This became a problem around 1992. Before this, it was just a problem with public speaking, talking in front of large groups. I joined a group at work, a Dale Carnegie sort-of thing. It was supposed to be fun, but it was all men twice my age. I was the only 20-something woman and found it creepy. In competitions someone had to give a bad speech for others to critique. I liked doing this. Knowing I had to give a bad speech made it so easy. But the men were so apologetic about criticizing me, I had to remind them it was supposed to be a bad speech.
Then I married an up-and-coming engineer in another department, and soon he wasn’t just another engineer, he was the youngest executive in the history of the company. After 4 promotions in 5 years, he became my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. That meant that my husband signed the performance review of the guy who signed my performance review, and the company couldn’t allow that. I was valuable to the company in my own way, so I was ‘transferred’ to another division and ‘loaned back’ to my own department. In that way I could continue doing my job, which was obscure, but I was very good at it. When my husband was promoted to the highest echelons of our particular pond, the biggest fish really put the pressure on him to get me to quit. I was supposed to be an executive’s wife.
But there was pressure down on my level also. My own supervisor said, “I really don’t believe in women working after they have children, but I really need you to come back.” At performance reviews, I was at the top of my group, and yearly raises were divided strictly by performance. The department got a fixed pot of money and I got the largest chunk of it. It had been that way from day one at this company, but now it was suspect. “She’s n’s wife” was beginning to be a pejorative.
One manager was up-front and honest and said, “I want you on my program but I am afraid of ‘pillow’ talk”. We had been friends previously so I told him the last thing I would think about in bed was his program.
The final straw: I was walking down the hallway, totally oblivious of anything around me. (This is my normal state. People think I’m rude, but I just don’t see them. It’s what made me good at this particular job, which was detail-oriented to the point of mania.) I heard “Shh! n’s wife!” Only then do I look around and see 3 50-something men in a side atrium-like-thing and realize they had been talking in low tones. I never would have noticed them if they hadn’t made a point to stop talking as I went past.
It was this incident, or one very much like it that sent me to Human Resources in tears, telling them I was quitting with no notice. The woman was understanding for a change. It had always been my experience that HR’s job was to make it as hard as possible to receive company benefits. She dug out a folder from the pile on her desk. She said, “I’m looking at the promotion list, and you don’t want to quit. I can’t say anything else. This isn’t the final list, but can you just hold out for 3 weeks?”
I waited it out, got the promotion that had been promised a year earlier, but hadn’t been politically correct to give me at the time. I stuck around for a few more weeks of inuendo, then I became The Corporate Wife.
Big Fish’s wife called me and welcomed me to the ranks. I was to make sure my husband bought a tuxedo and I was to buy two formal dresses. “Be prepared to have dinner in Washington, D.C. with 3 hours notice,” was her message. I had my first panic attack. My children were 6 months, 2 1/2 years, and 4 years. When I left them with my mother, I missed them before I got to the end of the driveway.
Now the pressure came from my husband. As the youngest executive amoung guys twice his age, he felt the pressure to conform. He never said it, but the message was his job depended on me being a good Corporate Wife. But we both came from a lower middle class background. I never thought we were poor as a kid. I didn’t have as much stuff as my friends, but our interests were different. I didn’t want a lot of the stuff they had. I hated shopping. My aunts bought me two dresses for Easter and Christmas. That should have been a clue. Those were the only dresses I had. When I filled out my college applications I realized for the first time my family was balanced right above the poverty line. This socio-economic group was not a good training ground for being a Corporate Wife.
Now I was going to dinner in Washington, at country clubs, at mandatory corporate social occasions. I actually took my 6-month old daughter on a 3-day corporate ski trip. The men were in meetings all day. The women skiied or did spa things. I sat in my room and breast-fed my baby. These women all had kids who were in college, or married with grandchildren. At dinner I gravitated toward the men’s conversations. I was an engineer. I had worked for the company. I understood what they were talking about. That made me look bad to the women. Either I was snubbing them or I was a young floozy talking to their husbands. I couldn’t win.
One evening just as I was about to leave the house for one of these dinners, I found my 4-year old playing with pretty red gelatin capsules – laxatives left over from my last pregnancy. A call to Poison Control told me even one would kill her. My husband went to the dinner while I stayed home and went through the whole Ipecac process with her. I don’t think they use Ipecac any more but this was 15 years ago. My friend who had been afraid of pillow-talk joked the next day, “She’d rather poison her kids than have dinner with us.” It was a joke, but it really hurt.
So fear of leaving my children, coupled with fear of an agonizing evening with Ladies Who Lunch quickly grew into a phobia of any social situation. One older executive had a wife close to my age. I won’t say Trophy Wife; their story was really quite romantic. Our husbands were going to Israel on business and she wanted me to go along as her companion. It wasn’t couched as a request. Oh, and we leave in 2 days. I broke out in hives for the first time in my life – all over my body. An army major was to be our chauffeur and body guard. So I said, “Like that won’t make us more of a target?” There was a lot of violence over there at the time. Daily bombings. So I absolutely refused to go, and deeply regretted it at the same time. I never got another invitation from her again.
Soon I could add migraines to my physical symptoms, and very quickly any mention of a corporate event would make me ill.
