My Worst Day As A Mother

Through a series of circumstances, my two children ended up three and a half years apart.  This was a good thing.  My son was old enough to understand that a new baby was coming, but not so young that he felt threatened by a sibling.  He loved to put his hand on my stomach and feel his sister dancing.  By report he was a very proud brother, bragging to all his friends at pre-school that he was getting a new baby.  One day he announced to us at dinner:  Mommy has a baby in her tummy; her name is Emily.  And I have a baby in my tummy; his name is. . . Benjamin!

                    

Thus, we prepared for two arrivals. Our son watched us feather the next for his new baby sister. We painted the room next to his to resemble Pepto Bismol, filling it with flowery fabrics and a matching pink rug.  He continued to plan for the arrival of Benjamin—whatever that meant inside his three-year-old head.

As we drew closer to the day in question we began making arrangements.  One of my husband’s colleagues lived near the hospital where I was to deliver.  He suggested that we bring our son to stay with his family when I went into labor. Our kids were close friends and our son was familiar with their house, so this seemed like a good plan. We began preparing our son for the inevitable chain of events.  We discussed with him that when it was time for the new baby to come, Mommy would go to the hospital and he would go to Allie’s house.  Together, we packed a little suitcase with a change of clothes, some pajamas, a toothbrush, and his favorite bedtime companion—a trusty stuffed gorilla.  Unbeknownst to him, we also purchased a little blue-clad baby doll, which we hid in the trunk of the car wrapped in his old receiving blanket.  This would be ‘Benjamin.’

October arrived.  The Atlanta Braves held on to their lead in the pennant race, and ‘Emily’ flatly refused to be born.  The Braves clinched the pennant and still, no baby.  Finally, I decided to try inducing labor by attending the opening game of the World Series.  The guards had to open a special gate for me because I could no longer fit through the turnstile.  “When are you due?” they asked nervously.  “Ten days ago,” I announced proudly to their concerned looks.  I spent the entire game walking up and down the aisles of the now demolished Fulton County stadium; I jumped up and down for Atlanta’s 3-1 victory over the Blue Jays.

The next morning it seemed as if labor was finally going to start.  We called our generous friends, giving them a ‘heads up’ that we would be heading to the hospital soon.  They had plans to attend a kid’s birthday party.  They suggested that we drop off our son early so he could attend the party with them.

The three of us had brunch together--our last day as the small family I had loved so much for three and a half years.  Soon we would be adding a new member, changing forever the dynamics of our sweet threesome.  After brunch, we gathered up our son and explained:  “Your new sister is finally coming. Let’s get your suitcase so you can go to Allie’s house.”  Obediently, our son brought his tiny suitcase downstairs.  We piled into the car and headed to Allie’s house.

When we arrived, Allie and her parents came running out to greet our son.  Once out of the car, we began our goodbyes, handing off the tiny suitcase to our friends.  Suddenly my son wrapped himself around my leg and would not let go.  He started to scream and sob uncontrollably, finally forming the words:  “I don’t want to live with Allie!”

It took a few seconds to register:  first shock, then understanding.  With all the preparation, we had not realized the message we were conveying to our little man.  Children, we learned, hear exactly what you tell them.  “When the baby comes, Mommy will go to the hospital and you will go to Allie’s house.”  Our beautiful son believed we were replacing him with a new child.  He was clinging to me with all his might because he did not want to be given away!

We burst out laughing, but then I realized the pain that overflowed this vulnerable child.  I broke into tears, picked up my son, and planted kisses all over him.  It took us a long while to calm him down and erase his fears.  We tried to do a better job of explaining that he was just going to play at Allie’s house until we could come back and pick him up.  As it turned out, labor stopped, so we were back sooner than expected.

That night was Game 2 of the World Series.  I elected to stay home with my son, sending my husband to the game with a friend.  Emotionally spent, my brave little boy fell asleep on my lap while I stroked his blonde hair.  It was the last time I remember experiencing a true calm in my life, the two of us together in a quiet house while the Braves battled through a tough game.  With the final crack of a bat, Terry Pendleton popped out to third and I went into hard labor.  Rather than repeat the fiasco of that morning, I called my brother after midnight asking him to stay with my sleeping angel while my husband and I headed for the hospital.

