Reality Chick

This week I’m prominently quoted in the Society for Human Resource Management news magazine on the effectiveness – or not – of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

“Many of our fellow citizens with disabilities are unemployed … they want to work, and they can work,” said President George H.W. Bush when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law on July 26, 1990.

Nearly 20 years later, President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 30, 2009, National Disability Employment Awareness Month proclamation, “We must seek to provide opportunities for individuals with disabilities. Only then can Americans with disabilities achieve full participation in the workforce and reach the height of their ambition.”

Yet for some the dream of meaningful employment remains as elusive in 2010 as it was in 1990. And there is some evidence that the ADA might have made things worse.

“Analysts have noted a decline in the employment rate of people with disabilities in recent years, and some evaluations of the ADA indicate that, rather than increasing employment, the Act may have reduced employment for those with disabilities,” noted the November 2008 edition of the Monthly Labor Review published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

“Although the ADA was intended to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities by prohibiting discrimination in the workplace and by requiring employers to accommodate the needs of workers with disabilities, economic theory is more ambiguous,” the BLS publication continued. “The major argument economists have made is that if employers perceive the costs of accommodation to be high, they will refrain from hiring workers with disabilities.”

As of June 2010 less than 22 percent of people with disabilities of working age are employed—compared to 70 percent of people without disabilities—according to BLS statistics.

Individual Experiences Vary

In the late 1980s, while working as a public relations director for a well-known Wall Street firm, Christina Gombar was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS)—a condition characterized by incapacitating fatigue and problems with concentration and short-term memory.

“When I got sick I was given a choice of long-term disability or a severance package,” she told SHRM Online. “As I was young and didn’t think the illness would be permanent, I took a package, which I used as a springboard to a downscaled career. This was great for improving my health, but didn’t provide enough income or benefits.”

When Gombar was able to return to work full time she sought accommodations, such as the opportunity to work from home a couple of days a week, a “perk” that was resented by some of her peers: “people just didn’t return my e-mails or look at the work I sent in,” she said.

“No one seemed to ‘get it,’ ” Gombar said. “When people think ‘disabled,’ they think: blind or wheelchair, not rosy-cheeked and mobile. I looked healthy and I did stellar work so they couldn’t let go of the idea that I freelanced part time by choice, not necessity.”

Deborah Lewis, a warehouse manager at a big-box retailer, experienced a similar reaction when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by widespread muscle, ligament and tendon pain and fatigue. Though Lewis’ co-workers knew her to be a hard worker prior to her diagnosis, she said their attitudes changed after her physician placed restrictions on the type of work she could do as a result of “a condition they had never heard of and couldn’t see.”

“Some people actually told me I was putting on,” Lewis told SHRM Online. “I have been dealing with that attitude from a lot of people now for over 20 years. People won’t believe what they can’t see.”

Neither Gombar nor Lewis is employed today.

“Here is the issue for many disabled people: they may be well enough to work part time, but the ‘Catch 22’ is part-time work doesn’t come with the benefits they need, and people with chronic illnesses always have higher medical costs than the healthy,” Gombar explained. “A few private insurance companies allow disabled workers to earn something like 5 percent of their original salary on top of their disability pay. My policy forbids any earnings.”

“I was unable to find any kind of job for over four years,” Lewis said. “The little box on a lot of applications that asks if you have any limits or can you lift, bend, reach and so on, put me out of the race every time.” She now teaches art classes at her home-based studio.

Yet Gombar and Lewis want jobs.

“I would give anything in the world if I could work, but now it’s much more obvious that I am disabled,” Lewis said. “I can’t even get an application. No one wants to take a chance that something might happen to me and that I would sue them.”

“So many employers are missing out on well-educated people just because they don’t fit into their image of what an employee should look like, act like or sound like,” she added.

“I would love to go back to work … but no one wants to hire someone with a health/work history like mine,” Gombar said. “I would love to just freelance, but again—not enough income and no health benefits. I’m stuck.”

An Employer’s Experience

Susan Loynd, SPHR, director of human resources for Washington County Mental Health Services (WCMHS) in Montpelier, Vt., an agency that helps people with disabilities find employment, has first-hand experience employing people with disabilities. Many of WCMHS’s employees have cognitive impairments, developmental disabilities and mental disabilities and work as “client-staff” offering peer support and a positive role model for other clients.

“Our client-staff are some of our best employees because … they’ve been marginalized … they’ve been treated really badly,” Loynd said. “When we hire them they are so thrilled to be given an opportunity, to give back to their community, to be paying their way.”

“Employers need to see that people with mental disabilities are just like everyone else,” Loynd added. “People have these stereotypes about disability [but] until they work beside someone else they just don’t know.”

Loynd, a member of SHRM’s Workplace Diversity Special Expertise Panel, said the stigma surrounding mental illness is an ongoing barrier for some individuals. “People are fearful that someone is going to yell and scream and behave badly,” she told SHRM Online. Yet when crises occur in her community, Loynd said their clients are not usually the ones to blame. “It’s people who are not aware they are experiencing some sort of psychological issue,” she said. “Our clients have been in the system for many years so they know what triggers them and know what the resources are,” she explained, and are “usually in a better place to manage that kind of stress.”

Many Face Bias

Individuals with disabilities face the same biases today that they faced before the ADA was enacted, according to Mike Purkey, executive director of ICON Community Services, an employment service that specializes in placing people with disabilities. “We’ve come a long way baby, but we’re not there yet,” he told SHRM Online. 

The ADA was “a much needed piece of legislation,” Purkey said. “It made people a lot more aware of people with disabilities and the fact that they are in the workforce.” But he said that many employers lack understanding and hold preconceived notions about people with disabilities—whether they acknowledge them or not.

