The hardest part was telling my wife.
Well, that was the second-hardest part. Ordeal numero uno, of course, was the lay-off itself. To hear the words, “We won’t be able to use your services anymore” and realize suddenly, woozily, they’re being spoken to you—that’s when the flakes of icy pepper sprinkle down the back of your neck. That’s when other words and phrases, such as mortgage default, eviction, hungry children, and other niceties of doom begin to crawl from the mental woodwork. That’s when a host of disparate fears start conspiring to shut you down.
My job was entirely home-based, so the moment of severance happened via a hastily arranged conference call with the New York office. Several coworkers, two of whom also took part in the call, were being let go as well, and a less-than-sensitive observer might assume that this “communal” termination made the moment easier.
Wrong. Multiply loss and you get more loss. So yeah, that was definitely the hardest part, just as the hardest part about a beheading isn’t the valiant farewell or the rotten fruit hurled by the crowd—it’s the split second when blade meets flesh.
Then it’s over, the reddened platform is mopped clean, and the gawking witnesses can move on. Right?
Now a kind of euphoria is supposed to set in, with folks scampering off to tell their spouses and tavern-mates how it all went down, how gory or spectacular or pitiful the end was. As a fun little thought experiment, let’s say that even the ghost of the condemned joins in, floating among the amazed and bewildered citizenry with a blow-by-blow account of his own execution. There’s no shortage of rapt listeners. They want to know how it felt.
And why shouldn’t he tell his tale? It’s imprudent to bury ourselves in the solitude of demise, our own or another’s. The aftermath should be a public thing, a communal cause célèbre, renewing the circle of life and the resiliency of the social contract. So there I was, a phantom of my former job-holding self, fully aware of my obligation to inform and update the people in my life.
Unfortunately, sharing is difficult for me. Always has been. When I say “sharing” what I really mean is speaking seriously, intimately, about important real-life stuff. About the business at hand. About oh shit what are we gonna do. I’d much, much rather talk about Einstein’s hairstyle or early primate evolution or the fine points of drawing lizards with my six-year-old daughter.
Now I had to reveal disturbing—hell, frightening—news to my wife. I stared at the phone, screwing up the courage to call her at work. After a while I decided not to do that.
I busied myself with LinkedIn, tinkered with my resume and portfolio, got our toddler up from his nap. Retrieved the older kids from the bus stop. Then came snacks, terror, homework, vertigo, dinner preparations, apoplexy. I changed my mind about not calling her. I picked up the phone several times, even dialed her work number a few of those times, always hanging up before the ringing stopped. You’d have thought I was trying to ask her out.
I was working up to it, mind you. For some reason—and now I’ll come across as barely capable of facing reality, but I don’t care—I kept thinking back to an experience I had last summer. “Experience” is meant loosely here, because it wasn’t anything huge. It was almost nothing, really.
We were visiting family and friends in Seattle, and one morning the baby and I got up early for a stroller walk. Out and about in Montlake—the sleepy, middle-class, center-city neighborhood of my birth—we hiked the sidewalks like foreign sightseers. The stroller was as light as a Caucasian sabre, the sun a blob of mango graffiti which the city’s rain-loving liberals had agreed could stay. I felt as if we’d purchased this primal mise-en-scène, my small son and I, with our early rising.
Zig-zagging the enclave’s nooks and crannies, we made our way to my old elementary school. At first I thought we’d just stand outside the chain link fence. But again, it was just us. Where had everyone gone? There was nobody to stop us from slipping under the shackles on the gate. So…
I gave my little guy the grand tour: the concrete playground complete with sites of long-gone jungle gyms and oversized U.S. maps painted on the ground, now worn away. The two kickball diamonds that seemed to have changed little or not at all since I first flailed on them. The portable classroom behind which I…I…
No, I didn’t get my first kiss there. I didn’t get into my first fight there. I executed a secret plan there, one spring day when I was eight or nine. Nothing sinister, exactly, just secret.
From a cereal box at home I had procured the free prize of a plastic Pink Panther knife. I think the knife was meant for children to use when camping or playing kitchen, but in my mind it wasn’t so much a tool as a talisman. Warmed on the inside with subterfuge and danger, I had carried this cheap, garishly colored piece of cutlery to school in my pocket. Nobody knew I had it but me, not even my witchy third-grade teacher, Miss Pace. And at lunch time I abstained from tag and kickball and slipped away, lurking unseen, scratching indecipherable pictographs into the portable’s wood siding.
Nothing remained of the cryptic markings in 2013, not surprisingly. (I wasn’t even sure if I had the right portable.) But the bizarre joy of the act came seeping back as I dragged the stroller between the building and the fence. I mean, I could have done anything that day in third grade—taken a leak, put on my mom’s lipstick, or just eaten crackers. The point was that I had a plan and I put it into action. All on my own.
But the substance of my reverie was only beginning to reveal itself. Continuing our father-and-son tour, we moved around to the front of the school. It was there that I had a strange, mantra-riddled epiphany. Gazing at the pearl-white stone steps and the tall, sad, gridded faces of classroom windows, I saw the children I knew then. I saw Graydeen and Dorian and my best friend Hugh. I saw Ann and Ruth and Carrie (a dark-haired beauty) and all the rest. I saw them charging up the steps and peering out the windows, I heard them babbling tepid insults and exuberant reminders to each other, I felt their raincoats and sweaters brush against me. My hands trembled on the stroller’s handles.
The mantra went: “This was a chance.”
This was a chance. This was a chance.
It cycled like birdsong through my brain as we wheeled away from the school and looped back toward my parents’ house. Please don’t ask me what it meant, because I don’t have a remotely solid answer. I have tried to understand it, and I think it has something to do with this: learning to trust other people. That’s what we’re supposed to do when we enter school, because if we can’t learn to rely on others we won’t learn anything useful for ourselves, not much at any rate. Sure, we need to absorb our numbers and our ABCs, but if there’s no one else there to pull us along and be pulled by us, all we’ll end up doing is scratching and scribbling a bunch of nonsense.
So I thought about that as I waited for my wife to arrive. I thought about how we all struggle to work with others, live with others. And I thought about the world then and now.
How much had changed, I asked myself, since I’d started at my now-defunct job—in December of 2004, almost ten years ago? The obvious answer was that we didn’t have children or own a house. Pushing beyond those core facts, however, I realized that in 2004 there had been no Facebook or LinkedIn (for me, anyway) and I had only a vague grasp of Google. In a sense, back then I had no network.
Whether it’s shameful or impressive, here is a stone-cold reality about my professional life: aside from a couple of minor gigs in the early ’90s, one of them a temp situation for the holidays, I have never gotten a job through a connection. It’s always been applications, resumes, and cold calling. Well, I told myself, this time it’s going to be different. This time I have a tangible network and I’m going use it.
But as I’ve already admitted, that’s the tough part. So far my reaching out to friends has been a bit clumsy. Not everybody is reacting as openly or sympathetically as I’d hoped, which means that I’m probably not being as open or as sympathetic as I need to be. My wife always tells me that I should be more obvious. Don’t be subtle. Don’t be cryptic.
My wife. How did she react when I finally told her—after dinner, after all the kids were in bed—that I was out of job?
She was a trooper. She was beautiful. She was unreservedly there for me, and I was ashamed for having been so damn scared to break the news.
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