By Ross Fredrick Williams

Growing up in Utah in the ’70s and ’80s was not easy for a child like me. I was different and I realized it at a very young age and hid it from the world for a very, very long time.

One of my earliest, fondest memories is of going, at age four, with my dad to pick up my mother from beauty school. Entering the Continental College of Beauty in Murray, Utah was like going to the park for me. The people running back and forth with such purpose, the clean capes draped over the clients in their chairs, the smells of perm solutions and burning hair, the rollers…it all made my eyes wide with wonder and possibility. I hated leaving, and I couldn’t wait to go back. That’s why I was so upset when my mom decided to drop out; she said she was allergic to a lot of the solutions. I didn’t know what that meant of course. All I knew was I wasn’t going to get to go to my park any longer.

Flash forward to age 12. Bored out of my mind one hot summer’s day, I decided to go on a ‘treasure hunt’ in our garage. There was always something good to find in there, as my parents never threw anything away. Everything got stuffed into boxes and stored in the garage. About an hour into the hunt, I opened the box that would change my life forever. At first I thought that what I was seeing was a dead animal and jumping back I let out a sound that can only be described as a high-pitched, inhuman wail. Once I calmed down, I took a closer look at what was truly in the box and discovered a human-haired wig. I could not believe my eyes; I swear I started to hyperventilate with the thoughts of what I was going to do with this, the most valuable treasure I had ever come across. I immediately started in on the rest of the box to discover more wigs; they were not human hair wigs but wigs nonetheless. I also found a Styrofoam head and in that moment an idea formed and my destiny was set. I knew what had to be done: I had to make these things my own and that’s exactly what I did.

My parents worked during the day and my older “jock” brother had just gotten his driver’s license so he was never home. I had the entire house to myself most of the time. I took the treasure into the house and locked myself in the bathroom where I went to work on step one of my plan: shampooing and brushing the human haired wig. It took me about an hour, but I got it clean and smooth. I then put it on the Styrofoam head but it wouldn’t stay so I got long nails from my dad’s tool box and shoved them deep inside the head at a sharp angle. This thing was not going anywhere.

The next day was like Christmas. I could not wait until I was alone and could play with this new toy. The minute my parents drove off I got out the hair and began brushing it with a brush that I had taken from my mother’s drawer. I also took one of her curling irons and two combs. I didn’t know the first thing about hair, so it was all trial and error at this point. I cannot even begin to tell you how many burns I sustained in these early days or how I managed to hide them from my parents—but of course I’d gotten really good at hiding things from my parents by then. At 12 I knew instinctively to hide things about myself: I knew that boys didn’t play with dolls and that boys who did were a kind of different that meant their parents wouldn’t love them any longer. So I hid my brushes and wigs along with my feelings.

As the summer drew to an end, I had gotten really good with the curling iron. I spent all of my free time playing with this wonderful gadget. I would watch TV while locked in my room and copy the styles of the actors from some of my favorite shows of the day. One such show was Little House on the Prairie. I did Laura Ingalls’ braids, Nellie Olsen’s ringlets, and updos inspired by Miss Beatle the school teacher.

When I was done for the day and had to put my things away, I found the best hiding place in the world. My room was in the basement. From my closet I could put my tools and wigs between my ceiling and the main floor of the house. I thought I was brilliant—I was wrong. My brother also used this kind of space to hide things like dirty magazines and apparently checked to see if I did the same.

I will never forget the day my brother barged into my room and without saying a word went to my hiding place and pulled out all of my hidden treasures. I had been playing with these things and hiding them for years because I didn’t want anyone to think or know what I knew about myself but had not yet put into words. “Male stylists are gay.” I could not go to beauty school, because I didn’t want people thinking or knowing my deepest, darkest secret. My parents would surely stop loving me, I would have to move out, and I would be looked upon as a disgusting freak. These are just some of the thoughts that flashed in my mind as my brother stood in front of me, my secret world completely exposed. My hands went numb, my heart felt like it was going to pound right out of my chest, my vision blurred, and the room started to sway back and forth. I felt as though I would collapse right there—dead! Now don’t get me wrong. I was always a bit of a dramatic child, but this episode was like nothing I had ever experienced. I was quite certain that my whole world was about to implode.

My brother stood there for what seemed like an eternity, until I spoke. All I managed to say was, “Don’t tell mom and dad.” I just kept repeating it (almost hysterically) until he said “okay.” My brother never spoke about it again, not to me or my parents. He never called me a “fag” or asked me why I would play with what I’m sure he thought of as dolls.

That moment was so traumatic for me that I decided to hide my hair things forever. I could not bear to throw them away, so I put them back into my ceiling. But I took a broom handle and pushed everything so far back that I couldn’t see it, let alone reach it without tearing my ceiling apart (which I never did). My stash is probably still there today.

The next six years were a blur of jobs that were just that—jobs. They were not careers nor were they fulfilling in any way. I tried to go to college, but school was not for me. I hated almost everything about it. I was creative and I had no outlet for that creativity to flow, until I was 24. At 24 I got a job at the Marriot in downtown Salt Lake City delivering room service in the mornings. I learned on the very first day of work that all of my male co-workers were, in fact, gay. It was a dream come true, I could be myself completely for the first time ever. Room service shared the kitchen with the restaurant and I got to know all of the servers really well, all of whom were female. One morning before work one of the servers from the dining room came over to the office and was trying to French braid her hair. She was not very good at it, and it was making her crazy. I walked over to her and told her to sit down and put her head back so I could fix her hair. I put her hair into a simple but perfect French braid—you would have thought that I had done her hair for the freakin’ prom the way she went on and on about how fabulous it was. I was in heaven—I’d done a real person’s hair for the first time ever and she loved it. I WAS HOOKED!

The next morning (to my total surprise) four of the servers came into work early so I could braid their hair. It took me about half an hour but I did them all and none of them looked the same: I did French crowns and ponies; one of them I made turn upside down and started at the nape with a fabulous bun on top. They each paid me five dollars and in 30 minutes I’d made $20. At that moment I knew I didn’t care what the rest of the world thought. I would tell my parents (okay, my mom) that that’s what I wanted to be—I was going to be a Hairstylist. 25 days later I started beauty school at The Continental College of Beauty. I now work at Milagros Salon & Spa in Seattle’s vibrant Belltown neighborhood, and I can honestly say it’s a dream come true.

Photo provided by Ross Fredrick Williams.

By Mark Spearman

I keep wondering what most people are thinking as they watch the images on TV of demonstrations in Wisconsin and elsewhere to protect the right of collective bargaining.

Such a sterile term “collective bargaining” for something as basic and personal as banding with others to establish and nurture a livelihood, and to provide for yourself and people you care about.

As 70,000 people circled the state capitol in Madison recently, my mind traveled back to an auto workers union president named Fred, from whom I learned something about that concept, about fair pay for a good day’s work, and about the politics of human aspiration and the emotions they can stir all around.

Fred was in charge of the union local in the mid-sized Midwest city where I worked as a newspaper reporter 25 years ago. He was essentially a slightly leaner, decidedly shrewder, certainly more diplomatic Wilford Brimley. Fred represented the interests of 3,000 auto workers who stamped sedans, station wagons and light trucks out of the untold tons of sheet metal brought in daily by rail.

I was the upstart reporter who’d periodically come by the union hall adjacent to the plant for comments on contract talks, rumors of contract talks, strikes, rumors of strikes, settlements, rumors of settlements… We seemed to find things to talk about pretty much all the time. Or, rather, I found an inexhaustible list of reasons to pester Fred for stories. I was the latest in a long line of know-it-all, 25-year-old journalism school grads who’d never seen a quarter panel, hood or decklid that wasn’t already neatly painted and attached to a car. We were the instant experts assigned the beat where Fred conducted business, but he took it all with patience and good humor.