“I don’t think the employer wakes up in the morning and says ‘I am not going to hire people with disabilities because they are trouble,’” he said. “But [the ADA] scares businesses, who fear they will get sued.”

Kate Cullen, a human resource professional in the Washington, D.C., area, said ongoing education can help hiring managers overcome ignorance and risk-aversion, which she said are the biggest obstacles to the full employment and integration of people with disabilities into the life of an organization.

Competitive Advantage

Companies lauded for achieving high performance from large numbers of employees with cognitive disabilities—such as Walgreens and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital—started with a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve, and believed that even those with cognitive disabilities would be assets.

And, as SHRM has reported previously, they were right.

Such success stories can motivate other businesses to follow suit.

Nereida “Neddy” Perez, vice president for inclusion and diversity at National Grid, one of the world’s largest utility companies, said that in 2009 her company began making “a concentrated effort to establish strong external partnerships with professional associations interested in the advancement of people with disabilities.”

“We established two new employee resource groups (Veterans and Enabling),” Perez added, “to help increase awareness about career advancement opportunities within the company as well as help us identify areas where as a company we could eliminate obstacles/challenges.”

And the company anticipated the needs of applicants and employees with disabilities by completing a facilities audit and by developing a team approach to workplace accommodations “to ensure that we address all of the needs of the employee,” she explained.

But Perez, a member of SHRM’s Workplace Diversity Special Expertise Panel, said there was more her organization could do. “We will look for ways to connect our internship program to any organizations that provide interns who are disabled,” she told SHRM Online. The company plans to train managers on interviewing skills for working with people with disabilities as well.

Some Mostly Positive Experiences

Cynthia E. Kazalia, a placement specialist for New Directions Career Center, a Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit organization that assists individuals in career transition, said her bone tumors might impact her range of motion and balance but they haven’t affected her career.

“Is it possible that I did not get a position over the course of my career due to the bone tumors?” she asked. “Sure. But an interviewer might have also turned me away because I laughed too loud or reminded them of their ex-wife.

“That said, I am not unenlightened about the existence of prejudice,” Kazalia told SHRM Online. “Once, on a summer job, an attorney told a joke that ended with, ‘That’s what happens when you hire the handicapped.’ A horrified look then crossed her face as she focused in on my presence. ‘Oh, Cindy,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The apology left me baffled until it occurred to me that she considered me disabled.”

“John,” a mid-fifties senior engineer with a congenital birth defect of the spine, said he has had no difficulties gaining employment throughout his career because people with his degree were in demand and employers were willing to “look past” his disability, which requires him to use braces, crutches or a wheelchair to get around. He requested anonymity for this article because he said his employer, a major defense contractor, “thinks they are doing what is best for me and I don’t want feelings to be hurt.”

“With my latest job change my employer has probably gone out of their way more than any other to make physical plant changes to make my life easier,” he noted. “However at the same time, in some areas they don’t seem to listen to my true needs and as a result money and time is wasted changing things that don’t need to be changed while ignoring things that do. This all seems to fall under the category of ‘I think I know what’s best for you and you don’t,’ ” he added.

Though his experiences have been largely positive, he too has faced a few challenges.

“For the most part my input and work efforts appear to be respected and appreciated,” he said. “However there are those who, for whatever reason, appear to be very uncomfortable with and around me.”

And in some cases, he said, he is treated like “the poster child” for those in the facility with disabilities.  Therefore I end up with trying to deal with the often uncomfortable task of speaking for all those in our facility with a disability.”

The Legacy of the ADA

Loynd said the ADA was a good start. “I think there are a number of folks who, but for the ADA, may not have had an opportunity at all,” she said.

Paul Miller, program director of the Green Mountain Workforce supported employment program at WCMHS, said that the ADA helps “keep bigger companies honest” and helps to create a dialogue: “It’s like having the big guy on the block standing behind you while you’re asking the kid next door for your $5 back.”

Perez said the ADA has “helped to raise awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities and establish guidelines that help businesses better understand what is expected from them.” But she said more work is needed, and that HR professionals “need to take the lead in addressing and eliminating the unconscious biases that exist in our work environments that sometimes impede the hiring of people with disabilities.”

This means holding leaders accountable for recruiting people with disabilities, she said, as well as challenging leaders’ perspectives about people with disabilities “the moment that someone makes an inappropriate comment or exhibits a behavior that is not professional.

“As HR professionals we have a responsibility to ensure that we effectively leverage the talents and skills of all employees,” Perez added. “If we see and know that there are barriers in the workplace that prevent an employee from being successful then we have a responsibility to address the issue.”

“Given the anticipated labor shortages that are coming up, look to a nontraditional workforce,” Loynd said. “Don’t back yourself into a corner when you are looking to hire people.

“Instead of putting an ad in the paper and talking to the first three people that walk through the door, widen the net,” Loynd said. “I guarantee if any one of these HR professionals called [WCMHS] and said ‘I need a couple of employees’ [agency staff members] would fall out of their chairs. We have a backlog of people waiting to work.”

An Open Mind

“Half the battle is having an open mind. Realize that you have many folks working for you who have mental health challenges right now,” Loynd said. “I work with these folks every day—there is no difference between folks that have a mental disability and anyone else.” 

“While we should not let disability be a barrier to employment, we also need to be mindful that we don’t hire an applicant ‘because’ of their disability,” Miller noted. “Applicants are not their diagnosis.

“We need to remind all staff and community members to think outside of the disability,” Miller said. “Ideally, we should be treating everyone the same. Everyone is important, but not necessarily unique or special.”

