Because I Said So (35 page)

I was the consummate working mother. I thought of writing an article entitled “You
Can
Do It All!” As the business grew, I created a home office and hired one assistant and then two. We earned enough to put our three children into elite private schools.

That it had taken until I was in my early forties to own a piece of the American Dream only made it that much sweeter. I never took what we had for granted. Every time I opened my double-door refrigerator—something that rental units almost never have—

I was thrilled. I loved doing the back-to-school shopping, getting the kids ready with all new clothes, down to their shoes and backpacks. Every year at Christmas, I hid a mountain of presents—so many that when Andre was eight, he said, “Mommy, I know there’s a Santa Claus, because you could never afford to buy us all these presents.”

I shopped at midnight from catalogs and had organic produce delivered to our door; our dry cleaning was picked up by a French cleaner with valet service. I didn’t have time to do the renovations on the house that Chris and I talked about, but I knew I would get to them soon enough. We talked about expanding the house so we would never have to move—creating a master bath and adding another bedroom so the kids would each have their own rooms.

During that time, some good friends, a well-established graphic designer and his wife, lost their sizable advertising agency and had to take their kids out of the French-American International School,
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which my boys also attended. This frightened me, but then my business was growing nicely every year. We always had several solid clients, among them a few Fortune 500 companies. We were winning awards, and I was being paid to write and speak in addition to my client work. Even when we lost a client, we immediately signed another.

That was until September 11, 2001. Our agency was the pre-eminent consulting firm for merchandise sourcing and product development for many of the nation’s top mail-order catalogs.

But after September 11, the work for consulting businesses like ours dropped off drastically. Between fear of public places and the dot-com bust, retail and catalog sales were hit hard.

I had this conviction that if I really threw myself into an endeavor, any endeavor, I could make it happen by sheer force of will. When at first we lost two clients (that, in and of itself, should have been a sign), then three and then another without signing anyone new, I adjusted. I let one assistant go. I renegoti-ated our long-distance and cell-phone contracts, and began traveling coach. Then I had to let my other assistant go. I started answering my own phone, opening my own mail, and paying, or at least trying to pay, my own bills. Then I stopped traveling at all. For four months I looked for any kind of work related to my field, but there was nothing.

I was too busy scrambling for work to see how far we had been falling, and how fast. By the time I looked around and realized that the world had changed—not just for us, but for many, many people—we were months behind on our mortgage, struggling to pay the car lease, and in debt up to our ears. Something had to give—and fast. As far as I was concerned, school was a priority; taking money from the kids’ education was not an option. Slowly, sadly, it hit me that we had no choice but to sell the house.

When I brought this up to my husband, he couldn’t even discuss it. So I just moved forward. I met with the realtors, recruited the painters, plowed through the piles of clutter in every corner. I hired “home stagers,” who moved in prop furniture that made
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each room look like a glossy spread in a home décor magazine and advised me on other home improvements that would help bring in the best price in the competitive market for affordable homes.

So there I was—looking on as crews of painters, carpenters, and gardeners bustled around us, creating the ambiance of a well-lived family life. But as soon as the renovations were complete, we were to leave. To avoid foreclosure, we were selling our dream to someone else.

Not only that. We were literally down to our last dollar—the money for the home improvements was to come out of the escrow. The rest of the funds we cleared from the house sale would go toward paying off some of our debt. So, every way I could scrimp on the renovations, I did. To save money on painting, I went down to the local paint store, where anxious unemployed laborers, mostly from Mexico and Central America, mill around on the corner waiting for the next car or truck that might bring them a day’s work. Being fluent in Spanish, I assembled a crew of four Latin men and bought the cheapest brushes, paints, and materials I could find. In four days, my house was painted.

Little did I know then that this was something I would do many more times in the next few years.

I went into survival mode
the day I realized we had to sell the house. Three years later, I wonder if I will ever come out. My husband collapsed under the emotional stress of the decision to sell and move, but with three kids, I did not have that option.

Someone had to give them hope, strength, and dinner.

I found us a small rental house in a shabby neighborhood a few blocks off the freeway. I felt deflated when I turned the key to open the front door to that house. Every room was painted sallow

“renter’s white.” The refrigerator hadn’t been replaced in twenty years, and the controls on the old electric stove consisted of five little colored push buttons. The fence in the backyard was broken, and the linoleum in the kitchen was god-awful faux marble. I
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thought for a moment about the beautiful new terra-cotta tile in the kitchen of our old home and then shoved that picture out of my mind.

I had never felt so lonely in my life. Obviously, I couldn’t cry to my husband because he was already coming unraveled.

Certainly I couldn’t let the kids see the disappointment on my face. If I called my friends or my mom, I knew they would just feel terrible for us, and couldn’t do anything to help anyway. It was bad enough that I felt horrible. I didn’t need to make anyone else feel worse. So, really and finally, I was alone—with my devastation and dozens of boxes to unpack.

I had no idea how I was going to pay the bills now that I had literally no business. I couldn’t afford the long-distance phone calls, the computer hookups, the travel—all that was needed to keep a small business running long enough to get new clients. I couldn’t even afford new business cards. And soon enough, I was to find out, I would not be able to afford the home phone line that gave me computer access to the Internet and e-mail, both indispensable to the professional life I had been living.

