One cannot be too young or too slim, I realized during my job search in South Florida.
A rigorous diet had left me with too little energy to spin elaborate, self-serving tales to the personnel managers who I hoped would make my dream of living in Florida a reality. Nor did I feel the need to lie. My work record was outstanding, and my skills were extensive. Plus, I could forestall any semi-legal fishing for answers to the day-care question. I told my interviewers up front: “My children are grown.”
I didn’t get the first 14 jobs I applied for. In frustration, I gobbled pasta and assessed each interview. I identified a pattern. The moment I said, “My children are grown,” the interviewer’s interest and enthusiasm slumped. One young man even helped me to the door, as if my age made ambulating across a level surface a hazard to my brittle bones.
Sucking in my stomach, I revised my personal history.
“The little ones are living in Illinois with their father,” I told the next interviewer, and the next and the next and the next. Was it a lie? They were all living in Illinois, in their own apartments and homes. Their father was living in Illinois too. I guess every mother has earned the right to think of her sons as her “little ones” even when they are 6 feet tall.
I was offered each job I applied for as the mother of “out-of-state little ones.” But by then, I was too enraged to work for what appeared to me to be age-discriminating cretins.
When I returned to Chicago, construction on the Kennedy Expressway had never looked so good-or long underwear felt so cozy. I was offered the perfect job despite admitting to being a 46-year-old grandmother whose bikini days have gone the way of hula hoops.
And then I learned that I too was susceptible to the age factor.
One of my first duties on the new job was mentoring a young colleague’s first printing project. The printer with whom she wanted to work was as young as my oldest son. I was alarmed, but spoke in generalities about balancing experience against the lowest bid. She contracted with the young printer anyway. My job was to guide, not to order, so I hid my dismay. I would instruct her in refusing to accept the work if it arrived in unacceptable form.
A perfect printing job arrived before the deadline. Now that young printer is my only printer, and I have recommended him to all my colleagues. But if I had been ordering rather than mentoring that first project, I would never have contracted with him, never enjoyed the extraordinary, excellent service he provides.
The young man has not shown me the same age discrimination I was prepared to show him. Although I am as old as his mother, he recommends me to his clients and brokers my free-lance work. Thanks to the kid I was eager to discriminate against, I earned enough extra money this year to fly over Florida on my way to Belize.
And thanks to my good-corrected with bifocals-vision, I can see that I’ve outgrown the nude beach. It’s obvious that any romantic meetings at a swim-up bar could unfold only on moonless nights. But that’s OK. Fully dressed, and with grandchildren’s photographs falling out of my portfolio, I can make a living in Chicago-and eat pasta too.