No so much his colleagues in the local. I recall watching my Toyota towed from the union hall parking lot as a burly union brother, expressing much schadenfreude, pointed to a sign that read No Foreign Car Parking. It was 1985, and people preached “Buy American,” but mostly it was a matter of the media being considered an enemy.

Sometimes I’d wait by the front gate to get quotes from passing workers about a proposal or pending labor agreement. My questions elicited a spectrum of responses, ranging from indifference to F-bombs.

All of this burnished what I’d frequently heard others say about unions, that they were dominated by contentious, demanding and unenlightened yokels with an inflated sense of entitlement.

I’d grown up in a small Ohio town where unions were the rare exception. I didn’t know anyone who belonged to a union. I didn’t go to school with any kids who lived in union households. On television, labor unions were usually a device to tell stories about corruption and crime. Often, union thugs were the “muscle” when something unpleasant needed to get done.

My only personal experience with a union was the day my dad arrived home in a state of agitation because he’d just driven past strikers on a picket line. One of them had spit tobacco on the side of his sweet, 1965 red Ford Falcon.

You could fire the old Civil War cannon on the Public Square of my hometown and be certain you’d never kill a Democrat or anyone who remotely defined themselves as pro-labor, let alone liberal. Unions were why new cars cost so much, why your electric bill was too high, why in certain fields the incompetent were never fired.  While anecdotes could be cited to support those claims, never mentioned was the role of unions in bringing us the eight-hour workday, minimum wage, employer-provided healthcare, paid vacations, worker safety regulations and a long list of other things taken for granted, things that may never have come about absent collective bargaining as a check and balance on the clout of big employers.

The attitude was embraced by more than a few in the newsroom. Resentment was most evident whenever a new figure was released that was purported to be the hourly rate of pay, including benefits, for an autoworker. I can still hear the squeaky ball bearings of my city editor’s chair as he’d whip around the copydesk to deliver extensive editorial commentary on that subject.

Accuracy of those estimates aside, I’d come to realize that whenever anyone’s income was reported publicly in print—regardless of who they were or what they did—there was a waiting chorus of the incredulous. It was always too much. Perhaps not too much for you, or for me, but certainly for them, for that job. Are you kidding?

A few colleagues who railed about overpaid autoworkers spent their evenings mailing resumes to other newspapers—unionized newspapers—where reporters were guaranteed a minimum rate of pay more than twice the barely livable wage we were paid.

Nationally, union power and public opinion of labor were already in decline. Reagan was in the White House, and a few years earlier he’d fired 12,000 striking air traffic controllers. The action set off a chain of events culminating in the news we’re now seeing in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere.

But that didn’t deter Fred from fighting for the local.

One afternoon I was in the union hall conference room, getting Fred’s official response to something or other. This journalistic exercise became rote over time. Summarize the situation in the lede, quote management, quote the union, elaborate, a little history for context, conclusion. I was scribbling whatever it was Fred was saying when suddenly he stopped. Clearly he sensed, not entirely inaccurately, that I was slipping into stenographer mode, not thinking through what he was telling me.

“Listen, you need to understand something,” Fred announced in a rangy, Southern drawl that I’d come to  guess was somewhere out of Arkansas or Texas.

I closed my notebook and put my pencil down.

“Don’t you aspire to a certain standard of living for yourself, for your family? That’s all we’re doing here. That’s all this is about.”

When someone’s talking about something they believe in, it has a certain signature that’s unmistakable. Fred never seemed much of a spin doctor anyway. I could tell he meant it.

In my mind I was contrasting this with the last conversation I’d had with the plant general manager, who’d phoned me at the paper with a request I first interpreted as dry humor: Would I please stop using the term “layoff” to describe the periodic herd thinning of which he was a chief architect. He asked if I could switch to the gentler term of “sendhome,” as in “Today the company issued 147 sendhome notices.” I don’t recall where the conversation went from there. I was polite, but our talk was short.

That day Fred talked about some stuff he didn’t usually get into. He’d been around the plant since the beginning, back in ’56. It was around that time that the union had first persuaded the company to pay half the cost of hospital and surgical coverage for its workers and their families—a benefit that was extraordinary in its day. He’d also seen the union get guarantees against employment discrimination based on race, three years before the rest of the country caught up via the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

His point was that this wasn’t just some zero-sum game played out to see how much each side could get. It was about securing and protecting jobs and income for real people and their families. And, it had a history that was important to acknowledge, one that started with people asserting their rights to some pretty basic things.

Something else happened that summer that changed how I viewed the plant and the people who worked there. The company announced that it had chosen this particular site over several others for a modernization project and a hundred-million-dollar-plus investment. That meant steady, significant work for years, maybe even new jobs. More than 1,000 workers gathered on the grounds outside the plant to hear the announcement.

I’d never seen people look so excited and proud of what they did. Some cheered and hollered. Many of them hugged. Some cried.

I hadn’t thought about Fred or the union or the plant for a long time. On the Web I discovered that the place was still in operation, but just barely, with about a third of the jobs of years past. No trace of Fred, but then he was not a young man in 1985. I suppose one of the old-timers at the paper might know what became of him, but I don’t really want to know.

I prefer to think Fred is still out there, looking after the interests of his union brothers and sisters, and maybe, explaining to some know-it-all kid how you make a quarter-panel out of sheet metal.

Photo provided by Mark Spearman.

More by Mark Spearman

By Norman de Guerre

The psychologist Erik Erikson had some theory about the stages of human development. It’s relevant to Work Stew, but I don’t have time to reacquaint myself with it, which is, I suppose, one of the realities of this phase of my own life that, if memory serves, Erikson referred to as “Industry”: there’s no time to do anything right now. Industry consumes.

I’m about halfway through Industry, splitting 20 to 60 down the middle and in the prime years of my constructive engagement with society. Said another way, I know about half of what actually would be insightful and useful to anyone regarding the topic of “work.” So caveat emptor.

I’ve read with interest the other Work Stew essays and it’s inspiring to read about people who have found their calling and are professionally satisfied. (I call their calling their “calling” because I’m married to an Episcopal priest who found hers; the Episcopalians have lots of special words for things, like, for example, “calling.”) I don’t have a calling yet, but as a closet optimist, I’ve not given up hope. Such is the reader who might find this essay interesting: a person who cares about callings, and wants one, but has yet to find something even approximating it.

Perhaps some context about my current non-calling would frame things, so I’ve sketched out a typical workday (I should acknowledge that while I am about to number many of my good deeds, my wife does her fair share too, like getting our two kids to and from school and a laundry list of other things that sadly, doesn’t include laundry):

• 5:30am – My alarm rings. I get up, make tea for us (lying on the floor and cat-napping through to the kettle’s whistle) and deliver a cup to my wife, with the same words each morning: “Good morning, honey! Here’s your tea!” (The up-lilt in my voice as I rally us for the day indicated by my use of exclamation marks.) I make breakfast for the clan, although I don’t eat any myself. I walk our two elderly, blind, incontinent dogs.
• 7:15am – I leave for the subway.
• 7:45am – I arrive at work where, as a friend once commented apropos of both of us, I get paid to talk to people. These conversations are scheduled back-to-back, typically in half hour increments, and I go from one to the next, talking and jotting down notes in my notebook so I can remember things to talk about with other people, later. I try to remember, when I am deluded into thinking my job is stressful and difficult, that it’s hardly diamond mining in Africa, and I close my eyes and imagine the poor bastards in those Salgado photographs. I don’t want to sell myself short (and I should clarify too that I’m not a counselor)—I manage a P&L, and I am measured on real and objective financial and operating metrics. My job has a scorecard with numbers on it. But we aren’t baling hay here.
• 7:45pm – I leave for the subway. More often than not, I get food en route to the subway and eat dinner on the B or C train.
• 8:15pm – I arrive home. The kids run to the door and jump up into my arms and I hug them and ask about their day. Sometimes I hug my wife and sometimes we just growl at each other, glowering over who is going to walk the dogs. I immediately change into my flannel pajamas, partly because they are comfortable and I need to lose 20 pounds and partly because I have this theory that if I’m in my pajamas, it’s less reasonable to ask me to walk the dogs. I give the kids a bath, I read them a story, and then I play guitar for them as they go to sleep, a regimented song list that at their request runs, in order: The Weight -> Apeman (“I think I’m sophisticated ‘cause I’m living my life like a good homo sapiens…”) -> Love In Vain -> Loving Cup. I try to get in bed before 10pm and read at least one page of something before closing my eyes and almost always immediately falling asleep.

