and at the time I thought it was going to be this great last gasp of youth kind of thing, um, it was a software services firm that also provided editorial services, um, some of which, the editorial management part and editing part of which was in-house. They would outsource their writing. Mostly what they would try to do is try to find, and I hate this word, influencers online and get them to write blogs for their clients. Their clients included some very well-known firms, hustle, main-type firms, in a variety of– now they kind of tried to specialize in tech, which I get the impression is what [Massachusetts] media tends to specialize in. We tend to specialize in tech, start ups done by ex-MIT people, healthcare, stuff like that, I mean, this is Massachusetts, it’s what we do. But they did have some other, like, hair care products and makeup products as well that they would work with, and basically what they would do is they would post your blog, your company’s blog and then if you, and this was all corporate blogs, this wasn’t, like, individual people’s blogs, they would post your blog, and also if you wanted find people to write your blog for you. And their internal team would edit whatever you wanted, you know, whatever was submitted and, uh, do quality control and manage the bloggers so that you didn’t have to worry about that.
And I found that I had a job die out from under me basically. Now, I could sit here and get really pissy about how a specific boss I had never particularly liked me, I could get pissy about that, or about how the brand was dying. The company that owned it is still around, that actual publication is not as far as I can tell. I googled it recently and nothing came up. I was like, “Oh, wow, my old publication died. That’s sad.” But I’m not surprised. I could get really pissy about these things, but the truth is I think it just wasn’t profitable anymore. It’s common in my industry. In writing and editing. It’s a tough game and a great job will die out from under you. It happens. And just, I thought that, they gave me a new job, some new responsibilities. That team, I just did not gel with them. And, they wanted me there at 8:00 am, which is not my style, and they wanted me to do stuff that wasn’t really writing and editing and I was like, eh, this really isn’t my thing, so I didn’t have kids at the time so I quit my job. I was like I didn’t need– I was like I have savings. And you know, this was in 20– would I do that now. NO. But this was in 2017 and the economy was roaring, and you could find another job in a couple of weeks and I did. It was at a software and service firm I was just talking about. I found it through a former co-worker who was just so stoked that I was interested in the job. I sailed through those interviews. I will never forget the interview that I had with the guy that turned out to be my boss.
1:05:00
His name was [Redacted], and whenever I tell this story, I will always use his name because he did me wrong, and there are some people where I will hide their identities because we had our differences but whatever, whatnot, but some people who do me wrong I’m like, “No, I’m not hiding your identity from anyone ever. You can deal with the consequences of the shit that you doled out.” And that’s how I feel about this guy. Fuck that guy.
He was the best job interview I have ever had. Bar none. We got along great. I have a trick that I pull out in job interviews. I ask people about their backgrounds and I listen attentively while they talk. The truth is, and you probably know this because you do this interviews all day, people love to talk about themselves. And people are asked about themselves so seldomly. And especially someone who has been slaving away at copy all day, they love being asked, “How did you get into this?” “Well, what do you really want to do?” And [Redacted] ate that up. He loved being asked. And as it happens, he majored in something I found interesting. He was a classical studies major. “So, you can read Latin?” “Yes.” “And you look at Roman numerals you actually know what they mean?” “Uh-huh.” And he was so excited to talk about this. At the end of the interview, he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “This is the best,” most interesting, he didn’t say best, “this is the most interesting interview I’ve had in a long time.” And I swear it felt like electricity when he touched my shoulder. I hate to say that I was sexually attracted to someone who went on to dick me over so badly, but I was. Do I think it was mutual? Actually, based on what ended up happening, yes, yes I do. Unfortunately. And I think he was very, very salty. I left that interview and I got a call back twenty-four hours later. Very quickly. I remember saying to my husband, I wonder if that company is going to hire me. But I heard back from them twenty-four hours later, which for that company is record time, they keep people on ice for like a month. And right away they were like here’s all the things we like about you, you are far more mature than– the average age of that company is 28, 29. You’re really mature. You have some experience. You know what you’re doing. We think you are going to be a great fit here.
I accepted that job. And I remember thinking this is going to be so cool. I’m going to be hanging out with people ten years younger than me every day. I’m going to start dressing like I’m in my twenties again. I’m gonna, like, go to parties with these people. That is not at all what happened. That might have happened except, I’ll never forget my first day at that job was, I want to say November third of 2017, MLK day of 2018, I realized that my period was late. And it was a huge surprise. My period is usually perfectly on, at least it used to be. I’m getting old now and all kinds of things, weird shit’s happening. But at that point, I always got my period bang on the money on time.
When it was MLK Day, after, so at the end of the three-day weekend and I hadn’t gotten my period that was due on Saturday I was like okay this is weird. I thought I was at the beginning of menopause. I was like, “Oh, wow, I’m one of those one percent that get menopause super early. Well, this sucks.” But I went and got a pregnancy test just to be sure. I took the pregnancy test and it was positive. I will never forget my husband was like, “There’s no way that’s right, take that again.” Or take another one. And that one came up positive. And he was like, “Well, I guess I am going to be a dad in about nine months.” I had been told that if I wanted to get pregnant I was going to need IVF. I had seen a doctor and was like I’m not getting pregnant.