When Purkey meets with business leaders he sometimes asks them what a person with a disability looks like, or to name a person with a disability. He then uses examples such as former Sen. Bob Dole—whose war wounds left him with limited use of only one hand—and Sen. John McCain—who cannot lift his arms above his shoulders—to illustrate that people with disabilities are everywhere and can hold positions of power.

“If we stop looking at disability as something scary, abhorrent, we can look at it as ability,” he said. “We all have things we do really well and things we don’t.”

 http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/Diversity/Articles/Pages/HastheADAMadeaDifference.aspx

Therese Borchard struggled with manic depression during her college years, but went on to earn a master’s degree and establish a stellar career in journalism and book publishing.  But the hormonal shifts of motherhood, a geographic move, as well as the switch from sociable on-site office work to an isolated, home-bound freelance life, created a perfect storm of factors for mental illness to burgeon once more.

After a harrowing, months-long stay in an institution, she returned to home and children and went on to become the author of the hit blog, Beyond Blue on Belief.net, where she shares her continuing struggles with anxiety and manic depression, from her own particular Catholic perspective. This year she published her memoir, Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression and Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes, along with The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Guide, which offers concise techniques to help anyone living with a chronic illness get through the demands of a day.

I interviewed her for Working with Chronic Illness on how she manages to work, raise a family and keep her manic depression under control.

 CG: What are your biggest challenges in navigating your health condition, your job and your home life? 

TB: I suppose my biggest challenge is managing my health in a way that I can concentrate enough to meet my work deadlines. Fortunately, my schedule is flexible enough that I can write extra blog posts on a day where I’m feeling good, and bank them for the days my head isn’t good for anything. But I’m always nervous to commit to a meeting in person, because I don’t know how I will be feeling that day. So I fake it as best I can. I’ve had to do that a lot lately with the publicity efforts for my books: I’ve had to plaster a smile on my face and spit out nice sound bites all the while I am thinking that I wish I were dead.

 What is a typical work day like? 

I drop off the kids at school at 8, and usually work out for an hour. From 10 to 2 are my golden hours, where I try to get the posts written, or follow up on a story I was supposed to write for other magazines and newspapers I write for. If it’s sunny outside, I will take 20 minutes and eat outside, because it’s crucial that I get that sunshine and fresh air. By 2:30 I usually need to pick up the kids, start homework, get organized for lacrosse practice, etc. My work window is fairly small, so I try to get as much done as possible in the hours they are at school. And two days usually go to doctors’ appointments, blood work, and therapy.

What, if any accommodations do you/your employers make for yourself? (I know you have to stop yourself from overwork sometimes!)  

My editor, Holly, is very understanding that things like Twitter tutorials and SEO (search engine optimization) training can sometimes activate my inner energizer bunny that I want at rest. It’s difficult, especially in the blogosphere, not to make my writing my life and tweet all hours of the day. I need boundaries between work and home life. I try my best to shut off my computer when I’m not working, and to leave it closed during the weekend. I find that when I ignore my sensitivity to online chatter, that I will have to invest a lot of time into getting myself well again … so I try to be as prudent as possible. 

 Your blog is about coping with mental illness, so your employers knew of your condition. But your illness is “invisible” — you look super healthy, you run, etc. Did they really know what it entails, how hard it is, that it could ever become overwhelming?    

 That’s a good question. I think Holly is as understanding and empathetic as any editor could be. And the manager editor, Michael Kress, and the editor-in-chief, Ju-Don Roberts, too. They want me to publish the real stuff – like the video where I sobbed and said depression wasn’t always pretty – as that is what best speaks to people in the throes of depression. So if I can’t stay as up on current events or celebrity gossip as some of the other bloggers, they are fine with that. Sometimes I need to write pieces a few weeks in advance, to give myself a little time of rest in a depressive cycle. That’s not a great formula for search engine optimization—as you want to write on all the hottest search terms—but if the content is authentic and resonates with folks, that’s what is important.

 You started out with great qualifications, a masters degree, a magazine career and book publishing. After you had your kids and a breakdown (no connection there!) — you had to rebuild. Can you detail those challenges a bit? How did you negotiate with your prospective employer?

 All I can say is I had to take it in very small steps. I was unable to produce anything for about six months. Every time I sat down to write, it was awful. I would just cry and cry.

 So I relied on my great aunt’s advice to just take it very slow, one step at a time. I first signed up to be a writing tutor at the Naval Academy, because I wanted to see if I could concentrate for three hours a week. Getting through some of those first papers was more challenging than getting my masters degree. But, at the end of that, I had the confidence to ask an editor if I could have back my assignment of bi-weekly columns. Twice a week I had to come up with something coherent on paper. That was quite a challenge, too! But together, the tutoring and bi-weekly column, gave me the self-assurance to pursue “Beyond Blue,” the blog, and then later, “Beyond Blue,” the book.

 Negotiating is VERY hard, especially when you are feeling so unsure of yourself. What I did was to speak with anyone I could who might have information that would help me negotiate. I then pretended I was them … my friends who had just gone through this and came out with favorable working agreements. I told myself that it wasn’t me who would be doing the talking, but my friend, and that somehow made it easier.

 http://workingwithchronicillness.com/2010/06/not-just-surviving-but-thriving-while-living-with-depression/

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/06/working-with-chronic-illness.html

This month I’m quoted in Elle.com on how I’ve managed to stay married so long:

“Many friends who witness my husband and me sparring say, ‘I don’t think you are going to make it.’ But in fact, our constant conflicts have kept us together,” explains Christina Gombar, 50, a writer. “Nothing is sat on, it all comes out right away, and it’s gone.” Fighting beats fuming quietly and is a great way to air problems. It’s also an excellent way to take a stand, empathically defend an important position, and provide essential information about yourself.  Gombar and her husband can safely be blunt with each other. “We don’t take offense because it’s the norm for us,” she says. “All of our friends who worried about our disagreements are divorced!”