The next day, my son came to visit me and his new baby sister in the hospital.  I made a point of telling him how much we couldn’t wait to come home to him and be a family together.  When we did, a swaddled Benjamin came home as well.  My son had moved on from his fear that we would give him away, but it was a long time until I stopped seeing that petrified look on this face.  I have never forgiven myself for causing him to experience that kind of fear.

Today my son goes to college three thousand miles away.  Now twenty-two, he likes to remind me that he is an adult (usually by ordering a beer at dinner).  To me, however, he is still that little boy asleep in my lap. I continue to clean his room and prepare his favorite dishes so that he feels safe in the knowledge that he is an indispensable member of our family.

Tomorrow's blog:  In Praise of Ira and Marshall

Grammar or Not, Here I Come

An unexpected consequence of writing a daily blog is how much I have been stymied by basic grammatical dilemmas.  After all, I have former teachers, classmates, colleagues, bosses, clients—all of them, thankfully, now friends—following my journey.  By some standards I am woefully over-educated.  This adds an element of stress to my task, as I am aware of you mischief makers out there who are racking up a score sheet of errant commas, mixed metaphors, and misuse of the passive voice simply for the joy of rubbing my nose in it.  While I do care what you all think—and I dearly hope that these little epistles provoke discussion and promote happiness—I confess that grammatical perfection is far from the top of my agenda.

There are, however, three notable exceptions.  It’s funny that I have become fixated on just three, as no doubt the grammar police would cite me for other crimes and misdemeanors to the English language.  For example, I have particular difficulty choosing a natural sequence for my prepositional phrases; I have wished longingly for a foolproof English companion to arithmetic's “order of operations”.  I have made a concerted effort to go “freestyle”—that is, writing in a conversational narrative that is more akin to the way I speak than the way William Safire (or William Shakespeare) would have me write.  Nonetheless, I have sworn vigilance in the prevention of these three common errors of grammar and usage: split infinitives, misused gerunds, and using ‘data’ as a singular noun.

Splitting an infinitive means to sloppily insert an adverb between a verb and its preceding ‘to’—as I have demonstrated in this sentence.  In Latin, infinitives are a single word, which led English scholars originally to insist on keeping the two words together.   This has raised controversy more recently; the late, venerable Mr. Safire himself ruled it a breakable rule “when it helps the reader to better understand my point.”  Most people do not notice when infinitives are split, as it is common in America to stress our adverbs.  If you think about it, however, the verb is the power broker in our language.  An improperly inserted adverb steals the power from the verb and derails the sentence, thus turning it into the equivalent of a teenage drama queen: inactive yet superfluously modified.  I have discovered that split infinitives are commonly solved by eliminating the adverb entirely rather than moving it elsewhere in the sentence.  This is a game I have taught my kids.  When you remove the extraneous word and restore authority to the verb, often you find that the sentence is improved without it.

An even more abused verb form is the gerund.  A gerund is when a verb is turned into a noun by adding “ing” to it.  As such, a personal pronoun that precedes it must take the possessive form: my, his, her, their, our, its.  Nearly every author and every television character seems oblivious to this rule.  For example, the other night on television a teenager asked, “Are you bothered by me going to college?”  This sounds fine to some people's ears.  I taught my children a simple trick to use gerunds correctly.  Since a gerund is a noun, try substituting the word ‘hat’ to determine the correct pronoun to use.  This example would be: “Are you bothered by my hat?”  It becomes easier to understand why the pronoun in the original example must be the possessive ‘my’ rather than ‘me’.  My children have become so adept at pronoun-busting gerunds in print that they use a special colored highlighter when they read just to count gerund abuses.  They also developed the practice of bringing home notices and letters from school only after circling and mocking the frequent gerund errors of their teachers.  It sounds like I have created pedantic monsters, but it is surprising how empowering this one trick has been to them.

