Member-only story
Work: Where I fought the battle of the sexes, and won.
All men are not sexist. All white people are not racist. However, all people are susceptible to thinking the way their forbears thought and that means we’re all susceptible to sexist and racist thinking — whether we like it or not.
This is the story of how being a woman has been at the center of every job I’ve ever had and how I’ve learned to make my way in spite of it — and, in some cases, because of it.
My mother taught me my work ethic. Like most women with children, she worked 24/7. Sure, she took breaks, but when you are responsible for the well-being of a man and three children, breaks are short and can be curtailed with zero notice, at any time.
Women of my mother’s generation never had the luxury of working from 9–5. They never came home to a hot meal someone else cooked for them. Nobody ever waited on them. Nobody ever woke them up with a hot cup of coffee or made their breakfast before work.
For women like my mother, work started before anybody else was up and didn’t end until everybody else was fast asleep — and sometimes not even then. She might still need to clean up the kitchen, iron or darn some socks. It didn’t matter if she got sick either — nobody stepped in to do her work, ever.