1:10:00
Well, if you’re 37 and you’re not getting pregnant, you’re probably going to need IVF, and so getting pregnant was a huge shock. My husband knew I had had a crush on [Redacted] and that I had been working long hours. He was like, “Okay. Nothing happened with you and [Redacted], right?” No, nothing happened, At all. Whatever else I have to say about the man, he was a professional and nothing like that ever happened. Okay, he was a professional in that way. There were many other ways in which he was not and we’ll get into them. But nothing had happened between us. It’s kind of funny because [Redacted] actually looked kind of like my husband and [my husband] has commented a few times, “Are you sure the baby is mine?” I’m like, “Yes.” After he looked at her feet. My daughter’s feet are identical to my husband’s feet. After he saw that, he was like, “Okay. I can stop asking now.” My husband has weird feet. One of his toes does this thing where it crosses over with his other toe, and my daughter’s does that too, so. I was not expecting to be pregnant at all, but I was like, “Okay, this company is so cool, and [Redacted] is so cool. They are going to be totally cool with the fact that I got pregnant.”
I really thought they would. I started having morning sickness. And I waited to tell anybody because I had miscarried a few times. And I didn’t want to tell anybody that I was pregnant and then miscarry and have people be like, “So, yeah, are you showing yet?” I didn’t want to tell people and miscarry, and I’ve heard other people say that like their co-workers are like, “So, are you showing yet?” It’s like, “Dude, did you not get the memo. I miscarried three months ago. I don’t want to talk about it. Go fuck yourself.” And I didn’t want that to be me. I didn’t want to get everybody all excited if there was nothing to be excited about. So, I started spending a lot of my time in the bathroom. I had really bad morning sickness. And I had it all through my pregnancy with the exception of that May. For whatever reason I did not have morning sickness that May. But starting at the end of June, again I started getting morning sickness. I had it all through the first trimester. There was a little pause in the second, and then it started up again. Until the day I gave birth. It actually fucked up my teeth. All my teeth are crowns at this point. At least all the back teeth are crowns. Lots of fillings up front. I puked for nine months straight. And they just assumed that I didn’t give a fuck. I ended up telling [Redacted], it was before three months, just because I didn’t want him to think I didn’t give a fuck. So, I did tell him. He said all the things that you were supposed to say. He’d actually already known. We had gone to– there had been a company party a week before and they took our drinks, I had been starting to get really sneaky with alcohol. So at that company everybody drank. And you drank. If you were not drinking beer at your desk at 2:00 pm on a Thursday that was weird. I skipped that and basically, like, hid that, and I got away with that. But at parties I started going up to the bar and asking for, like, a champagne flute full of ginger ale. Which, by the way, looks exactly like a glass of champagne. If you ever need, not that you could get pregnant, but if you ever need to pretend that you are drinking when you are not, that works great. That and also like a coke, a coke with ice in it in a rocks glass with like a couple of cherries or a lime that looks like alcohol too. So, I got really good at that, but there was one time when we were at a company party and he was sitting next to me where they took our drink orders with us sitting there. And I had just asked for a coke. I turned and saw his face, his jaw had dropped. It was like it had clicked in his head. And when I told him I was pregnant he was like, “Actually, I had a premonition when we were at dinner the other night.” I knew then, and I was like, “Yeah, I saw your face.” And he was like, “Awww, man was I that transparent?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And we just kind of had a little ha ha moment. It was the first good moment we had had in a while since I started disappearing in the bathroom for half the day.
1:15:00
And I thought, “Okay, now everything is going to be good. We’re going to be good. We’re going to get along again. He’ll be supportive. He’ll be a good boss.” But he got shitty. Things that he would have let slide. I’m not going to pretend that I’m a great editor, I’m not. I’m a great writer. I’m a mediocre editor. I’m not real great at project management although everybody under the sun thinks I should be. I’m doing my best to hide that I have any project management experience in my current job because I am terrified that they’ll try to pull me over to that. And honestly, I would rather get paid less and write than make myself miserable because I am not that guy.
But I’m not a great editor. But [Redacted] made a bigger deal out of it than he had to. I feel– I genuinely feel that he was just looking for shit to have an issue with. And he started being nice to everybody on the team but me. I didn’t believe that microaggressions existed until I worked with him. I hate that to sound like I am a cisgendered white person who hasn’t had to deal with that. I mean I am ethnically Jewish, religiously too, and I’ve seen people do stuff to me like that because I am Jewish, but I used to kind of roll my eyes when people would talk about microaggressions. I used to be like, just call it being an asshole is what it is, just being dicks. Now I know exactly what they are referring to because [Redacted] was a master of microaggressions. He’d, like, make faces at me. What are you going to do? Go to HR and be like, “He’s making faces at me.” You can’t do that. As a grown up. But I know what he did and he knows what he did. And my cat just hissed at me, but whatever. There was another time—I’m talking about [Redacted] and she’s like yeah, he makes me mad too.
But there was another time when, and honestly I try to block a lot of this out, it just makes me so angry. And I don’t remember a lot of my pregnancy, it was just such a traumatic time. But, um, there was another time when we were in the kitchen and he had been drinking beer from a Corona bottle—there was some wine in the bottle I remember that, but at one point, he lowered the Corona bottle so it was like his dick and he made eye contact with me. And I was like, “You’re going to do this to someone who was eight months pregnant?” But he did. And toward the end, there was a client, again, they were a household name. Honestly, they kind of failed, they had viral marketing campaign in the early 2000s that you would remember if I named them. I’m not going to because I did sign an NDA. But fuck them. But I don’t want to get sued over this, so. There are things—I’ll get sued over for talking smack on [Redacted] because he deserves it but I’m not going to get sued over that company. But, anyway, they had a viral marketing campaign in the early 2000s and have been struggling to establish themselves in the telecommunications industry ever since.