 Gombar sees her husband, Peter, as sort of a hedonist, with a passion for good scotch, fine cigars, and fancy steak houses. “He loves to spend money,” says Gombar, who tends to penny-pinch. Although she tried to rein him in early on in their marriage, she realized over time that she couldn’t change his fundamental nature. “Live and let live,” says Gombar, who has discovered that her frugality and his spendthrift ways seem to balance out. She recognizes that spending money, as long as it doesn’t bankrupt them, is his way of feeling safe and secure.

          In fact, limiting what someone spends can create a deprivation mentality, according to Steven Stosny, PhD … “Knowing that you can’t have something creates an unconscious longing for it,” he says.

http://www.elle.com/Life-Love/Sex-Relationships/How-to-Make-Your-Marriage-Merrier

My short memoir on  life at AIG named runner-up in the Manhattan Media Contest. Read it here:

                                    Elegy for an Organization

“In the federal trial, AIG alleges that ousted CEO Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg left AIG in 2005 with 290 million shares of illegally seized stock, since sold for an estimated $4.3 billion …” 

I could tell you about AIG.

That I was one of the no-name people, not the elites who screwed up.

That I made $20,000 a year.

That my office was on the narrow crooked end of Wall Street.

Where on the most glorious sunny day, it was dusk out my manager’s window.

That my own office was three mustard-colored walls and one grey, free-standing partition.

I could tell you that I was terrified.

Of the big buildings, the air of mystery, the sub-CIA cowboy culture.

Of the numbers I didn’t understand.

I could tell you that our P.R. policy was Don’t Talk to the Press.

That the building foundations shook when USA Today named our chief, Hank, the  seventh highest-paid CEO in the nation, or was it world?

I could tell you that not only in the company, but all over Wall Street, everyone knew that A.I.G. meant All Is Greenberg.

I could tell you that if Spitzer hadn’t forced Hank out, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

That AIG’s been brain-dead ever since.

I could tell you I have a soft-spot for Hank.

I could tell you that this company was a family when I had none.

The year people died, went mad, out of business, into rehab, into nursing homes.

I could tell you that for years I ignored the half page ads in the Help Wanteds

With the tall letters that said WALL STREET.

That I only answered AIG’s because it didn’t.

That when I learned it was Wall Street and didn’t answer their calls.

That they kept calling.

That my boss at AIG was the first man I worked for who didn’t harass me.

That he was a blue collar New Jersey newsman.

That his staff called him Bambi behind his back.

I could tell you that this was the year the stock market dropped.

That a rising tide lifts all boats, but hurricanes stir up gold.

I could tell you I made the best friends of my life there.

That we drank vodka in the morning but worked through the night.

That AIG’s unofficial motto was “We shall pay no claim before its time.”

That it didn’t need a diversity program, its workers came from over the world.

Its interns from housing projects.

I could tell you we were proud of the sub-CIA cowboy culture.

 That I came to have more respect for financial people than writers.

That the Ivy arts grads I roomed with after college couldn’t hack the real world.

That they left their jobs and lived off their parents.

I could tell you that people on Wall Street don’t take money from their families.

They support them.

That AIG didn’t care about pedigrees.

Just work.

I could tell you that on my floor Jews and Arabs were friends.

            That there was a transsexual, a platinum punk rocker, and a girl with purple hair, (me.)

I could tell you all about the married closet queen and his 400-pound secretary.

I could tell you how I learned to use a personal computer there.

That on the computer cube wall hung the Leviathan company chart.

For internal use only.

A complex web of holding companies, limited partnerships, and wholly-owned subsidiaries.

Chilean pension funds, Indonesian customs bonds anyone?

Four hundred boxes, cross-linked, to outsmart the auditors.

I could tell you that when Hank made a joke people were afraid to laugh.

That his oldest son Jeffrey was overworked.

That his second son Evan looked like a movie star.

That he fired both sons, or they left of their own volition.

And became CEOs elsewhere.

I could tell you that when Hank entered a party, he scattered crowds like a smoke bomb.

That he was five foot six, or looked it.

That he was 60 and looked 40.

That the one time my work brought me within feet of him, he winked.

I could tell you that I remember what I wore that day and what it cost.

That I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I could tell you that my whole life flowed from that building.

That it split me in two and broke up my home.

That when I worked there, I moved to a seedy hotel.

That AIG was more home than hotel.

That it was both prison and refuge.

I could tell you that I couldn’t afford to leave the hotel till I got a better job.

That I left AIG after 18 months for a $10,000 raise.

That I’d have stayed for $5,000.

I could tell you that I understood why AIG was cheap.

That by the time I left I understood numbers.

About shareholder value.

About managing risk.

I could tell you that AIG wasn’t like other Wall Street Casinos.

I could tell you that once a week Hank went through his rolodex to call someone in.           

And rip his face off.

That I wasn’t important enough for this to ever happen to me.

That the old Chinese waiters were equity millionaires.

That the upper echelons lived in a culture of fear.

            That they worked with Golden Handcuffs.

AKA Deferred Compensation.

AKA Holding on for the Retirement Bonus.

Now the disintegrating company’s news Googles into my inbox, like jagged rocks down an avalanche.

