by Robin Romm
When I was fifteen, my mom and I were at a diner, and as usual, I was in charge of communicating with the waitress. She scowled as she took our order and then turned around and chatted gleefully with the white people sitting next to us. Enraged, I wrote a note on a napkin: “Mexicans are people too.” I now see that these kinds of experiences helped me develop my assertiveness. I learned to stand up for myself. I learned to get shit done.
People often ask me who my role models were growing up, and the truth is I didn’t have any except Lisa Simpson. True story. To me, Lisa was brilliant and utterly unafraid to be who she was. I loved the way she earnestly voiced her unpopular opinions about all sorts of subjects and issues: feminism, literature, animal rights, immigration. Sure, she was occasionally irritating and overzealous, but damn, she had gumption and integrity. Lisa was just about everything I wanted to be, and I related to her in ways that I didn’t even understand at the time. I saw myself in her when she ruined Homer’s barbecue by destroying his suckling pig in her quest to save the animals of the world. That’s exactly the kind of self-righteous shit I would have pulled when I was a teenager. Many years later during a therapy session, when comparing Lisa’s relationship to Homer with my relationship to my own father, I suddenly burst into tears. I couldn’t believe I was crying over a cartoon, but it made sense. My father loved me but had no idea who I was, and I, too, lacked the compassion and maturity to understand who he was.
Everyone in my family was incredibly hardworking, and I admire them for their resilience and generosity, but nobody, nobody, had the kind of life I wanted, particularly the women. My aunt, who worked at a candy factory, looked at my hands when I was a kid and told me I had manos de rica. It was true—they were smooth and soft rich lady hands. My mom, most of my aunts, and many of my cousins married young and had children soon after. In addition to all the cooking and cleaning, their jobs involved intense physical labor. Every day my mother came home to never-ending cooking and chores. Who could blame her for being perpetually tired and cranky? Her life seemed like a crushing burden. Her world revolved around us and the factory, and there was little room for anything else. She never did anything for herself, never had the luxury of time or money, didn’t even have hobbies or good friends to unwind with after work. When I was eight or so, I used her face cream thinking it was body lotion, and she was so angry and disappointed. “Why?” she wanted to know. “Why would you do such a thing?” At the time I had no idea why she was yelling at me over moisturizer, but now I understand that it was probably one of the few things she ever indulged in, and I had taken it away from her.
What did I want out of life? I sure as hell didn’t want to work in a factory. That was my parents’ worst nightmare. They didn’t cross the deadly Tijuana border for their kids to work like donkeys in this country. I know they would have been happy if we simply had white-collar jobs, it didn’t even matter what kind, but I always knew I wanted so much more than that—ridiculous, impossible things.
I certainly didn’t want to get married or have kids. Judging from what I saw in my family, children sucked all the fun out of life. Most of the women I knew seemed unhappy, so I fashioned together my dream life from various books and movies. If other women were financially independent, traveled alone, and went to college, why couldn’t I?
I got myself through college and graduate school on my own. One fall I couldn’t even afford to buy myself a coat. It was a shameful existence at times, but I had pulled through alone, and I was proud of that. After I received my master’s degree, I was stuck in corporate America for two grueling years until I was able to cobble together a living by tutoring at a local university and freelance writing for major publications like Cosmopolitan for Latinas, NBC Latino, Al Jazeera, and the Guardian. I was hustling and barely surviving; my income was downright embarrassing for an adult. Though I was successful in many ways, I felt financially disempowered. I was too old to be struggling like a college student. I’d been poor for most of my life, and I was tired. Accolades were nice, but I wanted my success to translate into cold hard cash in my little brown hands. I wanted the luxury of buying a pair of shoes without falling into a spiral of worry and guilt.
I got married the summer I turned thirty. During that time my writing garnered the attention of a public relations firm, and they offered me a full-time, salaried position as senior strategist. Much of my writing was focused on reproductive rights, which I’d been passionate about for many years, and it was more money than I had ever seen in my life. It was not my dream job by any means—I imagined I’d be a professor or famous writer at this age (ha!)—but I was excited to write about issues I cared about, and I was eager to be compensated for my knowledge and talent. Though I could still live in Chicago, the job would require me to frequently travel to New York. I had always been scrappy, however, and had traveled to many places on my own; I felt like I could do anything.
Nothing could have prepared me for my monumental unraveling.
After my first day, I went back to my work-provided apartment on the Upper West Side shaky and scared. That’s all I remember. Every night after, I woke up drenched in sweat. Sometimes I would meet friends after work and cry over dinner. Fortunately, we were in Manhattan and no one cared that a grown woman was weeping into her kung pao chicken. The man walking down the street with a cat perched on his head and the drunk woman stumbling around in fishnet panties were much more interesting.
When I returned home from New York the second time, I began to lose my mind. It was as if some wires got crossed in my brain. I panicked. I was suddenly so tense that I forgot to breathe at a normal pace. “I don’t know how to breathe anymore,” I told my husband.