* * * * *

Looking back, I’ve not plotted a deliberate course. After graduating from college, I almost got a Fulbright to The Netherlands, making every cut except the last (arguably, the Committee was wise not to grant me at that age a paid excursion in Amsterdam with no defined responsibilities). So, I took what I could get and became a management consultant. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I did it for over a decade. Then, I had a surprising and satisfying detour into a field where my skills and passions intersected, but slowly, as the job started leeching the joy from my passion, I left and took a new job, almost wholly for the money. Now, I get up and go to work for the same reason I did when I was 21—because I have to.

A few glorious moments along the way have veered towards something approximating a calling, just enough to taunt me as to how sublime finding one would be. But nothing ever clicked enough to liberate me from notions about work that were firmly implanted in my brain at a very young age and reinforced for many years by many people in ways large and small—and these mental models tend to require pretty strong escape velocities. (By way of example, I was forbidden to become an architect, because my dad was one, and he thought it would end badly for me, and maybe he was right. Go make money! In a similar spirit, my father-in-law’s primary advice to me has been to relay the advice handed down to him by his father: stay on the payroll).

* * * * *

Why do we work? Can something profound and important exist beyond a paycheck and nominal place-in-the-world self-identity? What motivates us, the un-called, to get up every morning and wobble forward without strongly held professional convictions serving as wind in our sails? Can we instead chart a course to spend our precious human life pursuing something of substance and meaning, consistent with our values and disposition, in the service of family and friends and society and ourselves?

With all this in mind, here are six questions I’d suggest as important considerations for people interested in moving from “jobs” to “callings”:

1. What unique qualities do you possess, and what natural vocations flow from them?
2. What is your attitude about generating, spending, and saving money?
3. How important is serving a greater good relative to serving yourself, and how important is it to connect your period of Industry to bettering the world rather than simply your position in it?
4. What serves your soul—the city, or the country? North or south, east or west? Or, does it matter?
5. Can you promote yourself in a rigorous and goal-oriented post-social-media world manner; and if not, is it out of principle, disposition, or insecurity? We live in the Age of Ego and like it or not, there is a high correlation between self-aggrandizement and exterior accomplishment—but probably never at the expense of interior accomplishment;
6. How selfish do you want to be when considering #1-5 in the context of sharing a life with others? (For example, I share my life with a strong, accomplished wife and two bright and energetic kids. Our needs are commingled. I also feel a strong obligation towards new needs that might emerge over time as our parents age).

Like many other things, answers to complex existential questions don’t snap neatly and quickly into place, in Gladwellian ‘blinks’. They require reflection and mature consideration, suspension of prejudgment, and the discipline to allow the questions to percolate. I admire greatly people who create the personal space to ask these types of questions and even more so, those who summon the courage to restructure their life around the answers.

By Samantha Cole

People who graduated from my high school were never supposed to need a tool belt for work. At the small private girls’ school in a wealthy Connecticut town, there were no vocational courses offered. Freshman year, my best friend and I signed up to take wood shop at the affiliated boys’ school, but the course was cancelled once it was clear that we two girls were the only ones who had shown any interest. Parents sent their kids to this expensive and exclusive prep school so they’d have an advantage getting into the very “best” colleges. When I attended in the mid-’80s, the parking lot was full of European imports with college stickers in the back windshields. The more Ivy League institutions you could lay claim to, the more cachet your BMW had. These were not people who built things. These were people who commissioned things to be built for them.

I was always the kid who wanted to know how things worked and why they were put together the way they were. At eight-years-old I could take my bike apart and put it back together. I took the doorknob from the door to my parents’ master bathroom and installed it on my bedroom door, so I could have a lock. Then, to my parents’ dismay, I drilled a pinhole in the door so I could peek out at who was coming up the stairs. The plan would have worked brilliantly except that if the light was out in the hallway and my eyeball was not in front of the peephole you could see my light through the hole—exposing my unauthorized door-modification.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a job through a friend’s dad working “hospitality” backstage at an outdoor music festival. At the time, the venue had no running water or electricity, so in order to keep the artists happy (and well supplied with cold beer) we hospitality folks spent an inordinate amount of time schlepping ice in 50-pound bags across muddy fields to the trailer dressing rooms. This was my first experience doing physical labor and I loved it. I loved the experience of knowing that my body would perform when asked to; I loved the admiring and bemused stares of people watching me carry the ice; I even kind of liked the cold water running down my back as respite from the sweaty, grimy August heat. 

Of course, this was not a “real” job. I went to one of those prestigious colleges, and spent summers cycling through a series of Dilbert-esque office jobs. I came to understand that this is what “work” was supposed to be. Work meant learning to type, answer the phone, write boring memos, read boring memos, ignore the bigger picture. Work meant wearing pantyhose in an overly air-conditioned office waiting for the evenings or weekends to roll around. I thought I was growing up. Growing up was turning out to be pretty stifling.

I graduated from college with an English/Chinese studies major, without a clear plan for what to do next. It didn’t feel to me like I had a lot of skills. But I did have two and a half years of college Mandarin on my resume, so I applied for jobs in Taiwan and mainland China. I took the first job I was offered—to teach English in southern Taiwan. I signed a two-year contract and left the day after Thanksgiving 1994. And all of a sudden, I was not spending all day behind a desk feeling like a business impostor. Being a teacher impersonator was much more fun.

In the classroom, no one has any choice but to come out of their shell. One of my classes—the one that eventually became my favorite—was comprised of four-year-olds who were just starting school. Some of them seemed so young I was afraid that they maybe weren’t completely potty trained. Asking little kids if they have to go to the bathroom when they grab their crotches and look uncertain definitely brought me to an understanding of how little decorum I could live with. And with kids who have no common language, if you want to make a “no picking your nose” classroom rule, you need to demonstrate. If you are going to demonstrate a nose pick in front of a whole class of kids, there is no room for inhibitions.

If my pupils thought I was strange, so did everyone else in Taiwan. I found out really quickly that many Chinese people have no compunction about staring at anyone or anything that sparks curiosity. In the United States, undisguised staring at someone can be construed as an act of aggression. But the Chinese have no such reticence.  I was a Caucasian woman, nearly six feet tall, which made me a freak. And so, the Taiwanese stared at me. They stared at me while I was in the grocery store, while I rode a motorcycle through the scooter-crowded street, while I stood in line at the post office, everywhere. If they were not staring, they yelled “Hello. How are you?” with absolutely no interest in being answered in English. Mostly, they just wanted to underscore from across the street or from a passing car that they had seen me, noticed my strangeness, and wanted me to notice that they had noticed.