And apparently before I started, we had had a good relationship with them. But right around the time I started they had brought on a consultant who’s entire thing– you could tell she wanted to leave a little thumbprint and she was one of those people that sort of just goes into companies and tells them that everything they’re doing is wrong. And the tell you that you need to do this instead of that and re-toggle this and blah, blah, blah. If you have ever worked in corporate America I guarantee that you have worked with one of these monsters. And honestly, I just think they leave everybody more confused than they were to begin with, but whatever. I am not an executive, hiring, those sorts of people, so no one is listening to me. But they hired her for that job and she decided that they were doing marketing all wrong and that their blog was all wrong and it was horrible. And immediately she started to hone in on me in particular and I was just this horrible, horrible critter who should not be in that job.
1:20:00
And I tried everything I could to get myself to where they wanted that to be and things did start to get better. There was an unfortunate incident, though, where we needed to hire a consultant, not a consultant, I’m sorry, we needed to hire a freelancer. Internally. It was us. We needed to hire a freelancer to do writing for the blog. One of the names that came up was someone that I had used as a freelancer when I had worked at one of my previous media firms and I, at that point, had had a very good experience with her and I was like, “Oh, yeah, if we hire this lady, she’s going to be great. I loved working with her when I was at insert name of the first media firm here.” And at this point they had switched me to a new boss, they switched me to a guy, he has the same first name as another person I’ve been talking about and so we’re going to call him, I just don’t want you to get confused, we’re going to call him Giuseppe. So I was working for a guy named Giuseppe at that point who I had generally had a good experience working for him. I treated it as a fresh start.
Segue. This story belonged like two minutes ago. But at one point I took [Redacted]’s boss out to lunch to, like, try to establish a relationship with her. And I took her out to lunch and she took a moment and was like, “Look, I’m going to cut the bullshit. [Redacted] hates you. [Redacted] has been trying to get you fired for months.” And I was like, “Why?” And she was like, “I don’t know, look I’m a feminist. I don’t think I can say that,” this is what she said, she said something like, “I don’t think I can tell you that he doesn’t like you because you’re pregnant.” It’s like “Okay, then.” But one way or another she was like, “You’re going to get fired if you don’t watch your back.” And I was like, “Okay,” And the whole time [Redacted] had been acting like it was [his boss]’s fault, her name is [redacted] and that [his boss] hated me. And everything was covering our asses so [his boss] wouldn’t come down on him. [His boss] was like, “No, the problem is actually [Redacted]. He hates your guts.” Okay.
Now, let me tell you what I think happened. I think [Redacted] was attracted to me at one point. I think that when I got pregnant it completely grossed him out. It’s one of those things, from my understanding, it’s one of those things where it’s like, “Oh, no, I have a crush on a pregnant woman.” Oh gee, she’s pregnant with another guy’s kid so she’s gross. One of those things. I have not had that experience. I think people are beautiful whether they are pregnant or not. If I’m attracted to you before you got pregnant than I’m attracted to you not pregnant. If I’m attracted to you before you had kids, I’m attracted to you after you had kids. But a) I’m a woman, b) I’m not a misogynistic sack of shit like [Redacted]. And c) I’m just one of those people that tries to control their lizard brain. So, that’s what I think happened. Do I know that for a fact? No. Also, at the time, so this is not my natural hair color. I’m a brunette. I met the woman that [Redacted] ended up marrying when I worked with him. She was a brunette with blue eyes. And a light complexion. There was another woman that [Redacted] had bullied when she worked under him and he ruined her reputation too, and again, she was a brunette with blue eyes. I think [Redacted] has a type and when he decides he doesn’t like you he just wants you out of his face. Fuck that guy.
So, with this information that Katelyn gave me, I just sort of did my best. I remember I was in– that day I was in the elevator. It was a big skyscraper in [Massachusetts]. They were on the thirteenth floor and I stepped into the elevator and the song “Sail” by AWOLNATION came on, and it was one of those moments– I had my headphones in and it’s just one of those moments where the music is perfectly synched up with what’s happening. It’s one of those moments where stoplights change at exactly the right point in the music or whatever. It was like the lights in the elevator, the floor lights were perfectly in sync with the music.
1:25:00
And as I walked out of the building the music was perfectly synched up, and I was like I am going to make a whole list of music to plan your revenge to. I still have that playlist. I still have that playlist on my [unintelligible name] which is the European version of Spotify. I’m just that person that always has to use the underdog for their products. Yes, I’ll share it with you. I’m not sure if you have a [unintelligible] account. You do. Oh, you don’t. Well, I’ll share it with you and if you ever decide to get an [unintelligible] account you’ll see “Music to Plot Your Revenge To.” So, within a week of that incident I got a new boss. We will call him Giuseppe. That is not his real name. But we will call him that. And Giuseppe was married. He had kids. His eldest daughter’s name is the same as my daughter’s name, actually. I was pregnant at the time, and I was like, “Her name is [Redacted].” “Hey, that’s my daughter’s name,” and initially we got along great. So, the whole thing happened with me bringing on this new freelancer. I had had good experiences with her previously. She was awesome. However, I don’t know if it was just the situation, or I had just caught her at a bad time or what, but she was horrible working on this campaign. She was a nightmare. There was one time she was like, “Yeah, the internet went out in my house so I’m working from a café.” And like, so you’re an expert in writing so you’re going to understand when I weigh it. So, after you get a subject matter expert on the phone they do their whole spiel about why they’re awesome basically. And then you know, they say, do you have questions. You always have questions. You know, I don’t care, even if you don’t know anything, even if you don’t know anything about that product, you make something up, you pull something out of your ass. That’s how that is. And she was like, “No, I don’t have any questions.” And for whatever reason, we didn’t– we didn’t get a recording of that call. There was a technical malfunction. We didn’t get a recording of that call. And, like, yeah, she submitted something, that’s why we had to have the call, she submitted something, it was bad, that’s why we had to have the call, and then she did that, and the company took as her not caring, which meant that we didn’t care, and as a result Giuseppe had to put me on a performance improvement plan, and I was like, “Really, you’re going to do this, while I’m pregnant?” And I was told, it was actually on my due date. On my due date I was told that I was put on a performance improvement plan and I was like, “Really, you’re going to do this on my due date?” Really? And it was just awful.
