Commentaries by Cynthia

My first marriage was one of convenience. I was seventeen and pregnant and my parents thought it would be convenient if I was married to the baby’s father. So the nuptials took place in an outdoor ceremony on a lovely summer’s day in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Then, the following January, I gave birth to a healthy baby boy I named Bradley.

But financial stress and emotional immaturity quickly took its toll on a young marriage. When autumn rolled around, I called my parents and asked if I could return home. Perhaps feeling some guilt for enlisting me into a marriage that I obviously wasn’t ready for, my parents invited Bradley and me to move in with them.

We lived in rural North Carolina, Bible-belt country, so I found myself being the talk of the community, first for “getting into trouble” and “having to get married,” then for “up and leaving my husband.” Tuning out the gossip-mongers, I took a job at a textile plant, went to college part-time, and tried to be everything I thought a good mother should be.

Two years later, I was working as a bank teller and was planning to marry another local boy. And, no, I wasn’t pregnant when I walked down the aisle a second time. But I was in my early twenties and wanted desperately to have a family and home of my own. Bradley’s father had moved on and remarried, so it naturally seemed time for me to do the same. Seventeen months after saying “I do,” my daughter, Alisha, was born. And, for awhile, I couldn’t have been happier. After all, I had everything I wanted: a husband, a son, a daughter, and a three-bedroom, two-bath house only miles from my parents’.

Once the children were in grammar school, a growing discontent began to brew on the job front. So I approached my husband one evening as he worked on a malfunctioning computer that he’d placed on our kitchen table. “I’ve spent almost seven years as a bank teller,” I told him flatly. “And I’m sick of it. I want to do something else.”

“Like what?” he asked, sounding only mildly interested.

“I want to go to beauty school.”

“Beauty school? Why in the world would you want to do that?” He stopped tinkering with the computer. His arms were folded and he looked at me as though I were one of the kids in need of a stern fatherly lecture. “You like to write. Why don’t you try to get on at the newspaper office?”

“I’ve tried to get on there. It’s a family-owned business. Apparently, you can’t write for the paper unless you’re born into the family.”

He shook his head, still looking displeased. “So why don’t you try getting on at Buddy’s?” he said, referring to a chain of variety stores that housed its corporate offices in a nearby town.

“I’ve tried that, too,” I said. “And you have to know someone important to even get your foot in the door at Buddy’s.”

“I still don’t like this beauty school idea,” he said, frowning and turning his attention back to the computer on the table.

I reminded him that I hadn’t exactly liked that he had given up a good-paying office job with benefits so he could startup his own computer business. “But you wanted to do it,” I said. “So I supported you. Now it’s your turn to support me.”

He glanced at me angrily. “Somebody in this family is going to have to work somewhere that has health insurance!”

“Why does that somebody have to be me?” I turned on my heel and headed down the hallway to check on the children as they readied themselves for bed.

His voice followed me. “We’re not done talking about this.”

Indeed, we weren’t. We would continue arguing about it night after night. But, thanks to the support of my parents, a month later, I was an enrolled student at the Creative Academy of Hair Design.

It wasn’t easy juggling family, housework, a part-time job, and going to classes, but I eventually graduated from beauty school and began working as a hairdresser in a downtown salon. I enjoyed the job and my coworkers immensely. Just when one area in my life seemed to be going exceptionally well, I couldn’t help but notice that another area was taking a turn for the worse.

The older my son became, the less he and his stepfather got along. This placed me in the middle of their squabbles, and I often sided with my son because I resented the fact that that my husband tended to nit-pick Bradley while showing stark favoritism for our daughter. We were progressively becoming a dysfunctional family, made all the more so by my husband’s tendency to seek nightly solace by drinking.

As strained as things were, they were about to become even more difficult. I’d been working as a hairdresser for two years when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Spiraling into a deep depression that required counseling and medication, I watched helplessly as my mother withered away in intense pain. When the end came, as the doctors had predicted, I was brokenhearted and lost. What pulled me through were my coworkers and clients. They comforted me in a way my husband did not… or could not.

A year after my mother’s death, I suggested marriage counseling, but my husband wanted no part of it. Our verbal disagreements had escalated into yelling matches with physical displays of pushing and shoving. Wanting, above everything else, to live peacefully, I decided it was time to leave. My husband drew up the separation papers, and I signed them, leaving the house, the furniture, and three vehicles in his possession. We’d been married for eleven and a half years, and just like that, it was over. I was 31 and going through my second divorce. I swore to myself that I would never get married again.

It was important for me to be amicable during this time, so I accepted a meager settlement of $10,000 to end the marriage. No alimony or child support was offered, and I chose not to fight for either one. Somehow, someway, I knew I’d make it on my own as a single mother.

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Harry was one of my regular clients at the salon. He was also a vise-president at Buddy’s corporate offices, but you’d never know it to speak with him because he was a kind, gentle and incredibly modest person. Without disclosing my marital situation, I informed Harry that I needed another job -- one that provided a steady and predictable income with benefits. Harry told me to write a resume and he would submit it to human resources on my behalf. It suddenly looked as though I might get my foot in the door at Buddy’s, after all.

Over the next few months, I went in for several job interviews. When someone from human resources called and asked if I were willing to take a drug test, I said, “Of course,” and was told where to go and what time to be there. Then, in April of 1998, I was formally offered a position in the company’s travel department. I accepted the job with heart-felt gladness and enthusiasm.

And that, my dear friends, is how I wound up in Corporate America.