The final of my pet peeves is the use of ‘data’ as a singular noun.  Let us not beat around the bush here.  ‘Data’ is plural.  The only time it is acceptable to say ‘data is’ is when you are talking about the word itself, as I have done in the previous sentence.  This starts to sound a little bit like Forrest Gump (data is as data are!), but it is nonetheless an absolute, unbreakable rule.  At one point in my career, I stirred the ire of a particular marketing director who claimed editorial control over something I had written for publication that made liberal use of the phrase ‘data are’.  She changed each use to 'data is', then I re-edited it to change them all back to plural.  She cited an article saying that through common usage (misusage, I protested!) it had become acceptable in modern vernacular to use data as singular.  I argued that although misuse may have made it acceptable to use ‘data’ incorrectly, that it did not render the correct plural usage unacceptable.  She was incapable of following this logic; she only insisted it was not wrong to say ‘data is’ and that my plural usage was archaic.  Well, this is my blog and she is still wrong.  If that isn’t enough, the entire scientific community will back me up.

In the greater scheme of things, considering war and politics and the economy, grammar and usage seem like trivial details upon which to fixate.  I lump these into a category with hand-written letters and thank-you notes; they are no longer essential but they certainly are lovely when you get them.  I started this rant admitting that I am not particularly attentive to grammatical perfection.  When I consider, however, that the development of language is a hallmark of civilization, it pains me to see us destroy and subvert it as much as we do.  It is like watching the desecration a holy relic or the toppling of an enduring monument.  Today, I am sometimes amused by the slang and text strings my kids throw around.  I am not above using them myself—particularly for the amusement or horror of my kids while LMFAO.  There is comfort in preserving a certain standard in our language, however ethereal it may be.  Perhaps I am just an old fart refusing to be made obsolete by a few tweets.  Perhaps I am nostalgic for a simpler time.  Or perhaps our language, with all its quirks, is worth holding on to simply because it reflects something basic to our humanity.

Tomorrow's blog:  My Worst Day as a Mother

When The Mathematician Had No Clothes

There are very few moments in life when you are witness to your own metamorphosis as a human being.  I can count very few:  a near-fatal car crash, the births of my children, watching a plane hit a tower on live television.  One such moment occurred while completing an internship with the president of a major teaching hospital.  This comes to mind because I ran into the man recently having not seen him for nearly thirty years.  Although I count him as one of the most important mentors and inspirations in my life, to him I was a distant memory. 

I came to this prominent hospital leader to conduct important research in length-of-stay.  I was a shy student, not at all confident in my abilities, my knowledge, or my experience.  It was a testament to his dedication as a leader that he not only tolerated me, but also took the time to explain hospital dynamics and expose me to the politics of Board meetings, confidential discussions of hospital issues, and his true opinions of the people around him.

It was pre-managed care.  The golden age in the healthcare industry was waning and cost-based reimbursement would soon come to an end.   DRGs were on the horizon; our State devised a complicated reimbursement formula to win an exemption from Medicare DRGs, at least until the next election cycle.   The final phase of my work was to project this legislation's financial impact on the hospital. 

It is an understatement to say that no one had high expectations for the work I was doing.  The tricky reimbursement formulas—designed by a top mathematician—had been vetted to death in public forums.  Most of my professors had reaped large consulting fees for advising either the Rate Setting Commission or the dozens of hospitals across the state about what would happen next.  Hospital executives were fearful about planned expansions and construction projects already in progress; visions of bankruptcy loomed large.  Dutifully and well under the radar I ran the numbers of my analysis, merging the cost behavior analysis I had learned in class with the newly published reimbursement guidelines.  Nothing was adding up as advertised.

The new State "all-payor system" was designed to offer incentives for hospitals to reduce inpatient volume and to shift care into lower-cost outpatient settings.  Accordingly, the payment system punished hospitals for volume increases by reimbursing less than the full average cost per day.  My analysis took exploited true cost behaviors, showing that costs for certain types of care were “front loaded” during the patient’s stay, thus creating a mismatch between cost savings and payment adjustments. A full occupancy hospital could increase patient volume to the extent that they could lower length of stay.  Although not reimbursed at full cost,  payment for volume increases was favorable at the margin. The punch line is that despite its intentions, the legislation actually offered a bigger incentive to increase, rather than decrease, inpatient volume.

I called my mentor’s secretary to make an appointment so I could share my findings.  He was in closed door meetings for the foreseeable future, as the hospital was bracing against the threatening impact of the impending legislation.  I happened to see a poster by the elevator at school announcing an upcoming roundtable discussion where all the local hospital presidents would appear on a panel to discuss how their hospitals were preparing for the future.  As a special guest, the mathematician who was architect of the plan would describe his formula.  I decided to ambush my mentor at this event.