They didn’t tell any of the clients or any of the freelancers where I went. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone I was pregnant, which was just ridiculous. I wasn’t allowed to tell any of the clients or any of the freelancers that I was pregnant. And when I went on maternity leave they just said I was not there. And then my labor was horrible. I went through– I was in labor for forty-two hours, which does not normally happen. They were getting ready to do a cesarean when they were like, “Oh, we see a head,” and I pushed for a very short time and my daughter just came gliding right out. I can almost hear her saying, “Sorry Mom, I didn’t realize I was running so late.” Which would be such an in character thing for her to do. I worried, uh, I wasn’t allowed to take actual maternity leave, uh. This is actually really funny, this has actually changed in Massachusetts since my daughter was born. If my daughter was born six months later, this wouldn’t have been an issue. But at the time, companies were allowed to say that if you hadn’t worked there for a full year, you weren’t allowed to take maternity leave and I was allowed to take six weeks of disability and that was it. Which was bullshit. And they bullied me the entire time. And they made me feel guilty for just taking six weeks. I was like, “Really, guys?” And what kills me the most is when I tried to talk to my mother and mother-in-law about it, they both guilted me.
1:30:00
My mother-in-law was like, “Well, that’s amazing. I only got four weeks.” It’s like, “Okay.” I know she was a teacher, so I was like, “Really?” And I know things were different in 1981 when my husband was born, but that seems a little unlikely to me. And my mom was like, “Well, you know it’s wrong for women to expect maternity leave. You’re hurting American business.” And she told me that I should quit my job so that a man could take the job so that he could use it to support his family. Never mind that the average person that worked at the company was childless with the exception of Giuseppe. Most of them were childless and in their early twenties, maybe early thirties and just using, you know, using the job itself to pad their resume. Not that there’s any shame in that game, but still, using the job to pad their resume and pay exorbitant rent. But my mom said that and honestly I have never forgiven her. And she was like, “Of course [Redacted]’s acting that way. You’re ruining his job. You’re ruining his day. You should just leave your job so he doesn’t have to worry about that.” I’m like, “Wow, Mom, I’m your daughter and you’re standing up for someone you don’t even fucking know because Tucker Carlson told you so.” My grandmother died while I was pregnant with [my daughter]. The last conversation I had with her was basically her saying the same thing, that I shouldn’t be working, that I was hurting my child and putting her at risk by having a job. That was the last conversation that we had. She died the next day. It’s like, wow, I can remember you as being an anti-feminist. My dad–
By the way, I want to be conscious of your time. It’s 6:43. Okay, um, my dad became fixated on internet conspiracy theories, mostly in 2020. I think this started happening around this time. His whole thing became that this all happened because I’m straight. Now, I am not straight. Like, I love me the ladies as well as the gentlemen. I’m attracted to different types of people and some people that don’t identify as either gender I’m attracted to as well. Or people who are in the process of transitioning into another gender as well. It’s all good. But my Dad did not necessarily know this. I had made comments a few times like, “This girl is very pretty,” or “This girl is very good-looking,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m bi or I’m gay. My dad had never asked and I had just never told. He became, uh, he had been saying, thinking for a very long time, that the rise of gay rights was an attempt to dismantle the American family. And I asked a few times, “Well, what do you think the endgame for that is?” Frankly because I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and we– when I heard him start saying that it was kind of like, you know, how when you hear someone talk about, “Oh, the moon landing never happened.” It was kind of just amusing. It’s kind of amusing. It’s like, “Oh, so where do you think they filmed that? Where do you think the astronauts went?” It’s like, “Okay, it’s kind of funny.” At the time it was like one of those parlor tricks, you know, this is something people talk about at parties, okay. So, like why do you think they’re trying to dismantle the American family dad?”
And his reasoning was, they want us all to work constantly and be constantly in debt. So that we’re always paying our taxes to the government so that they can spend that money on yachts and cocaine or whatever. And that we’ll have to work all the time. I mean, Americans do work more hours than most countries so, okay, I got it, but it still sounded a little ridiculous to me. When I was pregnant with [my daughter], I mentioned that, and I feel bad. I wish I had never said this, but it was the truth. The girl that they promoted, the girl that they were trying to promote over me, happened to be married to another woman. And she was actually a very nice person and I sincerely hope that her career has treated her well. I have no idea.
1:35:00
I haven’t spoken a word since I left. But she happened to be gay and he was like, “See, that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. They’re doing this to you because you’re straight. And this is an example of gay people colluding together so that they can get more power because they will never get pregnant unexpectedly,” and this is basically– he thought it was this giant conspiracy that gay people were going to get promoted because they can’t have kids and therefore they will never care more about their jobs than their families. As it happens, as I said, the person that was promoted over me happened to be a lesbian and the CEO of the company happened to be a gay man. The founder of the company happened to be a gay man and the head of HR happened to be a gay man too, so that was enough for my dad. Three sources makes a story, you know, that kind of thing.