I could tell you that when Spitzer kicked Greenberg out, he parted the golden pot from the people who’d earned it.

Or were promised it.

That none of this was on paper.

All on trust.

I could tell you that most likely the company chart, with its 400 cross-linked boxes, made this perfectly legal.

Is life ever fair?

I could tell you more.

I could tell you all policemen are pigs, all soldiers murderers, all men are rapists and all Wall Street workers evil.

 Or I could tell you that Hank Greenberg gave me a job when no one else would.

That the company saved my life.

Or I could tell you I left my soul back there, locked up in a grey metal desk drawer.

 http://www.nypress.com/article-20328-non-fiction-contest-runner-up-elegy-for-an-organization.html

Should IVF Coverage Be Mandatory?

           A couple of Decembers ago, I got an email from Resolve, the national infertility organization — a plea for end-of-year, tax-deductable donations. “Imagine a world where fertility treatment didn’t exist …”  began the missive.

            It had been years since I looked to Resolve for aid in my finally defunct effort to have a family. The organization claims to serve a dual purpose: to prove information and support to those pursuing children, and reconciliation to those who wind up without. But the overwhelming number of communications and services, and the only lobbying activities – urging Congress to pass laws to make insurance coverage for fertility treatment mandatory — were geared towards the baby quest.

              So I deleted their emails after a quick skim. But having planted the idea of a world where fertility treatments didn’t exist, I couldn’t resist an honest answer: “I honestly wish they didn’t!” 

           This spurred an instant response, offering a plea for my “healing” – as if only a wrong-thinking person could even question the fertility system.   

            I hit the reply key, and then typed in: “The fertility industry makes those of us for whom the system didn’t work even more of an anomaly than we already are.”

            Within minutes, a Resolve staffer called. She stressed that Resolve was there to listen to people like me. 

            “Good. All I’m saying is — if infertility is defined as an illness, then that makes those of us without children sick and abnormal, right? I can’t reconcile to my situation if society can’t reconcile itself to me. Plus – I have a real illness – having infertility over the age of 35 isn’t an illness, it’s biology.”

            The staffer was dumbfounded.

            I continued, “I’ve worked hard for the little financial security I have, so I’m really cheap and risk-averse. I knew most IVF’s in my age group failed. If it were a stock, I wouldn’t have bought it. But because it was someone else’s financial risk – I gave it a shot. But I’d never have gambled on it with my own money. I’d never have got sucked into the emotional maelstrom. And if no fertility treatments existed at all, I’d have much more easily accepted my childless state. And so would the rest of the world.”

            A lengthy conversation ensued. I insisted on a precise definition of infertility. At 28 it’s an illness that should be cured when possible, and paid for by medical insurance. At 48, IVF is an artificial prolonging of the motherhood timeline. Was it fair to make other policyholders in the insurance risk pool subsidize that? The Resolve staffer was shocked.

            But this year, the once-taboo arguments I raised are coming out in the open.

            In July, Salon’s Broadsheet column backed the Family Building Act of 2009, which calls for insurance companies to provide IVF coverage. Fifteen states currently require it, and Resolve would like to make it a national mandate.

            The financial logic behind insurer-provided IVF is that those who can’t afford the more expensive and precise IVF procedure use the cheaper fertility drug clomid, which may cause the release of too many eggs, resulting dangerous multiple births that tax the health care system more in the long run.

            Of infertility, Broadsheet columnist Lynn Harris declared, “It appears that we can no longer afford to treat its treatment as a luxury.”  

            Some commenters disagreed, with the predictable advice: You can always adopt. Which prompted corrective replies from other readers who pointed out that adoption is often more expensive and risky than IVF.

Other responder’s put the argument in the context of the larger health care crisis:  “When society can afford insurance coverage to provide life-saving treatments for all the children already here who need them, then we can spend more money creating new children.”

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2009/06/24/ivf_coverage/

Consider Yourself Warned

          In Britain, authorities recommend giving a fertility test at 30, seeing it as an awareness tool. Fertility counseling should go hand in hand with other kinds of sex ed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/09/fertility-mot-children-nhs

             A former chairman of the British Fertility Society said it was crucial to tackle a “widespread misapprehension” about the success rate of fertility treatments. The chances dip sharply with age: from 31% for women aged under 35, to below 5% among women over 41.

 Mommy Oldest

            This summer, the death of a Spanish woman who gave birth at 66, leaving a toddler orphaned (she was unmarried) spawned heated debate on the blogs over whether or not there should be a ceiling-age for fertility treatments.

            In Newsweek, African American writer Raina Kelly spoke out: “Sometimes for the sake of the children-to-be, we may have to put away our longings and grieve for the children we might have had rather than go to the ends of the earth to get them. We have to think about the children, not just the having them.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/208022

Some feminist voices argue that the reproduction playing field should be leveled – that if men can become parents at sixty, then so should women. Personally, I wonder if this is something to envy – but I’d hate to see reproduction outlawed for one sex and not the other. 

The Motherlode on Stillbirth

In her New York Times Motherlode column, Lisa Belkin asked readers how to respond to a family who’s experienced stillbirth. Again, sparks fly in the comments section, with one commentator saying that words like “tragedy” should be reserved for mass events, like the Holocaust or Hurricane Katrina.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/when-a-full-term-pregnancy-ends-tragically/

Which button do I push for a dead baby?

            Stillbirth is more common that Down’s Syndrome, SIDS and HIV – one in every 160 pregnancies. Few expectant parents are aware of this, and so come to it completely unprepared — in an increasingly impersonal medical environment with no protocol for addressing it.

            NPR’s Tell Me More recently ran a segment featuring two parents of stillbirths who are trying to do something about that.

