Future endeavors.
Somebody once told me I have lucky money stars.
And whether it’s luck or hustle or some combination thereof, it’s always been pretty true. At least when it comes to employment.
After getting myself through college by squeezing every last penny I could out of grants, scholarships, and subsidized loans plus after-school jobs folding jeans and making lattes, I went to law school. (Because what does one do with an English degree anyways?)
Or, rather, I tried law school. I spent a semester at a private, expensive, mid-tier school on the East Coast where I made it exactly until fall break before realizing that law school was not for me. Leaving law school is a story for another time. The only really important thing to know right now is that one semester spent learning torts, contracts, and legal writing DOUBLED the loans I had carried forward from undergrad. And in the early winter of 2006, I found myself unenrolled, unemployed, and about to run out my repayment grace period.
My resume didn’t amount to much but it must have been interesting enough to get a loose connection to notice it. I soon found myself living in my grandparents basement while I started my first internship in Account Services & Brand Planning at a small Twin Cities ad agency that’s long since been swallowed up.
From there, I leapfrogged to my first “real” job—with a title and business cards!—at a much larger shop working on a luxury car account. (I found out later that my brief stint in law school had been intriguing enough that it had earned me the interview.) I can still remember the awe I felt those first few weeks as I sat in on conference calls and department meetings before partying with colleagues in rooftop bars that had been bought out for the night.
I was too young and naive to know that a recession was coming.
The next few years were rough for everybody but particularly awful in my industry. Many years later, I’d be having coffee in the North Loop with one of my favorite recruiters who would lower her voice as she talked about those years as the ones when there had been “bodies in the water.”
But I made it through unscathed somehow. And even though I had worked on accounts that had been put up for review or even lost, I never got my server access revoked while I sat stunned in the small conference room next to HR. My colleagues never received an email saying that I was no longer an employee and wishing me the best in my future endeavors.
It wouldn’t be until many, many years later that I would experience my first brush with a not-entirely-unexpected layoff. (Which, if I’m being honest, felt like more of a relief than anything.) And in a decade+ career, I only once had to participate in tough decision making around who would stay and who would go.
Like I said: lucky.
Which made it even harder to let our “helper” know last week that her time with our family would be ending.
This is the point where I feel the need to disclaim that domestic help feels like a necessity here in a way that it didn’t in the last post. {It’s also the point where I feel the need to disclaim that I know my privilege is showing.}
At our last post, having a nanny who also assisted with household tasks was an affordable luxury that made sense for our family. Here, I honestly don’t know how I’d function without somebody better equipped than me to navigate managing a household in Delhi.
Still, having domestic staff is something I haven’t totally come to peace with yet. Is it nice to have an extra set of hands to help with Nicolas, keep the house tidy, do most of the shopping and some of the cooking? Absolutely. But it also means managing an employee who literally sees my dirty laundry. (And that still feels really weird. Even if I do all the laundry myself.)
Minor discomfort aside, I’ve learned that it’s really important that whoever is inside our house for 40 hours a week is a really good fit.
I should have listened to my gut during the interview. But I had been desperate: we arrived on the tail end of transfer season and only one of the six or seven candidates I contacted was even available. I had figured “good enough” would be.
Over the course of a few weeks, I realized more and more that it just wasn’t. There was nothing particularly egregious but enough little things added up. Eventually I decided that it would be better to risk being helper-less than to keep moving forward in the status quo.
I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy conversation. So I prepped myself by thinking about what I’d say using my favorite filter for such times: is it true? is it kind? is it necessary? is it necessary right now?
Letting her go was both easier and harder than I had imagined it would be.
I explained clearly and firmly that it wasn’t working out, thanked her for her time with our family, and handed over final wages and an earnings & leave slip. I helped her gather the couple of things that she had been keeping at our house and then walked her to the door.
As she left, she remarked quietly that she was simply “unlucky.”
My head tugged at my mouth to blurt out a word of comfort. But my heart told me to stay silent. Anything I could have come up with would have been a way to make me feel better — certainly not kind and maybe even untrue.
And besides, who am I to say what’s luck?