At first this was annoying. But I also began to find it liberating. If I was the strangest thing that anyone had ever seen and I was just going about my normal everyday business, then I had a little bit of license to make an ass of myself too. So if I wanted directions to the airport I mimicked an airplane. If I wanted to know where the public pool was, I mimed swimming. I mixed up the words for honeybee and honey. Once, instead of ordering a cup of bubble tea from a street vendor, I inadvertently ordered 100. Realizing my mistake, I then had to stop the production line. I sheepishly took ten or so teas back to the school and handed them out to my fellow teachers, feeling both stupid and then magnanimous when everyone was psyched to get an unsolicited drink.

When my contract was up I spent about six months backpacking my way home, where I resumed my string of office jobs that just weren’t quite the right fit. I tried my hand at coordinating slip reservations at a yachting center, bookkeeping at a seafood importer, and managing a theatre company—each from the supposed luxury of an office with computers and phones and all-you-can-drink coffee. 

Then I hired someone to put a bathroom on the second floor of my 1929 bungalow. I had fulfilled the expectations of my expensive education: I had become the graduate who hired someone to build me something. But I didn’t want to go to the office when the roof got popped off my house and the dormer went in. I rushed home every day to see the progress as pipes were routed surreptitiously through a closet and into the newly framed space. The plumbing, the electrical, the tile all went in and I wanted to know how.  Just like I wanted to know how that doorknob came apart when I was eight.

One day when the new bathroom was nearly finished, with the knowledge that the funding for my job as an arts administrator was drying up, I asked the contractor who had built the bathroom if he needed an apprentice. “I’m strong, I’m smart, and I really want to learn this kind of work,” I told him. When he got done being surprised that a client wanted to become an employee, he set about teaching me the trade. 

I embraced the inner laborer I had discovered those years before on a festival field. I shrugged off the curious and incredulous stares on the job site just as I had learned to do in Taiwan. I put on a tool belt and filled it with tools that I learned to use while quieting the disapproving voices in my head that reminded me that I was supposed to want a corner office with a commanding view of the city. Instead I learned a skill that allowed me to build not just walls and furniture, but my own business in which I set the hours, decide the projects, work more when I want and less when I can. It’s not glamorous; I get dirty and dusty and hot. Sometimes old houses have settled and nothing is level and doors will not close. Clients give me vague instructions, like “Can you build me something that’s not too casual?” or they change their minds about the color of tile after it has been installed. But at the end of a day I can see the tangible results.  Sometimes my shoulders ache and I don’t like what I have built, but I now have the confidence to know that I can fix it tomorrow. At the end of a project, I know what I have accomplished and then I look forward to a new venture. No two days and no two projects are ever exactly the same.  The differences were what I was looking for when I left the office behind.

Photo provided by Samantha Cole.

By Zach Brockhouse

Up Highway 17 past Mount Pleasant, the land was choked with vegetation. The plants were barbed and poisonous and could grow several inches in a day. Scrub oaks tangled with Sumac. Honeysuckle battled Kudzu. Sawgrass covered every inch of the ground, blades that would cut hands and knuckles, raise painful, itching hives.

Native Americans used to live there. They grew corn and sat on the black sand shores to watch the big European boats coming in. They were the Wando, the Yemassee and the SeeWee tribes. The Europeans were introduced to poison ivy and hornets. The Indians were introduced to worse.

By the time the Revolutionary War began, these tribes were on their way out. The Francis Marion Forest was named for a man they called, “The Swamp Fox.” Most people thought of him as a hero, though there were rumors that he hunted Indians for sport and raped female slaves in his spare time.

This morning we stop at the last outpost before Awendaw and the Francis Marion, a doublewide trailer attached to a bright yellow house. We load up on Mountain Dew and chilidogs. We eat them quickly while Chief gasses up the truck.

The newer looking Diesel pump always has a rough looking trucker parked by it. He sits in the cab, his legs bone-white beneath his shorts and watches us from behind mirrored sunglasses. He smokes and probably wonders what the hell has brought us this far north. We’re lost, he thinks. Maybe crazy. The rips in our pants and the stained shirts, the sunburned necks, the rashes and bites that line our arms make us look like lepers, escaped and sun blinded, stumbling here of all places and no doubt looking for trouble.

The Civil War freed the slaves. One hundred years later, their descendants lined the highways weaving sweetgrass baskets under plywood huts. The tourists came down from the northern beaches to haggle, barking numbers in thick Yankee accents. The weavers watched the cars pass with looks of boredom so profound they could only be matched by the faces of the white children staring back at them.

We’re excited today. Instrument Man won’t be working the gun. I won’t be carrying the heavy tripod over fences and through vines. We have the company’s first GPS, and we’ll simply have to walk around the wetlands with a backpack, a battery pack, and a transmitter. The transmitter is a plastic disc on a pole you can raise above the overgrowth to clear sky.

There is the man who for the better part of fifteen years has been sitting underneath a painted plywood sign that ended up too short to finish. It reads, Boiled P-Nut. He waves as we pass. He still ain’t sold that peanut, Chief says every morning.

We pull across 17 to the access road. We stop at a rusted gate and he gets out to unlock the padlock. I hold the gate while the truck passes and close it behind. I hop onto the tailgate. It’s barely a road with trees grown so close they scrape the sides of the truck, joining the legions of criss-crossed scars from thousands of other roads just like this one, old and forgotten hunting trails and deer runs.

We put on our snakeboots, tuck the pants into them and soak the area in OFF to keep the ticks out. I tuck my shirt in and spray my waist the same way. The chemicals make the cloth feel crisp and cool and the smell will stay with me for most of the morning, a burnt sweet chemical smell that makes the hair on my arms rise.

We find the first pink flag left by a state worker and match it with the ledger Chief has. I raise up the disc and wait for the little numbers to line up and record our position. It’s early days for GPS and it takes a while for each position to be register. We all stare at the numbers and the little LED dots blink until we’re done. Gnats find Chief’s head in the sun and buzz around his ears, some stick to the sweat already coating his neck.

Then we head in, following each flag with a number written on it. This brings us deep into the wetland and the sun dappled pines and honeysuckle give way to a musky cool darkness. The ground opens up and the vegetation changes. I can name every tree I see. Garden Spiders wave between them wherever there is sunlight. They are big spiders. Yellow and black with vertical stripes in their web. They rock back and forth whenever you get too close. Chief occasionally throws them a cricket and we watch as the spider strikes and wraps it up.

It’s nine a.m., but already hot. Eventually around noon even the crickets and frogs will give up and it will become very quiet. We sit around and wonder whether it’s best to go back to the truck to try and catch a nap, play some Hearts—or keep going to the last flag.

We decide to keep going. Pass around the canteen. Light a sweat soaked cigarette, with a lighter that hisses and pops.

The further in we go, the higher I need to raise the disc. Eventually, I resort to waving it back and forth hoping this will induce whatever satellites we’re trying to communicate with to notice us. Leaves and twigs fall around me as I try and shove it through.

Chief and Instrument Man haul their bush axes from their shoulders, axes Chief sharpens religiously every morning with a file. They begin to furiously cut away vegetation to give the disc a clear path to the skies. Animals buzz warnings and for a little while the sleepy little swamp wakes up. Vines and brambles fall. I get a reading and yell out to stop. They lean on their axes and watch me watch the numbers. The numbers blink. Three sets of them need to register to move on. Sweat runs off my eyebrows. It doesn’t drip. It runs like my head is on fire and the quickest way out is over my eyes. I watch until the third number clicks and I lower the disc so I can move without getting tangled.

We finish our numbers and find another old logging road that Chief swears will get us back to the access road which will lead us back to the forsaken little strip the truck is parked on.

We’re hot. We’ve run out of water. We walk in a loose single file through runs made by pig and deer. We know this is where the ticks are, but no one wants to cut a path.