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=111063912&m=111063895

Guest Sherokee Isle, who suffered a stillbirth in 1981, is trying to make sure hospitals have on hand a copy of her book, Empty Arms: Coping After Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Death.

            She and fellow guest Alan Goldenbach, who recently wrote of his wife’s stillbirth in The Washington Post  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070602918.html) point out that parents-to-be aren’t told that when movement slows down near due date, it’s a danger sign. They are lobbying for more research to find out why stillbirths occur.

In June of 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama introduced the Preventing Stillbirth and SUID Act of 2008, but it was unable to gain much traction. (”SUID” stands for “sudden unexpected infant death.”) Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) continues the effort, “We need to know more about stillbirths to help increase awareness and prevention,” Lautenberg said. “We are crafting legislation to improve data collection so we can better understand what’s causing stillbirths and help parents looking for answers.”

People with chronic health issues are often also chronically financially challenged. It’s no secret that a catastrophic health event is the number one reason for bankruptcy in the U.S. It’s not just the bills, it’s the lack of earnings.

          Many people with CI’s (that’s shorthand for chronic illnesses) can’t work as much as they’d like to, or at all. If they fall down the rabbit hole of the disability system, they find themselves in an underground maze of dead-end tunnels when they try to get back to work — if, and how much they can earn without losing their health coverage and/or disability income.

The system right now makes it very hard to get off disability once you’re on it, or to even try to work while  trying to get your health back. The Social Security Administration has a Ticket to Work Program designed to deal with this, and  which President Obama’s said he plans to expand. But the stance of  private insurance companies — which offer much more comprehensive coverage — towards people disabled by chronic illnesses, especially invisible, cyclical, and variable ones, is a terribly adversarial one.

           I’d like to change that. I’d like to find a job for every person disabled by a chronic illness, as much as they can work each day, week or month, even if it’s just an hour by telecommute.

            The problem with most of the general financial advice out there, from Suze Orman to Money magazine, is that it assumes a certain amount of existing wealth and savings, and a normal working life span. For people with CI’s, it’s often just not the case. We can’t bump up our retirement savings by maxing out our 401k if we don’t have one. We can’t contribute to an IRA if we’re trying to stay in our apartment and out of the homeless shelter. We can’t pay for $600 a month in uncovered medical expenses by cutting out that daily double latte – because we could never afford it in the first place.

I’d like to create a clearing house of information, remove the smoke and mirrors that make it so hard for us to move forward financially. For the Normal ones, I need to show why their chronically ill friends and family members, unless they are married to a very high earner or have a trust fund, are barred from taking part of the working world.

What I don’t want to do is provide a platform or ad space for anyone selling the particular services of any investment company or financial planning service.  I get confused and angry when I read a seemingly intelligent blog, and see bogus Cure-All, or Make a Million Dollars at Home, or Life Coach ads popping up.

I worked healthy for 15 years, sick for nine, and had to stop full-time work ten years ago. I soon found out that I knew more about working with a chronic illness, and managing financially, than any of the career coaches, books and services out there. I was a business writer with a specialty in personal financial planning. I was and remain shocked and dismayed at the bad advice well-referred therapists, life coaches and career coaches handed out to me. It was often financially dangerous, sometimes unethical and possibly illegal. Above all, it was useless.

While previously I’ve written some critical things about the financial world (see my website www.ChristinaGombar.com) I thank God for what I learned there every day. And being risk-averse by nature I latched on to some very sensible, conservative investment advice, and I offer it in a very general way without naming names. My foremost advice is: Ask Questions, Educate Yourself. 

My first major project at my last job was writing a personal financial planning guide for people coming out of school with big debts, who were also committed to low-paying idealistic professions.  I’d like to put together something similar for people with CI’s and their families, because there’s nothing out there for us right now.

 Here are some useful beginner informational links about working with chronic illness:

http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/DisabilityPlanFactSheet.pdf

Above, the disability reform plan Barack Obama campaigned on.

A few years ago Lisa Belkin wrote a piece in the New York Times showcasing the difficulties of working with chronic illness.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E5DA1630F934A25751C1A9639C8B63

Jennifer Jaff is a lawyer with Chron’s disease who’s founded a nonprofit organization to help chronically ill people with work/disability issues.

http://www.advocacyforpatients.org/

 And More magazine’s May 2009 issue, “Ill in a Day’s Work” examined both sides of working with a chronic illness.

 http://www.more.com/2046/4359

 I’m looking for impartial, third-party legal and financial experts, who can help us create a database of information to share with the chronic illness community.  If you’ve got a “this will transform your life” Snake Oil type of life/health/financial solution, I’ve probably tried it already.   

So far, I’ve found no push-button solutions to either the health of financial challenges of living with a chronic illness. And if I do find that magical cure, I promise to share it immediately, rather than bury it in some pyramid scheme.

I’ve emailed Suze Orman and a number of other financial gurus, looking for advice for the CI community. The concept of being disabled before one has accumulated substantial savings isn’t even on their radar screen.  No investment advisor has a plan for someone with an empty bank account.

 Rosalind Joffe a career coach for women with chronic health issues,  last year published a book, Keep Working Girlfriend – Women, Work and Autoimmune Disease, co-written with Joan Freidlander.   In a recent blog tour, Joffe explained:  “When we wrote the book, we actually created a specific character that we kept in mind … She is in her mid 30s, a professional, a mother, living with autoimmune disease with mild and periodic disabilities and is very worried that she might not be able to work in the future. We saw that there were multiple forces that seem to discourage her from working. We wanted to create a book that would raise enough issues to encourage her to push through the hard times of working, raising a family and living with illness to counterbalance the opposition she faced.”