I fidgeted through the lengthy event.  The mood in the hall was somber as each administrator described the belt tightening that needed to take place.  The presentation by the famed mathematician only reinforced what I already knew.  Finally, the crowd began to disperse and I cornered my mentor.

“I must talk to you immediately about what I’ve found,” I said, now breathless with anticipation. 

“You make it sound like you’ve solved all the problems of the universe!” he chuckled, half-mocking me.

“A lot closer than you may think,” I answered.  “I need you to see this before I show it to anyone else—especially my professors.”

“OK,” he laughed.  “Meet me at 7am in my office and we’ll see what you’ve got.”  I went away satisfied, but in no way convinced that he was really taking me seriously. 

The next morning I arrived with a single page of typed notes clipped to a twelve-inch-thick stack of worksheets.  I had run the numbers so many times I no longer needed the cheat sheet.  Without prompting, I went straight to the flip chart and began listing key assumptions.  The formulas were so complex that I used a simple representative department as a model, extrapolating results to other areas.  In the end, on a single piece of paper, I demonstrated that an anticipated loss to the hospital could instead be a gain ten times greater—by doing the opposite of the conventional wisdom.

He asked only one question: “How is it possible that the greatest minds in the State have been debating this for months and no one saw this?”  “Well,” I answered, searching for an answer, “the architect of the formula is a mathematician.  He sees all costs as equal; he does not understand what accountants know about cost behavior.”

Without another word he picked up the phone, ordering his secretary to summon the Finance Committee of the Board of Directors to his office for the next morning.  I asked what I could do for him to prepare him for the meeting.  “Me?” he asked, surprised.  “I have no intention of presenting this.  It’s your work.  You will present it.”

“I can’t present it,” I said, visibly terrified. 

“Sit down,” he said, gesturing to the chair where I normally sat at our weekly meetings, thus reducing me from prophet back to my actual student size.  “Always remember this.  You know far more about this topic than anyone else in the room.  In fact, at this moment, there is no one in the world who knows what you know about this.  Why would you be afraid of them when they are ignorant and you are the expert?”

In that one moment by that single statement, this man changed my life forever.  To many who read this story, I am perceived as commanding and convincing in front of a room.  In fact, this confident stance was a priceless gift bestowed that day by my mentor.  Through his patience and generosity he taught me the power of being secure in my knowledge and convictions.  The young lady who left his office was just slightly taller than the one who tiptoed in. 

A few weeks later, my distinguished mentor sat behind me as I presented my resulting thesis to the faculty. It set the school buzzing.  The sector was hungry for analysis; it was a great time to be emerging into the healthcare market with a shiny new graduate degree.  I accepted a job with the same authority that built and administered the State all-payor system. When it came time for the legislature to renew the contract, it was passed unchanged with one exception—the flawed volume incentive calculations were quietly removed.

We live in a world of information excess, instant gratification, and quick fixes.  It is easy to get caught up in the tide.  Every once in a while I like to remind my children to trust in themselves and what they know to be true.  In the end, the stock you build in yourself is the only investment that never loses value.


Tomorrow's blog:  Grammar or Not, Here I Come

Does All That Math Add Up?

My children, despite their many strengths and talents, both struggled painfully with math.  I confess I have never been a fan of math, but as the daughter of an engineer I was never given the opportunity to get in touch with my feelings about it.  One simply learned the basics of math through whatever means necessary.  It was a matter of survival; unlike English or History, my father took proprietary interest in my mathematical literacy.   I learned to adapt through my own brand of memorization and pattern recognition, thinking of problems as games. I related to math in a competitive vein—deriving enjoyment from being right.   Before I knew it I was a certified math geek, completing two years of calculus in high school.  I drank the Kool-Aid, so to speak, buying into the propaganda that math was the foundation of all other learning.