But the other gal that they promoted over me is straight. [Redacted] is straight. Giuseppe is straight. Both [Redacted] and Giuseppe’s bosses. [Their boss], I don’t know, she was married to a man, so I am going to assume straight or bi. One way or another she’s seen penis in her life. Her boss and the person they briefly promoted over Giuseppe, they’re all heterosexual women. It’s like– and honestly it made me sick that my dad tried to turn my pregnancy into a conspiracy. That really [unintelligible]. He didn’t go to my baby shower, which hurt a lot. He was like, “Oh, I gotta work.” He never saw me while I was pregnant even if he lives, lived, he’s dead now. Even though he lived just over the state line in upstate New York. And supposedly family was the most important thing and it was why we had to fight these horrible homosexuals. Because of family. And yet he wanted nothing to do with me and my daughter during my pregnancy. I’m sorry but that really pisses me off. It still does.
So, yeah, so I had my baby, she was born, I went into labor early in the morning on September 26th. It was my mother-in-law's birthday. I was so mad, so mad. I was like, “She’s going to have the same birthday as my mother-in-law, she should have her own birthday.” I guess she heard me because I didn’t have her until almost the 28th, which I always thought was so weird. Um, I worried all throughout that six weeks about what it was going to be like to go back. I was like, “Oh my god, these people all think I’m an idiot and my body is so fucking busted right now.” I almost died in labor. Um, my heart was actually permanently damaged when I was in labor for too long. My mom got really mad at me, they should have given you a cesarean. Actually a cesarean would have been worse than a little bit of heart damage. It’s one of those either choice sucks things. But apparently a cesarean would have been worse. The more you know.
[Editor’s Note: A C-section, also known as a Cesarean section, is a surgical procedure where a doctor delivers a baby through incisions made in the pregnant person’s abdomen (belly) and uterus (womb).]
But I worried the entire time. And then I got a call. So I was supposed to have a conversation with Giuseppe. I had emailed him actually and said we should discuss my return. I was actually thinking I would probably quit during that call. He was like, “Okay,” and I remember it was Thanksgiving and I had gotten a notification that we needed to call, it was the very end of the day. I was like, okay, he’s probably not going to want anybody around when he tells me how much I suck and that I can’t come back. All right, that’s cool. I called in for that meeting at the same time that my phone started ringing and I saw that it was somebody in the office so I picked up. It was the VP of HR and the VP of [my job] and they were calling to tell me that my services were no longer required. There had been a mass layoff. I should have been mad, but I was elated. I wasn’t going to have to go back to that horrible place. And I was able to get severance. They gave me a month of pay, and on top of that I got unemployment. And I knew I was going to get Mass Health because, hey, I had a kid and I was unemployed and I did. I love living in Massachusetts, best state in the world. I love our systems. I’m actually not being sarcastic at all, I’m actually dead serious. It’s a very [contradictory] thing to love [Massachusetts], but I do love [Massachusetts].
1:40:00
And then, on top of that, I didn’t know it then, but I ended up getting free career training too. I got, if you are legitimately laid off, and it’s only happened once, uh, you only claim it once, is how it works, you can get trained in another career. I actually ended up getting training in nonprofit administration. The next job that I actually got after this was for a nonprofit. I actually ended up writing the technical manual for their systems, which was kind of cool. And part of it was I had a degree in nonprofit management. So, yeah, it works. It really sucked though, like the whole situation sucked. I’m glad that that was the resolution. I didn’t just have to quit my job and get nothing. Also, my daughter was born completely for free. That does not happen in this country. First of all, my former employer had awesome health insurance, and secondly they had this thing, it was just one of their perks for their employees because everybody there was young and healthy so they could do this, where if something was not covered by your insurance they would pay for it, through, like, an internal fund. So, [my daughter], my daughter was born completely free in America.
And I paid for it dearly. I have PTSD. I am super– and it’s not just from working at that job, I can’t just blame that for that, I already had PTSD, but it’s worse now. I got PTSD, there was heart damage, and my pregnancy was a miserable experience. It was a miserable time in my life. I honestly have trouble remembering it sometimes now because it was just so bad. But at least my daughter was born for free when people go into debt into this country for having children. You know, people can end up paying thirty thousand dollars for having a child in this country easily. So, it turns out that me being laid off was part of a mass layoff, uh, Giuseppe was fired as well, fired, laid off, so was [his boss]. Um, [Redacted] held on to his job. Because of course he did, that piece of shit. Um, a few months later he went to another job. He manages what my husband considers to be the best coding blog done by a corporation. That he has ever seen. And he’s like, “I always feel really bad whenever I use them as a source.”
[Husband comes in for a few minutes and they talk about getting something ready for dinner. I’m getting a knock at the door. “Hi [my husband]. You can say hi to Dan. He’s doing an art project.” “I know you’re on the phone, but I need to know when I have to get things ready.” “Can I tell you later? I’ll tell you after this call. Can we say 7:30?” “Okay. The rice is going to be a bit cold. I thought we were going to start dinner at 7:00 like we always do,” “Yeah, we’re running a little late.” “I need to know when to start the grill. Okay, so I won’t start the grill until later then. The rice is going to be a bit cold. That’s fine. Sorry.”]
What I will say is we can stop at 7:00 if you want and we can schedule another time to reconnect?
We might as well get this done. And then if you have any follow-up questions you can do that, but no, we might as well just do this now. We’re here so, yeah, in any case, [Redacted] apparently manages one of the best coding blogs that [my husband], who you just heard, has ever seen. [my husband] always says he feels so bad, really bad whenever he has to use them as a source. And he says honestly I use them pretty often because they’re really good. I’m just like, “Fuck you, [Redacted].” Um, I talked to a former co-worker who is actually friends with [Redacted] and I was like, “Yeah, so I saw [Redacted] got a new job. Yeah, I thought he was like a lifer at our former employer.” She had been laid off at the same time I was actually.