I’m looking to address the needs of not just thirty-something Moms with a fall-back husband income and insurance protection, but everyone, in all types of careers, and including men – because in my experience, they feel the impact of career-loss even more acutely than married women.

 Reality Check Needed:

The women (and men) I’ve met in the chronic illness community – in my doctor’s drip room, online, people who’ve called me responding to pieces I’ve written – worked until the bitter end, worked until they were taken away on stretchers, often fired without disability pay simply for being ill. When we strike up conversations hooked up to our IV’s, the first thing we talk about is – Do you still work? When did you stop working? How did it go? Many have a lawsuit pending, because their employer refused to accommodate their illness: they were essentially fired for being sick. After publishing an article, I got a phone call from a once-middle class woman, now homeless due to Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS). She’d been socially and financially frozen out by most of her family. One brother was sympathetic, but his church-going wife opposed either letting her ill and homeless sister-in-law move in, or his supporting her in any way financially. He did manage to transfer the many Marriott points he’d earned through his extensive business travel to her, so she was intermittently able to stay in comfort, when she wasn’t scrambling for a bed in a shelter.

The Marriage Penalty

Chronic illness kills 80% of marriages in which they occur, so most women do not even have the option of being dependent on anyone.  When I travelled to Washington to ask Congress for more CFIDS research funds, my lobbying partner was a divorced woman holding an M.A. from the University of Chicago, who’d held high government offices and once ran her own business, who had been reduced, for a time, to living in her car. She now has a clean and safe trailer. Brain damage caused a speech delay, as with a stroke victim, and at 50 she walked laboriously with a cane.

Family Matters

Another woman, a former Boston lawyer, who left her job thinking she could freelance, got too sick to work at all, and having left of her own choice, was ineligible for disability pay. Eventually she moved back to her native New York to help take care of her aged mother, and stayed on in her apartment. “I wish I could set up a video camera so I could show how verbally abusive he is to me.” She stays because she cannot afford to live anywhere on her own, or to even share with a roommate. Many of her experimental medicines are uncovered by insurance, and she is so weak she can’t use public transport, and so takes cabs across town to see our doctor.

Another woman I know, a once well-earning professional with a Master’s degree, would like to move home with her mother in suburban New Jersey, but is unwelcome. If she doesn’t get the wrongful dismissal settlement she hopes for from her former employer, she will be forced to move to a group home for the mentally ill. She isn’t mentally ill, but like many people with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, was written out for depression by the Social Security Administration. This is a common ploy, because it is easier to kick people with depression off the system.

This is the reality of chronic illness. The more I talk to people, the more I realize how fortunate I was, to have been well enough to establish a career before I got sick at age 30. To have realized early on that the variables of a chronic illness don’t mix well with the variables of running my own business, when I didn’t have a family or husband able to serve as banker and safety net. To have picked to work for a company which at least gave lip service to whole life needs. To have been lucky enough, at least at first, to have a boss who understood and tried to accommodate. To have disclosed the day I was hired. To have a company that didn’t give me too much trouble when I finally had to be taken out (more or less on a stretcher) – and who still contributes a small sum to a pension, pays for not only my, but my husband’s medical insurance – which was a Godsend, when he went several years without a steady job during the post- 9/11 recession. My disability package secured and paid for our mortgage and expenses for at least three years. Yesterday my husband got his historical Social Security Statement. His income for 2002? $5,000. From close to $100,000 in 1999. Through all this, my income was invaluable.

The Disability Trap

When I first got sick, it wasn’t hard to find lawyers and articles and books and lawyers to help me prove my disability and collect it.  But no one offered a strategy for getting off disability, and ever since I went on disability, I’ve wanted to get off. But considering my health, my whole life circumstances, my hellish experience working sick for a decade, both freelance and on-staff, and the punitive “work and lose” system currently in place, I don’t have a lot of choices.

This week, I face typical issues. What do we pay for? The $250 brakes my husband needs on his car for his 170 mile a day commute? The $300 bald tires that must be replaced because I already got a warning from a cop? The $1,000 I need to travel to New York where I’m trying to sell my novel – which I hope will get back in the earning world? The usual $1,000 I spend each month in uncovered health costs – my supplements, my $100+ trip to Dr. L in New York for my energy-restoring drip, the Goji juice that actually seems to give me energy, but costs $42 a bottle? My gluten-free food and the expense of eating healthfully and organically? The new miracle energy supplement so many people are raving about, but which costs $85 a month? And where do I find money for wedding and graduation presents?

The Poverty Cycle

Cort Johnson, web host and editor of this Phoenix Rising newsletter, camped in the dessert as a young man, so as to be independent and not impose on his family, making pocket money from fast food jobs. He thought he was doing the right thing, ingesting a mega-dose of protein and fish oils, surviving mainly on cheap canned sardines. He also got an overdose of mercury. I meet many, many people in the drip room who can’t afford to eat well enough to improve their health. They have gone into debt with experimental drugs uncovered by insurance, with modalities like acupuncture, to say nothing of the Snake Oil cures they sample out of desperation.

The Insecurity of Social Security

I hope I’ve made it clear by now that there’s a lot more to the issue than the willingness to work.  It’s true that you can make $710 above Social Security disability, but if your check is only for $500 a month – as it may be if you got sick in college and never established a work history – that’s not close to an independent life. I know many people who tried to do the right thing by trying to work their way off Social Security, but due to employer demands and bookkeeping glitches, sometimes earned slightly more than $710, at which time they  were immediately and completely dropped from the system, without health coverage or income, and had to pay lawyers to get it reinstated. One woman wound up evicted.