Now that I’ve outed my kids I must be fair; they were each competent enough at math to fulfill all the state and standardized exam requirements.  Whether or not they possess the math gene, through their dedicated work ethics they prevailed at meeting their academic goals so far.  But the road was not an easy one.  This wreaked havoc with my golden rule of parenting:  never teach your children to drive, play the piano, or do math.  It’s not that I haven’t instilled a sense of the importance of each of these things.  I insist on the highest standards in each of these disciplines, but as each is a relative commodity, it seemed advisable to me to avoid these mine-filled battlegrounds.  The relationship between parent and child is challenging enough without adding math to the equation.

My solution was simple:  delegate math mentoring to a qualified surrogate.  This worked well most of the time.  One year, when my son was studying Algebra 2, we had a period of time when math tutors were particularly hard to procure.  With midterms approaching, I had no choice but to step in and play the role I dread most.  At the mid-year parent-teacher conference I mentioned to his teacher that I was currently working with him.  Much to my surprise, the teacher’s temper flared up immediately.  “What gives you the right to teach him math?” he said somewhat aggressively, leaning over the desk that, fortunately, separated us.  “Uh,” I said, uncharacteristically sheepish, as his instant hostility caught me off guard, “it’s not rocket science—it’s algebra.”  He shot back, “But this isn’t your ordinary Mom stuff!”  “Well,” I countered, regaining my footing, “I’m not your ordinary Mom!”

Discretion being the better part of blog etiquette, suffice it to say that the teacher and I agreed to disagree on almost everything except that ‘i’ is the square root of -1.  The math teacher and I never spoke again.  Math remained a troubling presence in our household.  Whether or not I was responsible for my kids’ tutelage, I still had a vested interested in my kid’s success.  So for their sake I did my best to maintain high morale around anything math-related. 

Inevitably, my kids would raise the classic why-do-we-need-math-anyway debates.  In the early years, it was easy to dazzle young children with answers they could barely comprehend, like balancing a checkbook, managing investments, comparison shopping, or calculating the deductions on a paycheck.  After all, if you do not take the time to count your change or review your credit card statements you become a certain type of victim of society.  Last year, for example, I found no less than eleven inaccurate, duplicate or over-charges on my American Express bill totaling close to three thousand dollars.

Consumer awareness aside, I thought it was valid to consider just how much we really use the full force of the math spectrum we learned in school.  For my career, math was an important stepping stone to other disciplines.  Without certain basics it would have been difficult to grasp the economic concepts I learned in graduate school.  One cannot comprehend shifting curves or traveling along a curve without first understanding how a graphed curve reflects the interplay of two variables.  Nor could I have survived biostatistics class where we learned how to find the slope of that enigmatic line that flies inexplicably through the scatter plot of random points. 

Early in my career, I set out to do more qualitative rather than quantitative work in the healthcare industry, yet I found myself continuously drawn to the financial side of organizations.  Faced with opportunities in operations versus those in reimbursement and finance, I discovered that the numbers were more intuitive to me than the people.  I felt more confident making decisions around hard data.  Hospitals face the interplay of so many variables:  labor, quality standards, patient acuity, regulations.   There are always classic debates over whose patients are sicker, what will the government pay for, what brings better outcomes, how to improve productivity, and what factors increase risk.  Each is difficult to examine and adjudicate at face value.  Each can be solved with quantitative models. 

Later, as I left hospitals for industry, I continued to borrow from my mathematical and financial toolkit to argue everything from product design to strategic direction.  In my subsequent consulting practice, which focuses on marketing, messaging and strategic planning, I frequently find myself framing discussions in quantitative terms.  That being said, the last time I calculated a derivative or integral was in my college calculus final exam.   The last time I used the quadratic equation was to show my kids how to use it to solve problems on their homework. Today, I use tangents only to digress off topic at Starbucks, not to touch a point on a curve.

After considering my mathematical journey, I must admit that math is all it’s cracked up to be.  My kids will have to persevere, making friends with their greatest demon.  Perhaps I made a mistake as a parent not beating my kids over the head with mathematical principals while they were still in diapers.  I hope my kids did not suffer because I chose to forego the nightly math competition that my own family had over dinner.   When the rigors of learning math seem beyond relevant, I hope they will think of math class much like a medicine ball.   You need to push beyond what you use every day to develop the mental muscles that allow you to think with facility and ease in your own problem space. 