1:45:00
And she was like, “[Redacted] was heartbroken about the layoff. He just thought that was so horrible. Apparently they had been pulling him into strategy sessions and asking him for his opinion on how they were running the business and they took everything he said and ignored it. Completely ignored everything he said. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but it makes me so mad that like life is way too kind to some people.” Now he gets to make way more money than I do and be perfectly happy in his dream job. I hope he dies in a fire. He got married in 2020. He married the girl he had been seeing when I worked with him. My husband, it’s really funny, at the time I had said to my husband “fuck this guy,” again the line I just used, life is too nice to some people. [Redacted] had commented many times when we worked together that he had never wanted to get married and that he thought that guys who got married got fooled by their wives and blah blah blah. Apparently whenever he would talk about marriage his hands would start shaking and stuff. I never saw this, but apparently other people we worked with did.
I took it as, “Oh, he got married. He finally found happiness. Fuck that guy. I hope he dies in a fire.” My husband was like, “No, he lost. His girlfriend finally wore him down. He’s having kids and dealing with all the shit that we’re dealing with and he’s going to be even more miserable about it than you are.” I kind of hope that [my husband]’s analysis of the situation is accurate, but I wouldn’t wish what happened to me, either the pregnancy discrimination or the difficult birth, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Even [Redacted] and his wife. I genuinely hope they are spared that. But I still hate that guy and I hope that someday I hear that some bad news has fallen on him, but not that bad.
So, yeah, that is my story about [Redacted]. What happened to me afterward, took about a year, I got unemployment and, like I said, I got job training, and through that I was able to stretch out the unemployment. I did a lot of freelance work. I actually wrote a book on contract negotiations which was kind of cool. It was called, what was it called? It was called [Redacted], something like that. It was put out by a company that does, they’re called [Redacted] and what they do is, they basically negotiate, they find the little loopholes in the oracle contract where oracle is going to try to fuck you. Which they do, if you have any background working with oracle products, they fuck you. So, yeah, contract with that company to save your ass. But, anyway, I did that. I got a job during the– somebody heard– it was another guy also named [Redacted], ironically, who I had worked with at another job. I taught him how to do copywriting when he first started doing that and he became incredibly successful at it, and to pay me back he got me a job at a marketing firm in [Massachusetts]. That job would have worked out great except half their income came from events. And in-person events. I was hired at that job in December of 2019 and you can imagine what happened when they realized that all of their in-person events were canceled a few months later. So, I got laid off again. Um, at least that time the CEO was willing to write me a very nice personal recommendation, which I did appreciate. That said, it was painful that that happened twice in a row and I was just like, “Oh my god, I’m never going to work.” My next job was working in a nonprofit. It was good working with people who were motivated by wanting to do good. Um, I’m not going to lie, I didn’t love the woke politics. I hate to say that because I sound republican when I say that, um, but these were people who would just talk about microaggressions casually, like, that it felt like they were looking to be offended sometimes. They would bring stuff up all the time, and I was like “Okay.” And I had to ask myself, like “Okay, if you’re a person of color then you probably have faced discrimination.”
1:50:00
Like I have faced with my pregnancy discrimination. It was kind of like, it was so fresh that I was like, “I could tell you about discrimination,” but at the same time, no, I can’t say that because it’s not like I’m pregnant for my entire life. I was pregnant for nine months. So, it wasn’t that great of a job, but luckily it was contract, and also luckily I got another job a few months later, which is my current job.
Now I just write data. I don’t write data, I look at data. It’s basically, it’s consumer and economic data that other people generate and I conduct surveys. You know those online surveys where they ask you a zillion questions and then they finally start asking you about your purchasing habits. That’s us. I’ve been there since December of 2021 and I’m glad it’s not in person. I’m glad it’s remote. It’s a Massachusetts company, but they realized during the pandemic that they could save a lot of money by having people work remotely so they do, and they can hire people anywhere in the world. I have co-workers in– technically my boss is in Spain. I have another co-worker in London. I had another co-worker in the middle of nowhere in Montana for a while. My original boss was in San Francisco, so like, I work with people all over the world, which is kind of nice. But I’m glad it’s not in person because it gives me less opportunity to be awkward, which I’m like, okay, this is good. Also just after the [Redacted] situation I just kind of don’t trust anybody. I’m like I could work with anyone and they could just randomly decide they hate me for any reason. And it’s like, “Why bother?”
But, yeah, and an old friend. They actually had an interview. They interviewed at the company where I was discriminated against and they interviewed with [Redacted], and right away they didn’t like him and they almost got into a fist fight with that guy. Just during a job interview. He was like, “I hate this guy.” Everything about [Redacted] just rubbed them the wrong way. They were like, “I feel really bad that this experience happened to you so I’m going to get you a job at my company,” and that’s how I got my current job. That person was later fired. And like, legit fired, not just laid off. They were not satisfied with his work. So that stinks because we’re still friends and it’s a little awkward sometimes. But I’m glad to be there. I don’t want to be there forever. I hope to move on to something else within the next few years, but for the time being I like it.
However my nice little cherry-on-top-of-the-cake story here is, I had a co-worker and she had been there for a long time and she suddenly got pregnant. I wasn’t surprised when she randomly got laid off a few months after she came back, and when I saw that her job– the reason that she supposedly got laid off was because they didn’t need her anymore. They didn’t have a need for that role anymore. Well, I basically saw that her job was being posted online last week. I can’t say I was surprised. It could be that they’re just looking for someone to do the same job for less money, but I can’t help but think, you did this because she had a kid, didn’t you?”
Anyway, that’s my story. Questions, comments, peanuts.
