My Parents’ Memory of My Dad Losing His Job − 3 May, 2008
In my story Why I Had No Eighteenth Birthday, I described the terrible six-month period while my father, an attorney, looked for work. I shared the story with my father, who shared it with my mother. Both of them had somewhat different memories of the particulars of those events. I am not surprised; they were the adults living this nightmare out in full. However, my father concurred that I had pretty accurately captured the “family worries and tensions” of that period. I returned to the story and made the corrections necessary to make it reflect reality.
There are some important aspects of that story that I want to describe separately, so that they don’t get buried under the mound of stories I have written since then. Knowing that it’s unlikely most of you will want to re-read the story if you have already read it, I will explain one interesting difference here. My mom remembers that I already had applied for a scholarship at the women’s college to which I’d been accepted. I received the phone call announcing my award of a full scholarship while talking to her. She remembers bursting into tears of relief at the fortuitous news.
My father also explained what losing his job meant to him at that time, aside from a tremendous amount of stress.
He tells me that he had really needed to leave the firm because it had not been a good fit for him. He became a better lawyer at the new firm because it gave him much more responsibility and enabled him to become a successful trial lawyer. Although he concedes that if he’d stayed at the original firm, today he’d “stinking rich”. But he explains that he would have “lost his soul”.
I am glad he lost his job, too. I cannot see him having stayed only to lose his soul. But I told him that I think he is stinking rich if riches may be measured by having a pair of loving children, a successful marriage, a stimulating life, a rich spiritual inner life, many talents, the ability to travel all over the world, and much more.
There are some important aspects of that story that I want to describe separately, so that they don’t get buried under the mound of stories I have written since then. Knowing that it’s unlikely most of you will want to re-read the story if you have already read it, I will explain one interesting difference here. My mom remembers that I already had applied for a scholarship at the women’s college to which I’d been accepted. I received the phone call announcing my award of a full scholarship while talking to her. She remembers bursting into tears of relief at the fortuitous news.
My father also explained what losing his job meant to him at that time, aside from a tremendous amount of stress.
He tells me that he had really needed to leave the firm because it had not been a good fit for him. He became a better lawyer at the new firm because it gave him much more responsibility and enabled him to become a successful trial lawyer. Although he concedes that if he’d stayed at the original firm, today he’d “stinking rich”. But he explains that he would have “lost his soul”.
I am glad he lost his job, too. I cannot see him having stayed only to lose his soul. But I told him that I think he is stinking rich if riches may be measured by having a pair of loving children, a successful marriage, a stimulating life, a rich spiritual inner life, many talents, the ability to travel all over the world, and much more.