The people who had staged our home suggested that I might use my bilingualism to assemble a crew to paint the next home they were staging. Thus I became a painting contractor and house painter. I quickly learned the business from my crew, sometimes painting myself, even climbing scaffolding, something I had never expected to take up in my late forties. Because exterior painting is very seasonal, I also assembled a crew to clean houses, another service that often precedes a home sale. Again, with my fluent Spanish, which had become even more fluent, I gathered a ready team of Latin ladies, all experienced but unable to find regular work with their limited English. Thus I became a housecleaner.

Suddenly I was dashing around giving job estimates, transporting the women and cleaning supplies to various jobs, buying paint, and looking for that next job. The work was my salvation, although it was also sporadic at best and not nearly lucrative enough to sustain a family in one of the most expensive cities in the nation.

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As heartbreaking as it had been to lose our house, losing my career and my self-confidence was worse. I had to give up my identity in the white-collar world and all the trappings of success that went along with it. I returned my plush leased car to avoid repossession and bought an ’86 station wagon with 250,000 miles on it.

I sold my Armani suits to a second-hand shop—with all the stress, I had lost thirty-five pounds, so they didn’t fit anyway.

Although I had always been outgoing, I could not bring myself to socialize. At first I was too shell-shocked at finding myself so alone, too busy trying not to feel a failure. Then I was just depressed. I was tired and sad, yes, but I also began to feel strangely out of place in the world, like one of the “illegals” in a Mexican rap song my painters played—
no soy de aci, ni soy de
aja,
“not from here nor from there.”

I was moving further and further away from having anything in common with the parents at the private schools my children still attended on partial scholarships. My children, too, felt the change—they had gone from being ordinary, high-achieving kids living a privileged life in an affluent, mixed-race family to being the poor black children at their exclusive private schools.

When one of my closest friends got married, I pulled myself together to attend her wedding reception. Now two sizes smaller, I borrowed a dress from one of my Latin cleaning ladies and tried to make myself look like the picture of success that people would expect to see. But I made the mistake of starting a conversation with a friend of the bride who was whining about how bored he was with his job, and it paid only $130,000 a year anyway. I could feel my eyes fill with tears. I left shortly after I arrived, feeling depressed and invisible.

Likewise, I couldn’t face my former business associates, only to have to tell, once again, the sad story of the demise of our business. One of those colleagues had been among my closest friends; we had spent hours talking into the night about family, business ethics, our childhoods in New York. But as my fortunes took a different turn from hers, she became judgmental, telling me that it was my fault, and eventually bowing out of our friendship. I was
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reminded of the saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. What did she know about my life now?

The truth is, I now had more in common with the guys who painted for and with me and the women with whom I cleaned houses than I had with most of my former friends and associates.

I learned about food stamps and Medi-Cal, about Catholic Charities and Jewish Family and Children’s Services. I learned firsthand what it feels like to have the checker at Safeway look down on you when you pay for groceries with the food stamps

“credit card.” Though it is designed to look like a real credit card to save you that embarrassment, the checker at an upscale market near my sons’ school was even less discreet, asking loudly, “So you’re paying for that with food stamps?”

Like other poor people, I learned to be wary of the police. I had been stopped for a broken taillight that I couldn’t afford to repair and issued a ticket requiring me to pay a fine of $160 if I didn’t fix it. Well, if I couldn’t afford to fix the taillight, how was I supposed to afford the fine? I was too busy trying to make my rent. So I missed my court appearance. Today, there is still a bench warrant out for me.

Our marriage began sagging under poverty’s crush. When things had been good for us financially, Chris and I could get away with what, in retrospect, was a union laced together with threads. Without the distractions of vacations, dinners out, a social life, and travel, the bare bones of the marriage were exposed. And they clearly weren’t enough, at least not from my perspective. I think Chris just gave up after we lost the house. But I couldn’t give up, and I couldn’t stand that he did. He was home most of the time, but you would not have known it for the minimal time he spent taking care of the children.

Andre was old enough to help out, but he had transferred to a more academically challenging high school in Marin. He had long dreamed of playing college basketball, and I wasn’t going to let the burdens of our present life deprive him of his hopes for the future. He helped some at home, but he had a full load of homework, a fifty-mile round-trip commute to school every day, and
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basketball practice, which meant he didn’t get home until nine or ten at night.

On the many occasions when I worked late at night to finish painting a house that had to be ready the next day, Chris let the younger kids get their own dinner, if they even remembered.

Other times, I’d come home at ten to “What’s for dinner, Mom?”

And I always came home to a sink full of dishes, a dirty kitchen, and piles of dirty clothes. The less Chris did, the more I did, and the more resentful I became.

Our sad little house was bursting with the tension. One night, when I returned at bedtime to find that Armand and Cienna hadn’t eaten dinner yet, Chris and I fought so hard that the children insisted they hadn’t been hungry at all, so it was okay that Daddy hadn’t fed them. In the meantime, Andre started to find more reasons to stay over at friends’ houses, sometimes for the entire weekend.

This was breaking my heart and clearly my children’s hearts as well. With all they were going through, I didn’t feel that this was the time to file for divorce, and I didn’t have any energy to devote to anger. So I decided to just let it go, to let everything Chris did or didn’t do that I resented or worried about just slip away. I stopped counting on him for anything and started counting on the kids to take care of things when I worked late.

When I had my advertising business, I always had a housecleaner. It was all I could do to coerce the kids into picking up their rooms before she arrived. And I reasoned that their homework was more important. Now that I
was
a housecleaner, they would just have to do both. I taught my ten-year-old, Armand, how to cook dinners for himself and his little sister. When I went off to work on Saturdays and Sundays, I left the children with lists of chores that would have overwhelmed some housekeepers.