The Pentameter Parameter

Inquiring minds wondered whether it takes longer to write a 1000-word essay or a Shakespearean sonnet.  Hence this post, written in iambic pentameter:

So Shallow Network

When Facebook pushed its social network out,
The online world was one big catalogue,
Yet now we 'friend' and 'poke' and 'text' about
While any Joe-blow hack can have a 'blog'!
But what of children born to such a fate,
Embracing realms where writers never 'write'--
Will they be taught to miscommunicate,
Or change the currency to megabyte?
Computer chips enrich the common tool,
Put integrated features in our hand;
We still must teach our kids The Golden Rule,
Ensuring social graces on demand.
The world would be a very frightening place,
If you and I could not speak face to face.


Tomorrow's blog:  Does All That Math Add Up?

Time Traveler

For many years, I traveled regularly for my job.  It was not unusual to be on the road three or four days in a week.  Ironically, one of the factors that dissuaded me from pursuing a career as a pianist is that I couldn’t envision myself living in hotel rooms out of a suitcase.  While still in high school I became acquainted with a rising star who had just won a prestigious national piano competition.  On his victory tour, I had the chance to visit with him when he performed in my home town.  Here he was, at the peak of his fame—hailed as the next great American pianist—and he was already bemoaning the travel.  He complained that the hotel food sucked and that his socks were musty.  So much for the glamorous life of a star.

I have thought of this man often over the years as I donned my business suit and medium-heeled pumps and headed for the airport.   Whereas I feared travel in the career I didn’t pursue, I never minded it in the one in which I landed.  My work was a mission, a calling, a quest; the travel was merely a means to an end.  I attained Delta “Million Miler” status in just eight years.

The key to travel in those days was good planning.  After a few tries, it was possible to streamline your necessities to the point where you never really unpacked.  Two dark suit--one grey and one navy--meant that you could travel in one while the other was at the cleaners.  Silk T-shirts, in a variety of colors, gave you a new outfit for each day, especially with a few well-chosen, easy-to-pack accessories.  My one spatial splurge was my hair dryer—a clunky necessity for one born with terminally frizzy hair.  I even debunked the airport, claiming for myself a convenient parking spot as if it were an endowed chair.

Technology, however, was a big problem in those days.   There were no laptops or internet connections.  We carried “portable” computers, modems, and a bulky screen projector.  You could not rely on the client’s having up-to-date or compatible equipment onsite.  We lived in constant fear that the magnetic media would become erased or corrupted.  I would carry extra program and data disks in my bag and sometimes mail myself a copy at my destination.

Thank goodness, technology has come a long way.  I am writing this now on an airplane with a slim laptop that not only connects wirelessly to the universe, but also slips into my purse.  The power to access a portfolio of applications on demand and on a convenient portable platform is ubiquitous.  My college-age children now carry more computing power on their phones than we carried around in large cases when they were just infants.  And because this level of technology is more or less standard now, we can bank on having connectivity and compatibility at nearly every destination.

Instead of the business traveler’s reaping the rewards of these technologies, enabling a more pleasant and streamlined experience for the economic road warrior, our lifestyle gain was negated by the terrorist threat.  Our shortcuts have been undone. The duplicate toiletries I kept pre-packed have been replaced by small 1.7 ounce bottles that last only a few days if they don’t leak.  The time savings I was able to engineer out of the pre-airport song and dance has been replaced by a lengthy and invasive security screening process.  My go-to parking spot vanished, having been ruled too close to the airport for comfort.  The airplane meals are gone completely. Although terrible at best, they once provided enough sustenance to permit a tight connection between a client meeting and a late flight home without needing to stop for a meal.

Does anyone still remember the good old days, when travel used to be a bit of an extravagance?  Putting on your travel clothes meant dressing in a smart outfit, not baggy sweats and Uggs.  We would spend days planning the wardrobe, counting out each day’s clothes and folding them neatly until they appeared almost new.  If we were lucky, we would require new clothes for a trip, as our everyday wear would be deemed too ratty and inappropriate for something as special as travel.