The Civil War is still alive down here. You can hear it in the way people speak, in how neighborhoods are drawn, and the ethnic lines are as clear as fresh chalk. The further out from the cities you get, the more visible it becomes. Chief brings out his metal detector in these spots and the wooden crates of his handmade tool box are alive with slave chains and grapeshot.

Around a corner, parked in a patch of shade blocking the road, is a little camper. We stop, the sight of it striking us for a moment into immobility. Its back is facing us. The sides have been crudely painted to look like a log cabin. Around the little window cut into the sheet metal side, a wooden window sill and a pot of geraniums have been painted.

We approach it wary. Instrument Man scratches at the bandaged Sumac boil on his forearm. Closer to the front, painted in bright green letters that look like Lincoln Logs reads, “Honest Abe.”

Through the driver’s window, a man is asleep. A gas station Styrofoam coffee sits in the filthy arm rest. He’s got a black beard with no mustache. He’s wearing a black tuxedo tee shirt. A road map sits coffee stained and curled on the dashboard. An unzipped duffel bag is on the seat by him, stuffed with clothes and a stovepipe hat. Several pairs of socks are draped over the open passenger side window.

We try to see to the sleeping area in back, but a half closed curtain keeps it from view. The curtain is made from a brown towel. Hyatt Regency is sewn into the corner.

He’s sleeping soundly. Up close he really doesn’t look like Abe Lincoln. He looks like the truck drivers that watch us at the outpost. To save some money on hotels, he’s found this faraway place to catch up on some sleep. I look for the porn magazines hoping to find an explanation for the inordinate amount of porn you find rotting in the faraway fields and wetlands. It’s everywhere, long-abandoned houses, tree trunks. I never go a week without finding some. But he has none. I wonder if he has family back where he came from. I wonder if they miss him.

We leave him sleeping there, find the truck baking in a sun that has moved since morning. We drink ice water standing around the orange cooler and pack up. The shadows are getting longer. The crickets and frogs are beginning to wake.

A corporation was planning to build there. For every wetland they filled in, they would have to build the equivalent elsewhere. Usually these took the form of a scraped together pond or a wet patch between two cement pipes where frogs would gather in the evenings. Sometimes a wetland would be saved when a rare woodpecker would nest there. Usually not. Eventually the whole area would become a business park.

I hope Abe moved in time. Maybe his camper’s still there underneath it all. Maybe someone else will find him in a hundred years.

Photo provided by Zach Brockhouse.

By Peter Morningstar

I’m a pediatrician. I work primarily in Presque Isle, Maine, for a big practice that probably doesn’t really need me, but where I make a modestly meaningful impact, while not overworking myself, spending plenty of time with the family, and having the opportunity to do things I enjoy, like four wheeling and mountain biking, playing hockey, and writing.

I used to work full time in Machias, Maine. Machias is an Indian name that means Bad Little Falls. There is a Bad Little Falls in Machias, where the Machias River goes over a series of ledges next to the Main Street corridor. It’s not a super big drop, and it’s easy to miss if you are in a car on Route 1, but there is a lot of water going through a narrow curve, and it looks pretty, and pretty rough. You see all this if you wander out behind the Mobil station and look over the embankment.

I asked my buddy Dave Whitney who is a big kayaker and canoer, and owns several businesses in town, if he had ever run the falls and he looked taken aback. He arched upright, his glasses slipped down his nose, and his eyes opened wide and wild. “Nooo.  No.  Nooo…” Too rough? I guessed.  “Oh it’s rough, and it’s a good drop for a raft, let alone a kayak or a canoe, but the biggest problem is there’s eddies in there that would suck even a raft down, and the falls are full of metal posts from back in the days they ran logs down the river. A person would get shredded in those falls.” Anyone ever done it? “If someone did he hasn’t been back bragging.”

I worked for the hospital there in Machias, and it was a Bad Little Hospital. I don’t mean bad like low quality, or poorly equipped; I mean bad like terrible, like rough and mean, like the Machias River Falls: small, kind of cool looking, tempting, and filled with old sharp steel. I remember when I was a nerdy kid, being attracted to the tough girls my mother didn’t even bother to warn me against, the girls who smoked and glared at passing cars by the high school my mother wouldn’t send me to anyway. The hospital in Machias was like those girls.  The doctors there had been warring amongst themselves for years, and warring against the hospital administration for even longer. The nurses if anything were even more out for blood than the doctors. It seemed like every indiscretion, no matter how mild, was reported to a state licensing board. When I interviewed, there were three pediatricians, when I arrived there was just one… Pediatricians had come and gone and come and gone. I lasted the longest, four years, the first year and some, and for various stretches later on, all by myself. I can’t imagine what moved me to want to move there, but I was excited to go. I like to be needed.

Of course I finally gave up and left three years ago. The family didn’t like the town so much.  There’s not much to do in Machias, no movies or mall, no ice rink or ski hill to make the winter go by, and too many biting insects to enjoy the summer much. Like the Falls, it’s pretty to look at, but not a place to immerse your family, unless they are really good at making their own fun, and not bothered much by black flies and mosquitoes. On a bright Autumn day, or in the Spring when the snow is melting and the flies are still sleeping, it may be the prettiest place in the world. It is kind of a Bad Little Town that way, a place my mother would never have thought to forbid. We were all relieved to move somewhere less Bad and less Little. Presque Isle is isolated, but you can ride your snowmobile right up to the mall, and the bugs are scarce.

Since I left town, the hospital in Machias has improved some.  I don’t take the betterness following my departure at all personally. An inpatient had wandered out into a storm after arguing with staff and froze to death in the snow, sparking a state and federal investigation that toppled the last administration. Since then the hospital has gone to some lengths, and with some success to get less Bad, if not less Little.

Actually, even after we cleared out I couldn’t tear myself away completely. I still go down there every four weeks for two days to look after the kids from that Bad Little Town. In part because in three years no one has stepped in to replace me. My friend Alf is an excellent physician assistant who handles almost all the pediatrics there and does a fine job.  But the role of assistant by its nature demands an assistee, and that person is still me. I drive three and a half hours each way from our home in Caribou down the loneliest stretch of highway in the east to Machias every fourth week, work like a madman for two days, then load up on caffeine and head home.  One trip in the snow two years ago I saw only seven vehicles out for the whole 175 mile run: four plough trucks, two pick ups, and a border patroller.  That was when the mill in Baileyville was shut down and the log trucks were all parked. I almost always stay with friends there those Thursday nights. The truth is that the friends I met in that Bad Little Town, and the patients I treat at that Bad Little Hospital, are about the best friends, and most loyal patients a person could have. It’s funny that such good people can be found so far out along the edge of nowhere, and that is why I keep going back to that Bad Little Town, even three years after we escaped. I can’t help myself. I love the place.

By Michael T. Heath

I’d been working in the company test garden all morning—checking on water lines; picking stray potato beetles by hand. In one corner stood the latest composters under development. I liked the rain-catching pyramid, but alongside that one sat a barrel-shaped tumbler on a slippery base. This one just begged to be turned each time I passed, and I obliged it, rolling the food scraps and garden trimmings yet again. My invention had been the foot ‘steps’ which allowed no-hands compost turning. I’d also helped design the rain-catching lid on the square one (patents for both were in the works). A little further in the garden I looked over our tomato crop, ripening nicely. A hinged trellis around each plant was another of our new products, made to slide over the tops of full-grown plants. I stopped to run my hand along the red, vinyl-coated surface of the sturdy tomato holder. These should sell well, I thought. They’ll stand out in a marketplace full of cheap green ring supports that weren’t designed to fit over big plants. My eyes moved down the row and settled on a rusting spike marked off in inches. It stood 30 inches tall (as measured by the gradients), and told the owner how much snow had accumulated. The snow stake had a fatal flaw as a product, in my eyes. It was topped by a sunburst pattern, complete with individual rays poking up from the top of the stake. The sample I had put out had already begun rusting in just a few weeks. But I could imagine a worse outcome—one which exposed the company to real liability. Since I was charged with discovering just such problems during product testing, I was determined to torpedo the snow stake before it made it into the gardening catalog my company put out.