1:54:03
[Redacted], thank you, um, when we had first spoke you mentioned, you touched on it briefly this evening, but you had brought up your Jewish identity in a much more [unintelligible] way. I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about that.
Sure. Is there anything particular that you are looking for?
Uh, you had articulated as almost an othering of yourself when you were a kid and how you grew up.
Yeah. I grew up in a working-class, white neighborhood. Well, not White. I would say evenly mixed between white, Black, and Latin, and a lot of kids who lived there did speak Spanish as a first language. People were really weird about me being Jewish. I remember– and I’m sorry my nose is starting to run. It was a warm day out there and there’s pollen everywhere. But anyway, in the neighborhood I grew up in, the word– I was always the only Jewish kid or almost always. A lot of the Jewish kids in our area went to private school, and I just didn’t know too many other Jewish kids growing up. My grandmother had been disowned when she married a non-Jewish guy. She met my grandfather at a bar when they were 21 and 22, and her parents wouldn’t give her permission to date him, so she ran away with him and nine months later my mom was born, so she was always really weird about being Jewish and just sort of took it as, like, the community had turned their backs on her. And my mom– my dad had been cheating on her throughout their marriage. She converted to conservative Judaism when they married. She didn’t have to go through full conversion because she was ethnically Jewish but they did have her do some classes and stuff. And she technically did. She was a member of a conservative Jewish temple. And when my dad was using drugs and cheating on her and just generally being a piece of shit, the rabbi at that temple told her just to turn, to turn, you know, to avert her eyes basically. You know, just be a good wife. And she took that to mean that all Jews thought it was cool to cheat on your spouse. Now, I know, and you hopefully know, that that is not correct. That was just one rabbi sucking. It’s the same as I’m sure you would find evangelical preachers who do the same thing. You would find Catholic priests who would tell you to do that same thing. And I always wonder if they were kind of like, “You know, maybe you can save this marriage.” That kind of thing and she just took it the wrong way. That’s possible too. And let’s face it. People sucked more in the eighties. At least I like to think they did. Maybe not. Looking at today’s supreme court, maybe that’s not accurate.
But anyway, one way or the other, she did not take it well. And so we did not have firm Jewish identities. None of my blood relatives did. And growing up, the way I look and rocking a name like [Redacted] was not easy in that neighborhood or in those circumstances, and I was always real uncomfortable with it. It was very awkward. And I hid that I was Jewish. All through, like, people would ask and I was like, “No, I’m German.” And, you know, I would just do everything I could to hide it. I begged to go to church when we were little. My mother actually ended up raising us Methodist. I rediscovered Judaism when I got to college. I started going to temple, and I just found that it fit a lot better with what I believe than Christianity does. I tried being an atheist for a while, that didn’t work for me either. I definitely believe there is some sort of a higher power. I don’t believe it’s watching our every move or anything like that. But as it happens, Jews believe that too so I was like, “Yeah, okay, all right.” The kicker for me was, um, I was backpacking through Europe once and I was hearing a lot of– it was during a period where there was a lot of antisemitism going through Europe at that point. It was 2003 and the height of the Iraq war and, um, a lot of Europe, honestly I don’t want to scare, and a lot of Americans do this too, and honestly QAnon is based on this shit too. But conspiracy theories start going around whenever stuff that people don’t like is happening. And they used to be more prevalent in Europe than in the United States. Not so much anymore. There was a lot of antisemitism. I kept hearing it and it made me really uncomfortable. I was like, “Even if I didn’t call myself Jewish, it’s part of my heritage.” And the last, kind of the moment it clicked for me was someone had randomly hung a poster with something on it at a Holocaust memorial in Prague. It was something like, “Even if I cut my nose off, I’ll still be a Jew. If I change my hair I’ll still be a Jew.” If I do, I don’t even remember all the things but it was, “If I do this, if I do that, I’ll still be a Jew. I will always be a Jew and I will always be oppressed.” And it clicked and I was like, “That’s me.”
2:02:00
And that in mind with how I look and my name and what I believe. It turns out what I believe is exactly what reformed Jews and conservative Jews believe. I was like, “I guess I’m Jewish.” So, I’ve been Jewish ever since. It’s a big part of my identity. Usually one of the first things people will hear within minutes of meeting me is “I’m a Jew.” I’ve had people be like, “Well, why do you bring that up?” And I’m like, “It’s a big part of who I am and I’m proud of it. I’m proud of everything that my people have been through so that I could live this life, and I’m proud of everything that I’ve been through. You know, with taking schoolyard punches, having people make fun of me. I’m like, you know what? Fuck those people.” And I’m proud of my heritage.
So, my daughter is being raised Jewish. She’s half German actually. My husband was, I want to say 5/6 German and 1/6 Dutch. And he was raised a Unitarian Universalist. My mother-in-law and I got into a huge fight when she asked me to raise my daughter Unitarian. I was just like I am not raising my daughter some fucking feel-good religion. That people just do because they enjoy getting together and are like, “Let’s be nice people.” That is not my style. And yeah, I’m proud of where I come from.
And then, I guess the last question I have for you is, why did you reach out to Aid Access?