This is when I found my saintly therapist, who helped me uncover the childhood anguish I had so carefully compartmentalized and buried deep inside my psyche. I’ve always been introspective, often to an unhealthy degree, but some memories I had unconsciously obscured just so I could go on living my life without shattering. Suddenly, however, I had a flood of flashbacks that unmoored me.
The most appalling component of my shiny new job was a time-tracking system called Time Task. Essentially, we were all required to account for every minute of the day. If I switched tasks—say, from a press release to discussing another client with a coworker—I was expected to stop the timer that kept track of my work on that project and begin a new one to record the length of my conversation about the other client. Our timers were supposed to run all day so management could keep tabs on what we were doing. Multitasking became excruciating because every stupid task had to be documented. We were required to write a description for everything we did throughout the day, and when we left, we had to account for about eight hours of work. If your time didn’t add up, if there were any gaps, there was going to be trouble.
Not only was Time Task humiliating, it triggered episodes of severe anxiety for me. I couldn’t sleep. I lost weight. I cried in the bathroom. I secretly took antianxiety drugs from my husband just to get through the day. I had fought so hard to create the kind of life I wanted for myself—a life of art, freedom, adventure, and social justice—and now I was stuck at a job that controlled my every move. It scared me. Though my white-collar job paid far beyond my parents’ meager factory wages, I was, in some ways, treated like they were—my boss was exacting and condescending, and I was expected to crank out writing as if I were a machine. I was consistently required to produce complex writing products in unreasonable amounts of time, which would fill me with panic. Once, my boss scolded me in front of another coworker for taking notes during a meeting. Another time she forced me to revise a six-hundred-word document eleven times, which amounted to about nine hours of work. And when she made mistakes, she would blame others and expect us to rectify them. She remains the worst person I’ve ever met, an impressive title considering how many assholes I’ve come across throughout the years.
When I described the office culture and working conditions to a friend of mine, she ver
y accurately called my job a sweatshop of the mind. I had never felt so devalued and disrespected in my entire adult life.
I’ve been a perfectionist since I was a child. Once in kindergarten I made a Christmas tree that involved gluing cereal loops together to make the garland. I didn’t like how my tree had turned out—I’d used too much glue, and it was too messy for my taste. I asked my large and sour-faced teacher for the opportunity to start over, but she refused. Though she insisted that it looked fine, I was so ashamed of my shitty artwork that I cried inconsolably. My teacher called my dad and forced him to pick me up.
Because I always understood that I wasn’t what my parents, culture, or community expected, that I was, in many ways, a disappointment, I cultivated incredibly high standards for myself. I studied hard and worked on my poetry for hours at a time, fixated on finding the perfect words. Years later in college, I realized that I had to work harder than my white classmates because people automatically thought I was less intelligent. People like me were not expected to succeed.
My grades were excellent until my depression worsened, and I eventually became suicidal at the age of fifteen. By then I really started to feel that my life, and even my body, were not my own. Even when I tried to conform, because being who I was caused so many problems, I just couldn’t do it. My sadness grew more severe, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. I was convinced the world would never allow me to be who I was.
I had trouble functioning several weeks into the new job. I couldn’t pry myself off my couch and would often sleep to escape the turmoil of my brain. I kept my family at a distance because I didn’t want to alarm them, and I rarely socialized with friends because the mere thought of talking to people exhausted me. I had just married my boyfriend a few months before, and our marriage was already beginning to unfurl. It was one of the loneliest times of my life.
My hypercritical boss and the time-tracking system stirred up my issues with authority and control. I resented the shit out of the situation because it reminded me of being a child. My environment, once again, wanted me to conform.
Fifteen years after my first suicidal episode, here I was wanting to die again. I thought my writing was going to give me the freedom to be whatever I wanted, to live the life I had imagined for myself when I was a girl. But it was just another kind of trap. How could I get out?
I finally understood that until I addressed all the underlying problems in my life—my constant need for validation, the depression I’d left untreated for years, my issues with my family—no amount of achievement was going to make me happy, and this kind of work environment would cause me debilitating anxiety. I tried first to negotiate a better work situation for myself, only to be offered a less advantageous setup. One evening I unleashed all of my frustration and disappointment in an epic phone call with my boss. I paced around my apartment and outlined all the ways in which their family business was completely fucked up. It felt amazing, the kind of thing you fantasize about but never do. Still, quitting felt like a failure. I saw myself as strong and independent, a woman who spoke her mind, but I simultaneously hated myself. Who the hell do you think you are? I asked myself over and over again. After what my parents survived to raise us, my inability to handle an office job, no matter how loathsome, felt shameful.
I was afraid to tell my mother that I had quit the highest paying job I’d ever had, but when I did, she was relieved rather than disappointed. She had seen the toll it had taken on my mental health and was worried I would relapse. “Tu si eres chingona,” my mother said to me when I shared the news. It’s only now that I can see the irony of her compliment: chingona, a badass bitch—literally, a woman who fucks. I had defied her attempts to shelter me, and she had somehow learned to admire that. I finally understood that I’d never be a failure to my mother. We spent so many years bickering and misunderstanding each other that I hadn’t realized how proud of me she had become.