Just before noon, the managers assembled in the conference room. A few of them carried mock-ups of the upcoming catalog in black-and-white, while others had folders bulging with color pictures of past hot sellers and the pet favorites they were hopeful to place. There was a general anarchy of voices and shuffling as folks acquired seats and valuable table space to spread out their materials. Barely noticed, I wheeled in a cloth-shrouded cart and parked near the door. In my left hand was a generous pumpkin about the size of a large basketball. A few of the managers took note that I was in the meeting and nodded towards me. The meeting was quickly called to order by the company president. He handed moderating duties off to the marketing director who was readying the next catalog. She thanked everyone for coming to the meeting and told them I would be giving a brief presentation before they got underway. I nervously wheeled my funky cart out from the wall for all to see. It stood approximately four feet tall with a white sheet draped over something pointy in the middle. I began by saying that I had been asked to test a new product idea and that I felt it was one of the most dangerous things to come along since I’d started. At this point I raised the ripe pumpkin above my head. “Imagine you’re walking along in your backyard. It’s winter, and there has been a lot of snow. You stumble on some tool left out in the yard…” I smashed the pumpkin down on top of the cloth-covered spike in the wagon, getting it to penetrate completely through the gourd. I then pulled back the cloth to reveal the rusty snow stake, neatly impaling my fresh pumpkin. I looked around the room to see more than a few startled faces. Only one showed annoyance: my boss, head of product testing and close to the marketing director. It seemed that my show and tell time was up, so I gathered up the pumpkin parts and my death spike and beat it out of there. The smashed veggie went into the composter. The snow stake returned to its spot in the test garden and immediately continued rusting. Throughout the day, I carried the feeling that I had done a good thing in the meeting.

The next morning I was summoned into the office. A stern boss asked me why I had felt it necessary to intrude on the manager’s meeting with my demonstration. Normally I’d submit a report to marketing, who’d make a final decision on what we sold. I tried to explain that I had done the report but was concerned that this item was super-dangerous, and wanted to make sure the people who had the authority to choose didn’t choose this one. “Well, they have decided to carry the snow stake anyway. It sold well in our competitor’s last winter catalog.” That was the beginning of the end, for me. Within the year I was out. My numerous product inventions live on, printed quarterly and mailed to every state.

Photo provided by Michael T. Heath.

By R.P. Rodgers

I remember a time when companies weren’t staffed only by eager beaver go-getters always on the lookout for the fast way up, a time when there was still tolerance for the office oddball.

When I was 32, I got a job in an advertising agency art studio. Old Timers called it the Bullpen. There were a lot of old timers at that agency. People in the industry considered it a kind of retirement home for aging Art Directors. These guys came up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Some still wore their thinning hair long over the collar, had mutton chop side burns, and hit on all the young female interns and assistants. It was the waning days of the three-martini lunch, the days before computers and sexual harassment laws changed workplace life for the codgers forever. I’d secured a full-time position in the bullpen because I’d had a portfolio of solid samples—samples I’d swiped from my wife’s job and lied about being my own. Also, I came dirt-cheap.

My stall in the ’Pen was a cubicle with a drawing table. The fellow who sat in the cubicle adjacent to mine was an old man, possibly in his 60s but it was hard to tell. His face was badly weathered. He wore the same outfit regardless of the season—light colored dungarees and up top a plaid flannel shirt which covered a long sleeved T-shirt. I said his face was weathered, like he’d been living on the street—which it was rumored he had in fact done for a time. His voice was a faint rasp that emitted from the back of his throat, toned by too many Camel no-filters. He resembled the old cartoon character Popeye the Sailor only more swollen in the face. Whereas Popeye had been a bald man, this fellow had a generous, full head of hair worn in the style popular with ‘50s greasers—the D.A or Duck’s Ass which was coiffed with the hair swept back and piled high in a pompadour which flowed back to a flip at the collar. He was an old man and it was old hair, gray but once blond and so the gray was stained with a yellow tint like fingers stained from too much nicotine.

Joe K was his name. The letter K not Kaye like Danny Kaye, Joe’s last name being some unpronounceable Eastern European garble of consonants and so he was simply Joe K. Joe K was clearly a charity case who got his in from some other old timer who must have known him in better days. It was not unlike our studio manager, a devout born-again Christian, to engage in this kind of rehab work. This sometimes made me question my own fortune in getting the gig.

Joe K (pronounced jokay) didn’t perform much work. He often called in ill and would use up his yearly allotment of vacation and sick days by April. He spent his time carving objects from wood he would scavenge around the dumpsters of mid-town Manhattan. He worked with single-edged razor blades crafting miniature tugboats, railroad cars and other models to order for some of the old art directors. His hands were shaky and he’d often curse as he’d slice open a finger. He’d color the wood with Magic Markers and then coat them with an aerosol lacquer. That didn’t help his emphysema. He smoked at his desk all day long.

Joe K was a smelly old man. This was not a light whiff of body odor that you might expect on a co-worker after a day’s work. Joe K was epically stinky. The proper language to employ to describe the effect of his smell would need to be that used to describe the titanic struggles of history. It would take a Homer to do it justice. The stench was thick and pungent. It had tang. It reminded me of chicken soup and freshly sharpened pencils. It changed the molecular composition of other air it came into contact with and had the power to linger suspended in place a full ten minutes after Joe had passed down a hallway. It was a stink with a physical presence. Crossing it left you buffeted, like cutting across the wake left by a passing river barge.

Many of those who worked or had business in the bullpen urged the studio manager to have a word with Joe K. We’d watch from across the room as the hygiene conference unfolded. Joe protesting that he showered regularly. It was recommended he wash his clothing with greater frequency and vigor. If he did, it didn’t help. We surreptitiously placed a half dozen stick-up deodorizers under his drawing table. Joe didn’t notice them. Neither did the stink.

One of our stock art materials in those days was rubber cement that had Benzene as a main ingredient. Benzene was a known carcinogen with side effects including irreversible central nervous system damage and testicular atrophy. I would leave a large open can of it on my drawing table to scent the air. New Jersey Potpourri. I considered it a fair trade-off to be able to make it through the day.

It was hard not to like Joe K. He had an innocence and exuded an innate positivity along with his wretched stench. When he did work he was good and knew his stuff. Old School. He would never learn to use a computer but he was accurate as hell with a ruling pen. On those rare occasions that he did shower, he’d arrive at work, late, but with his head uplifted and his D.A. light and fluffy. It was heartening to see that old bastard in a good mood. It never lasted long.

Joe wasn’t aware that he had an aroma. He explained to me that he had lost his sense of smell when he was young after falling asleep in a bathtub full of beer. That’s hard living. Despite all that, Joe had a lady friend, a Miss L. who he referred to as ‘my angel’. I’m guessing this heavenly creature also had no sense of smell.