The reason I reached out to Aid Access was, and it’s unfortunate, it’s so funny, it happened the day I spoke to you, which is just so wild, it was one of those moments. I had heard that there is a possibility that birth control pills, not birth control pills, I’m sorry, it’s probably what’s next on the list, but I had heard that the abortion pill was going to be banned. In the United States. That a Texas State Circuit Court judge who had been appointed by Trump, who was a professional anti-abortion activist at one point, had a case come before him where he would basically have the ability to ban, I am going to say this wrong, but Mifepristone. Okay, close enough. To ban that and it was going to be crossing his desk, and I don’t even know if I can still get pregnant. I’m a little old. And honestly, if I got pregnant and my life wasn’t going to be in danger and the baby was going to be healthy, I’d probably just have the baby. My daughter was unplanned and, you know, I tend to see such things as blessings. But I also know that not everyone feels the same way I do, and also I know that sometimes there are ectopic pregnancies or there are just situations, like, what if you find out your husband is cheating the day before you get pregnant? If you want to have an abortion and you don’t want to stay with that piece of shit, please have the abortion. And I wanted it to be an option for me. No matter what some stupid judge in Texas thought about that pill that has been perfectly safe. We have been using it in this country for over twenty years and it has been used in Europe even longer.
I want it to be an option for me, but even beyond me, if a friend came to me and she told me she was pregnant and she was scared, and that she didn’t want to have a baby and didn’t want to have a surgical abortion, but would be comfortable having a medication abortion, I would love to have the opportunity to say, “Honey, sit here and wait. One second, one second.” Run upstairs, get the bottles of Mifepristone and Misoprostol, I believe, is the other half needed for the abortion pill. Get me little things, come to her, and be like, “Honey, this is my gift to you.” If you don’t want to take them, that’s fine, give them to somebody who will use them.” That’s why.
2:05:00
[Redacted], thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to spend time with you and hear your story. Are there any other things you want to share before we end our time tonight?
Number 1: Fuck [Redacted]! I hate that guy. Oh, I should mention, I did see him in person exactly once after I was laid off. I was in [a neighborhood], which if you’ve been to [Massachusetts] it’s basically our downtown area. I was in [a neighborhood], I don’t remember off-hand what I was doing down there that day, but I was there and suddenly I see this guy on a skateboard and I was like, “What is this bald guy doing riding a skateboard through [a neighborhood]?” And the guy goes kind of close to me. I don’t know if he saw me or not, but I realized one, that was [Redacted], two, he’s gone completely bald since we worked together. Good! Sorry I hate to say that it makes me sound so vapid and shallow, and I know that hair loss is a thing and I probably should feel comfortable poking fun at my weight if I’m going to do that but yeah, I was like fuck that guy. But, yeah, I’ve seen him once since then. Other than that, is there anything I want to add–
It really bothers me that a woman’s reproductive status or lack thereof, how all of this, I feel all of this is such a bigger deal for women than it is for men. Some of this is just biological. Women have to carry children while men don’t, but I feel like some of this is frankly just misogyny. You know, you don’t see people-
I’ll put it like this: If Hillary Clinton had had as many different children by as many different men as Donald Trump had—as many baby daddies as Trump had baby mamas, the conversation about her would have been very different. Same thing goes for any other female politician. It’s not a surprise, okay I should say, it’s not a surprise to me, that the first female vice president doesn’t have any biological children of her own. And even with her, my whole family loves to rag on Kamala Harris ‘s supposed sex life. It makes me sick. I don’t think she deserves any of that. I mean, you’re not going around talking about how many women Joe Biden has slept with. You don’t go talking about how many women–
Okay, they do talk about how many women Donald Trump has slept with, but they talk about it like it’s a good thing. And, you know, it’s like why is this a thing? I don’t know. It bothers me. It bothers me so much. It bothers me and it will never not bother me that I had that experience with [Redacted], when I was pregnant with my daughter. And it will never not bother me that my family’s entire conversation around this has basically been “Oh, you should stop working and let your husband work.”
One thing I haven’t mentioned: my husband doesn’t work right now. Not full time. He works freelance, but he isn’t working full time. His mother has basically rewritten what has happened. Okay, hold on, I am going to turn a light on in here because it is getting dark in here and it’s driving me nuts that it’s this dark. It’s not that much lighter, but it’s light, lighter enough. Okay, now I’m like half in the dark, half in the light.
Anyway, his mother has basically re-written the script to say that I bullied him into not working because I’m a feminist. And she calls herself a feminist too, so where do you get off? But I bullied him into not working because I’m a feminist and because I insisted on continuing my career selfishly. The reason why he doesn’t work is that he really wants to spend our daughter’s first years with her. That’s the reason. And honestly because he’s terrified of the job interview process. He was abruptly let go from a job himself, near the beginning of the pandemic. And it freaked him out. It was unrelated to the pandemic. Just this guy who had been giving him work for a number of years ran out of money. It happens. I’ve been around long enough that I know companies run out of money and I feel no shame in it, but for him he took it very personally. He’ll probably begin working again at some point, but he’s spending some time with our daughter and it has allowed me to go back into my career, which I have enjoyed so I’m not complaining.
But just that there’s this weird attitude about women who work. Side note, I’ve noticed there’s this weird thing with women on internet forums and blogs that women who are stay at home moms assume that we look down on them for being stay-at-home moms. So, we think we’re better than them. I don’t think I’m better than anyone. Honestly, if I could get away with being a stay-at-home mom, I totally would do. Just that’s not been my reality. Just– I would love to get up with my daughter every day and do fun things with her every day, but unfortunately it’s just not what I’ve been able to do. But I noticed that too, and I feel that no matter what you do, there’s an assumption that people judge you and there’s some truth to that too. Unfortunately people do judge women for what they do. And that reality is something I had never become so sure of until I had kids. And I never realized, and I’m not necessarily talking about you, how much of an advantage men have in their careers. And I really hope that that changes, because I think that no matter what gender you are and no matter what gender you identify with or no gender whatsoever, we should all have the same opportunities, so that is my long, windy answer to a series of short questions.
[Redacted], thank you so much, and I’m going to stop the recording here.
Sure.
2:11:25