A few weeks after I left my job, an international organization I’d previously worked with offered me a consulting project in Trinidad. I was sent there to write a report on cervical cancer prevention and interview low-income women benefiting from the lifesaving procedure. I was being paid to travel and write about a feminist issue I cared about; it was one of the most exciting opportunities in my life.
As I stood in the passport line waiting to enter the country, I reflected that only weeks ago I was sobbing on my couch, wanting to die, unable to leave my apartment. And now here I was in a foreign land, not only functioning but also exhilarated by my circumstances, by the life I was able to painstakingly build and rebuild. I was mobile and independent, privileged to make choices my mother could never even fathom. When she crossed that border thirty-eight years ago, she was giving me permission to cross my own.
Both
YAEL CHATAV SCHONBRUN
The moderate knows she cannot have it all. There are tensions between rival goods, and you just have to accept that you will never get to live a pure and perfect life, devoted to one truth or one value.
—DAVID BROOKS, The Road to Character
My two-year-old son announces that he wants to tell me a secret. The secret, “Bonky bonky,” is loud and wet. We both giggle, and I kiss his round belly as I lift him from his car seat. But as we enter the door of the family day care where he spends three days each week, his grasp tightens and his smile evaporates. He attempts to merge his body with mine, to delay the breakup he knows is coming. I disentangle from his embrace and place him on the ground; he tries to climb back up. I break his grip as Jeannie, his day care provider, picks him up and tries to distract him. Wise to attempts to break his focus, he twists his neck to maintain eye contact with me and begins to wail.
Even as I feel the tug toward him, I am eager to disconnect and begin the non-mother part of my day. I’m either a modern woman admirably committed to my career at all costs, or a failing mother who regularly sheds her maternal responsibilities in favor of her own, self-interested objectives. Perhaps I’m both.
On the morning of this particular Tuesday drop-off, I’m headed to the university-affiliated psychiatric hospital where I’ve conducted my research for the better part of the past decade. I welcome the fifty miles that separate my ambitious self from my nurturing self. My gig as a clinical psychologist and research faculty in the medical school of an Ivy League university requires a fundamentally different set of skills than those of mother: stoicism in the face of a relentless barrage of criticism (also known as the peer review process), the ability to sustain logic and high-level reasoning through complex arguments, and a persistent focus on pursuing the next achievement. Truth be told, I’m not close to a perfect ten on any of these traits to begin with, and magnifying my shortcomings is the fact that I spend much of the traditional workweek mothering my two- and five-year-old boys. I rely on the long drive to sharpen the softer edges of maternal me.
I turn “Animal Alphabet Songs” off, switch to NPR, and sip my coffee. I’m feeling more scholarly already. My two-year-old is probably having a great time, and I’m set to have a productive day using my brain to accomplish tasks for which I have spent my adult life training.
While the mother me exists largely in the private world of my home, my professional self has the opportunity to achieve and contribute in a manner that is widely and publicly respected. A day of outstanding parenting, whether that involves staying calm through multiple tantrums or consciously relishing the sight of my two boys racing through the kitchen in superhero capes will bring no accolades. I’m ok with this, because even as it’s hard to quantify the meaning of those seemingly insignificant moments, it is those moments that make for a connected and fulfilling life. And yet, I find vast meaning and fulfillment in my professional life. My work as a researcher aims to increase knowledge of how to treat underserved individuals, and my role as a therapist can bring healing into the lives of individuals who are in significant pain. And the less magnanimous part exists for me, as well: the more tangible reward
s of professional life—accomplishment, income, recognition—are hard to relinquish. So I haven’t.
I tune in to my mental to-do list as I head in to my office. In addition to the ever-present pressure to get moving on scientific papers—the one currently on my docket examines predictors of involvement in sex trading among hazardously drinking jailed women—I have several meetings to squeeze in today. Once in my office, I set up my laptop and get to work on the paper. I’m in a satisfying groove when I realize I’m late to meet a research assistant. I email an “early draft” to my coauthors, some of whom I will be meeting with shortly, explaining that my hope is to have a complete draft available to them the following week.
After a quick update from the research assistant, I’m off to a team meeting in my colleague Linda’s office. Linda is a senior professor and researcher. Known for her wide-reaching contributions to psychotherapy and pharmacologic treatment of substance use disorders, Linda is something of a rock star in the world of addictions research. She is impressively successful in the currencies of the academic trade: securing large grants, publishing in top-tier journals, and knowing who to know among the top academic dogs. I am the first one to get to the meeting, so we have a few minutes to chat.
“I read what you sent,” she tells me. (How in the world did she have time?) “Why do you think this paper is taking you so long to complete?” I mourn her disinterest in the value of conversational pleasantries as a pink flush climbs up my neck and into my cheeks.
“This topic is a whole new literature for me . . . I have so few hours every week to work. . . . There were so many school closings this winter. . . . The results kept changing because the data aren’t well suited for the questions we decided to try to answer. . . .”