Joe K had an incredible knack for finding money. Change in a pay phone, bills on the sidewalk or in an old pair of pants. The latter must have been infrequent if it coincided with laundry day. For Joe, good fortune always traveled with bad for whenever he found money he was soon thereafter visited by some calamity usually in proportion to the sum found. A quarter on the sidewalk, a spilled cup of coffee; a fiver in the hallway, a thumb slice in the paper cutter that would take five stitches to close. One afternoon Joe returned from lunch, late, with a great find—an envelope stuffed with cash, probably drug money dropped in mid flight. We all urged Joe to look both ways when crossing the street. A few days later the black butterfly of Karma laid him low. While helping ‘my angel’ to move some suitcases from her attic to her basement, Joe missed a step and took a tumble. The suitcase hit the concrete floor of the basement first and sprang open. It was an old-fashioned Samsonite job with metal bands around its belly. These, of course, came free and Joe landed on one, tearing his rectum. Ouch.

A few weeks later Joe returned from convalescing. It was the beginning of the end. He’d also hurt his leg and since he couldn’t afford a doctor, he treated it by wrapping it tightly with an ACE bandage. That first day back Joe was tortured with a horrible itch from his crotch to his ankle. He bade me stand in front of him to block him from view of the ‘lady artists’ as he furiously scratched himself seeking relief. Was this itch a result of the fall? Joe recalled to me a similar itch about a year prior from a bad case of poison sumac. The sumac had responded to some ointment liberally applied and held in place by an ACE bandage, this same ACE bandage Joe had pressed into service after the tumble.

Joe was not good at laundry.

Soon after this Joe was diagnosed with throat cancer. It was rough but after a few weeks Joe was back at his drawing table. His voice box had been removed and he wore a thick muffler around his neck to hide the hole. It was disturbing to watch and hear him clean his blowhole at the sink in the bullpen. Once, he was in a really bad way with some sort of blockage of the blowhole. The studio manager recommended he go to the emergency room. We learned later that the blockage had been a fly that had managed to somehow crawl under and up the muffler to the blowhole.

Joe still had his sense of humor and was a great kidder. He had this small vibrating device he’d hold to his neck which would amplify the air as it passed up his throat allowing him with some difficulty to form words and sort of be understood. He’d come upon you unawares and ‘goose’ you with the little vibrator. He always had a big grin on his face, which would twist in soundless laughter as you jumped.

Joe was a dumpster diver and would often visit a landfill down by the Brooklyn docks searching for discarded treasures he could refurbish to earn an extra buck. On one trip he was mauled by a pack of wild dogs. When returning home from the hospital he was mugged on the subway. He was targeted because he couldn’t cry out for help.

Joe K never returned to work and we lost track of him after that. His replacement was some eager beaver go-getter looking for a fast rise to the top.

By Mark Spearman

The photo is of a boy of seven, nearly eight, in a freshly pressed white polo and khakis. His haircut looks new. He sits in a high-backed chair before an impossibly shiny and massive mahogany table. Early spring sun filters through a muscular Chicago skyline from a window far behind him.

But it’s his body language and expression that are most remarkable. He’s more slumped than seated. His eyes are heavy, squinting slightly, bringing to mind a long-distance trucker fighting to stay conscious after too many hours on a barren ribbon of interstate.

The picture was taken 14 years ago this April on “Take Your Child to Work Day,” and the boy is my first-born son. Here in the 47^th-floor boardroom of a $20 billion marketer of panties and brassieres, shoe polish, air fresheners, and cheesecake, he is watching a succession of awkward phrases, cryptic numbers and brand logos via Microsoft’s PowerPoint.

He’s joined by a dozen other boys and girls—the sons and daughters of the accountants, lawyers, secretaries, HR and marketing types, who toil here each day. The PowerPoint, of course, is meant to convey what mommy and daddy do at work. Slightly out of frame, I stand in the wings with a few of my colleagues and watch the same presentation with the secret hope, perhaps, that it will spark an epiphany of our own to help us divine a larger purpose to our labors.

Years later the boy, now a man old enough to legally drink strong spirits, defend his country, and order premium cable channels, will recall this moment as one of the few times in his life that he experienced boredom so intense that it was more a physical sensation than a state of mind.

In those days, the halls and public areas of this particular company boasted one of the world’s largest private art collections, which underscored its museum-like feel. As my son struggled to stay awake in the boardroom, steps away stood the Henry Moore sculpture, Falling Warrior. One of the most dramatic works of art in the collection, Moore’s faceless Warrior depicts, in a style between figuration and abstraction, a wounded soldier hovering just above the ground, in agony, raging against the darkness.

That PowerPoint show was followed by a presentation on “branding,” for which my son’s will to fight the instinct to nap was simply no match.

I’m really not sure what I’d hoped for. The year before, his older sister had visited me at work. She would later relay to her third-grade classmates that her father spends his days riding the train. He then goes to an office with a view of Lake Michigan. And he answers the phone, if it rings.

Over the years he and his siblings would find other occasions to visit dad at work, but the field of corporate communications and marketing is hard enough to explain to grown-ups, let alone children. It’s one of those pursuits that will undoubtedly leave behind artifacts that future archeologists will be unable to make sense of, like papyrus scrolls from ancient Alexandria that we can only conclude had some vague connection to commerce.

In fact, I’ve come to suspect that my children’s periodic but brief exposures to cubicles and corporate-speak contributed in no small measure to their choosing careers in art, science, and medicine.

Mind you, I’ve always taken my work seriously, and over time I think I’ve become quite good at it. On certain days, it can actually be a lot of fun. And it has caused me to cross paths with many interesting people, a few of whom have become treasured friends. But as a father of four, it has largely been a means to an end, a living to support the massive infrastructure required to deliver a child from infancy into adulthood.

In a letter to one of his sons, John Adams explained that he studied politics and war so that his children, and their children “may have liberty to pursue mathematics and philosophy…paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” Maybe the relationship between my career and those my children would pursue is not so unlike the upward trajectory envisioned for the young American republic. Or maybe I just never had the confluence of courage, opportunity, and imagination to pursue, full-time and without qualification, work I truly loved.

In either case, being able to support and encourage my children into the careers they have chosen has given me great satisfaction. And I’m actually okay with the fact that they never quite figured out what I do.

That photo of my son languished in a large Rubbermaid tub of uncategorized family images for many years, but I came across it again recently. He is much the same boy today. Skeptical, a man of facts and few words, not one to suffer fools gladly.

He’s a molecular biologist, and it is no wonder that, in that long-ago boardroom session, his young mind, wired for empirical evidence and cause and effect, bristled at zero-atomic weight concepts like message points and communications platforms.

The other day he was explaining to me some work he’d done related to the genes involved in the anti-oxidant network of the organism Plasmodium berghei. I wasn’t able to follow most of it, but I gathered from his tone that it was a matter of some importance. And I couldn’t help but notice how focused, engaged, and in the moment he was as he spoke about it. And that made me happy.

Photo provided by Mark Spearman.

More by Mark Spearman

By Lindsay Moran

Parenthood should come with one of those warnings, like certain medications—“DO NOT operate heavy machinery while using this product”—and the warning would be simple: NEVER try to combine work with childrearing.

I learned this lesson before my son even came out of the womb. The publication date of my first (and I hasten to add only) book—a memoir about working for the CIA—happened to coincide with my then unborn child’s due date: February 2005. This was not ideal timing and resulted in a debate among myself, my agent, my editor, and various members of the G.P. Putnam and Sons publicity staff about whether we should move the publication date back or forward.

I argued for publishing after the baby was born: “My understanding is that newborns sleep a lot.” I envisioned myself yakking away with the ladies on The View while my firstborn slept quietly in a Moses basket at our feet. And, of course, I would have lost all that baby weight within days of delivery, as I had a rigorous exercise regime planned for myself.

My patrons were wiser. The VP of Putnam publicity, a bear of a man (single, no kids), whom I would come to revere for his wisdom and expertise, pronounced simply: “You will NOT be able to handle book publicity and a newborn, I guarantee it.” He had a media appearance regime planned that was even more rigorous than my treadmill imaginings.