Today when I travel I get a distinctly different blast from the past.  We are herded, much like livestock, into long lines to await individual scrutiny of our papers.  We arrive at a station where we remove our shoes, our valuables, and much of our clothing.  We are searched.  Our belongings are inspected, some chosen at random for closer examination.  We are sized up, some of us sent one way while others are singled out for their specific physical attributes.  We wait in a holding area until we are packed, unable to move, into a small space for transport.

Fortunately, many are discovering that technology helps them travel far less frequently.  This is a good thing, because while technology is striving to make our lives better, human beings just can’t help but mess things up.

And now for something completely different, tomorrow's blog:  So Shallow Network

My Trip to Mars

I was born in the late 1950s, the only daughter of an only daughter, and the only grand-daughter among a sizeable stable of grandkids crossing both sides of the family and spanning over two decades.    I was raised in a male dominated world within a male dominated world.  As the sole female child, I was taught to sew and cook.  I was required to make the salad and set the table each evening.  I did a large share of dusting and vacuuming.  I think my brothers were probably never asked to fold my father’s boxers.

Suffice it to say, I was not weaned on a diet of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.  I was groomed, as was the custom, to be girlie, ladylike, and submissive.  My father liked to instruct me in his preferences (he didn’t like limp lettuce in his salad, for example) admonishing me that learning to please a man was important.  Ouch.

At some point, the screaming voice in my head became deafening.  I heeded its call and followed my own path.  This involved an education, a career, and adopting an assortment of powerful female role models.  By the 70s I learned that women were at least as smart as their male counterparts.  By the 80s I discovered that although it was challenging, a career and motherhood could be integrated into a workable lifestyle.  By the nineties I recognized that expertise conveyed a brand of power that was capable of penetrating the old boys’ network.

During our generation, women scored a lot of “firsts” in the fields of business, education, politics, science and technology, not to mention traditional taboo fields such as the military and the clergy.  Each of us was aware that we were trailblazers in some way.  I met a lot of fabulous women armed to the hilt with brains, determination, talent, and chutzpah. 

As we of "the fairer sex" collaborated to change forever the role and perception of women, there was just one problem:  the men didn’t get the memo.  I was excited to be recruited to work at a large corporation, hungry to affect positive change on a large scale in an industry that was changing rapidly and financially regulated.  But they were not ready for me.

I should have known what I had gotten myself into when the big guy from corporate called me ‘honey.’  Determined not to be one of “those women,” who inadvertently rub their colleagues’ noses in their femaleness by whining too often about sexism, I vowed to make gender a non-issue.  I was determined to be seen on the merits of my work, not judged as either a typical female or an exception to the rule.  Refusing to play the game, I kept my head down and did my job. 

Eventually, I decided to start a family, soon becoming pregnant with my first child.  During my maternity leave my position was transferred to a new manager.  He made no provisions to give me my annual increase because he assumed I would not return to work.  He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’ll tell you right now, I think a woman’s place is at home with her babies.  I don’t approve of your coming back to work.”  I made a mental note to send flowers to his wife.

Fortunately, there was exciting work to be done.  The healthcare industry was in the midst of a perfect storm, facing regulatory upheaval on the eve of a technological revolution.  I brought to the table first-hand knowledge of the challenges our clients faced as well as a sound education in health policy.  Most days I was happily consumed with helping our developers harness technologies that would make our client hospitals more successful, or helping our clients to equip themselves for what was coming down the pike.  I learned that you cannot be successful alone; you must help your boss and co-workers to be successful as well.  But secretly I wondered: did this rule apply to the men?

As long as we were all about the work, I could tolerate—nay, thrive in—the male dominated corporate environment.  In fact, I remember arguing to new female hires that being of our persuasion was not an obstacle to success or upward mobility.  But who am I kidding?  One year, as each member of my department waited for their “annual review” (a euphemism meaning five minute meeting where we are informed of our raises) one of my co-workers—a fine intellect with a PhD—approached me and said, “You know, you really shouldn’t get a raise.  The money should go to the men who are supporting their families.”  To this day, I wonder whether he knows he said that out loud.

From that moment forward, it no longer bothered me.  It all became hilarious.   At some point you realize that you and the Neanderthals speak different languages.  You can’t reach them; you can’t change them.  If you are lucky, the best you can hope for is to step on their knuckles with a stiletto heel as they drag along the corridor. 

Tomorrow's blog:  Time Traveler