We moved the pub date back to January 2005. I was literally about to pop. Forget about those extra 10 pounds the camera adds; I had an extra 40.

My first appearance was on the O’Reilly Factor; not quite the inviting henfest with Barbara Walters and Star Jones I had envisioned. Before O’Reilly, I shared the green room with Ann Coulter, who looked savagely skinny in real life, sort of like one of those longhaired ghoulish skeletons you hang in front of your house at Halloween. She sat cross-legged, loudly smacking gum and even more loudly ranting about the liberals, until she finally turned to me, pointed at my stomach, and said, “Can you actually feel it moving inside there?”

“Yes,” I replied, although I stopped myself before asking if she’d like to feel the baby kick. I feared the bony claw of Ann Coulter on my stomach might induce early labor. Later, everyone said O’Reilly went easy on me—my husband and I replayed countless times a clip of him saying, “Well…you MAY be right…”—and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because I was pregnant.

“You do realize,” my wise publicist said, “that some people will think you left the CIA just because you met a guy and got pregnant?”

Really? Becoming a spy had been a childhood dream of mine, and working at the CIA was the culmination—if not total fulfillment—of that dream. Leaving the Agency, with which I’d quickly become disillusioned, had been a wrenching decision that had nothing to do with my desire, still latent then, to start a family.

Anyway, the CIA goes to far greater lengths to make life easier for a working Mom than does real life (or freelance writing). It would have been wiser—not least of which financially—for me to stay at the CIA and help to provide my family financial security, and health insurance.

That cold week in January, I waddled from one studio to another: Anderson Cooper, Good Morning America, CNN’s American Morning, and various radio shows, which were my favorite because you couldn’t tell that I was the size of an aircraft carrier. Inevitably on the TV talk shows, the host or hostess failed to mention that I was pregnant—granted, there are more interesting things to discuss with a former spy—and the camera would pan away from my face to my ginormous stomach. I just looked like a CIA operative who’d gone hopelessly to seed.

Eventually, the book and I made it to the The View but it was two years later when it had come out in paperback and I was the seasoned mother of two. I left the boys at home in Washington D.C. and my husband’s care while I traveled to New York for the appearance the following day. I was so ridiculously excited to be free of my kids in Manhattan that I was like an Amish girl duringrumspringa—that period during adolescence when they’re basically encouraged to go wilding in order to determine their commitment to the church and lifestyle. I met my then last-standing single girlfriend and her British boyfriend at a bar and proceeded to set up an I.V. line of Martinis. The next morning, snuggled in a semi-circle between Joy Behar and Star Jones, my nervous sweat must have smelled 80 proof. Later, I watched the clip and came to the disheartening realization that not only did I look better at 8 1/2 months pregnant; motherhood had rendered me completely inarticulate. Maybe it was just the previous night’s binge, but since the kids, I could accurately field the frequent interviewer question, “So how many languages do you speak?” with, “I struggle to speak English.”

After my first son Jesse was born, in addition to freelance writing, I became occupied with various speaking and consulting engagements. Planning for these inevitably required protracted negotiations with my mother and husband about who would care for the baby. One such gig occurred when Jesse was about four months old and still subsisting entirely on breast milk. Diligent new mom that I was, I’d pumped enough in advance to fortify a famine-stricken third world nation. If you opened our freezer, you’d find a sack of green peas and about forty plastic containers of frozen breast milk.

For this particular engagement, I was to speak to a group of students at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and so had a ticket to fly from Washington D.C. to Boston. My “Medela Pump in Style” caused quite a stir with Airport Security, and I was made to open the mysterious black backpack—which even I would admit looked suspicious—and turn on the device. Luckily one of the TSA agents was a recent mom who rolled her eyes as her male colleagues examined the breast pump like it was a dinosaur bone they’d dug up; she waved me through. I would sooner have left one of my breasts behind than gone without the pump. Still, despite my best efforts— pumping and dumping right before my talk at the Kennedy School—toward the end of the Q&A, I could feel myself becoming engorged. Luckily, I was wearing a blazer that covered the two darkening, dampening spots on my blouse.

Once I tried to combine a writing assignment—a travel piece on Richmond, Virginia for The New York Times—with a family excursion. My preconceived notion of the trip was my husband expertly manning the boys while I sat in cafes and pontoon boats, taking notes. Instead, I pushed an unwieldy double stroller with two screaming kids over the bumpy terrain of one after another Civil War site, and dragged the entire family through the dusty Museum of the Confederacy, where the significance of Jeb Stuart’s plumed hat was entirely lost on our boys, then ages three and one. That night, both kids projectile vomited all over our stately room in the Jefferson Hotel. I ended up having to return to Richmond on my own dime a week later to re-conduct research without the distraction of the kids.

Certainly as the boys have gotten older—now four and six—I’ve been able, occasionally, to work without disastrous effect. But it never becomes easy, nor does it cease to be frustrating. I’ve conducted phone interviews while nursing an infant. I’ve let my kids watch back-to-back Sponge Bob episodes for hours just to keep them quiet while I’m trying to answer emails. I prefer to communicate almost entirely through email because nothing spells unprofessional more than a kid incanting “Mommy!  Mommy!  Mommy” at some ear-splitting decibel in the background. I’ve spent countless hours when I ought to have been preparing for a talk or a meeting instead drafting elaborate and detailed instructions for my husband regarding: what and when to feed the kids, where to find their socks and sippy cups and the Epipen, and the importance of thorough post-potty wiping.

Whenever I’m approached with a professional opportunity, I marvel that anyone takes me seriously at all anymore.

While I never paid much attention to the struggles of my CIA colleagues who were mothers—single people routinely fail to comprehend or even notice the hardships of raising kids—later, I would look back in awe at the fortitude of these Spy-Moms. Sure, almost any and every means of employment is difficult to maintain, let alone thrive at, when you’re a mother. But few require you to lead double—or sometimes even triple and quadruple—lives; to venture out in the middle of the night and meet shady informants and spend hours sitting in parked cars inhaling secondhand smoke all the while wondering if your kids will wake up and demand—in the desperate and high-pitched way that only they can—to know where you are. Angelina Jolie couldn’t have made the movie Salt without a veritable battalion of nannies, let alone LIVED it. I have the utmost respect and admiration for these women who somehow managed to be both Supermoms and Superheroes.

About two years ago, I professionally threw in the towel. I decided that conceiving of ideas and sending out pitches to publications, and then—if I was lucky enough to spark the interest of some editor—toiling over an article that I would have to “rework” about fifty times, and for which I was always paid a pittance, was hardly worth the time and energy sapped from my relationship with the boys.

People ask me all the time, “Have you written any more books lately?”  Truth be told, I haven’t even managed to read a book since Jesse was born.

I tell everyone that 2012 will be my year. That’s when both kids will be in school from nine to four and, save for the bouts of illness and trips to the gym and the highly over-rated cleaning of the house, I should have time. Right?

I look forward to September of that year with both excitement and trepidation. I know that I am ungodly fortunate to have been blessed with healthy and (to me) endlessly fascinating children, but I won’t deny that motherhood can be mind-numbingly dull. I just hope that when my working brain finally thaws, I won’t find it too far past its “use by” date. I hope as the kids’ worlds revolve less around me, and as they develop independence and passions of their own, that I will be able to regain and reawaken mine.

More than anything, I hope that—in spite of the exhaustion and frustration and feelings of self-doubt and second-guessing about choices I have made—I will still feel as if, parentally and professionally, I am doing “the right thing,” which, like every other mother out there, is merely the best that I can.

Photo provided by Lindsay Moran.