Entrepreneurial Dreams

It’s a wonderful idea to work from home. But I warn anyone starting a business to have a safety net – three years living expenses, because that’s how long it takes for a typical business to turn a profit.  Second to having a health crisis, starting your own business is the easiest way to go bankrupt in this country. You need capitalization — money – to start with, and that’s something chronically ill people are generally already depleted of, due to under- or non-earning, plus greater medical expenses than average. And I advise to never, ever use credit cards to fund your business, or for your own day to day expenses. If you have a spouse or family willing to be your banker, you’re in a different situation, but such people, I’ve found, are rare.

In one day, in Dr. L’s drip room, I met an attractive young woman, blond and thin, who said she was in town with her fiancé, a medical resident. She worked as much as she could, for her mother, who had a health food business. This young woman was well-situated for her very part-time career – but she’s a rare bird indeed in the chronic illness world. Another young woman I met the same day had returned to New York to live with her mother when she got too ill to work in Seattle. Her mother disbelieved that her CFIDS was a real illness, and threw her out. She was now “on the street” – living in homeless shelters, and turning tricks.

Tainted Income

One of the hardest things for people with chronic illnesses is conveying to their friends and families the financial spot we’re in. Our experience is often one of shame – one woman I know is berated by her father for being on “welfare” – and disbelief, rather than compassion.  God bless all with families that can be supportive emotionally and financially.

Unfortunately, say the word disability pay, and many people scoff. Here in Rhode Island, a former fire chief makes $150,000 in retroactive disability pay on top of his state pension. The system is frequently abused, mostly by public and union employees. Those of us of marginal means and real illnesses are tainted with that brush.

I would like to bring to public light the tactics insurance companies use to scare us into submission. These are issues that should be open to discussion and negotiation. We want to work. Employers and insurance companies don’t want to pay us for not working. The missing player here is an employer who’s willing to accommodate us.  

I’m in search of companies and employment agencies willing to risk hiring the chronically ill. I’ve heard of agencies that specializes in flex- and part-time work, geared towards parents. Will they, and companies apply that same flexibility to those with variable chronic illnesses?

From ADA to the DL

 Many companies talk a good game about working with people with disabilities. There are also a number of books out there, like Gayle Backstrom’s I’d Rather be Working: a Step-by-Step Guide to Financial Self-Support for People with Chronic Illness that ought to be consulted (but actually offered no answers for my own particular health/life dilemma) and Job Hunting for the So-Called Handicapped by Richard Nelson Bolles – who gave us What Color is Your Parachute? – and Dale Susan Brown.  The idea behind these books is laudable, but as one who worked ill for a decade and has been trying to get back into the working world for another, hard to put into practice for someone with multiple and unpredictable physical and cognitive malfunctions – a fact noted in the latter book. But by all means, read them along with Keep Working Girlfriend (if applicable) – they may well contain the answer to your own career/earnings problem.

 The Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to encourage  employers to accommodate people with static, or predictable disabilities – paralysis or sensory disabilities.  A new amendment to the law was designed to encourage employers to accommodate people with the kind of multiple, cyclical and unpredictable disabilities typical of autoimmune disorders.

 The details of the law can be viewed here: http://www.eeoc.gov/ada/amendments_notice.html

 Jennifer Jaff, the disability lawyer and activist who the founded Advocacy for Patients with Chronic Illness, Inc. (www.patientadvocacy.org) who herself suffers from Chron’s, is at the forefront of safeguarding such workers.   

If my own company had  been able to accommodate my illness, I never would have had to join their dole qeue. All they would have had to do was let me do what I’d done for them the previous eighteen months of freelancing, before being hired on staff: work part time in the office, and part time at home. Ironically, to get the health benefits I needed to keep my health optimum, I had to do something – show up at their set times – which was really not necessary for the performance of my writing job – but which ultimately caused my health to cave in.

The Disability Dilemma

            I’m looking to make this a visible cause, so I and other people don’t have to hear the snide comments we all hear every day of our lives about the fact that we don’t work for pay. And I want to do something even more challenging – I want to change private insurance laws, like the one that says that if I make any money at all, my income, medical coverage, pension and benefits will go away. Forever.  

A few years ago, I applied for a part-time university teaching job and was offered it. I wasn’t sure if I could handle the load of teaching two classes, especially as they were held early in the morning. No matter if I go to bed at seven p.m., I always feel horrible in the mornings due to adrenal malfunction.  But I was desperate to work, to be in the world. The problem was, this teaching, which I wanted to just try for a semester, only paid about a quarter of my disability pay, and came with no benefits or promise of job security. And it would end my company’s disability income forever.

After consulting with my lawyer ($400 an hour) I found I couldn’t do it. He’d had the exact situation with another person from my company who’d gone off on disability with Multiple Sclerosis. She was punished for just trying to see if she could work. He even told me that if I pulled the same trick, he might not even want to take my case, it was too much trouble, the big guns at my company were determined to get as many people off the roles as they could.

I asked the university department head if she would let me work without pay – perhaps my salary could be funneled into some sort of escrow account, available later if I can get off disability? I just wanted to work. No – things had to be done by the book.

Financial Snake Oil

Career coaches working with people trying to get off disability have recommended I actually give a false Social Security number – my husband’s — in order to collect money. They are not thinking things through – just getting seduced by their own Financial Snake Oil cure. But the above example shows how impossible it is to get an ethical, solid organization to do something even slightly questionable.

I wish it didn’t have to be so punitive. The nature of my and many other chronic illnesses is that they’re cyclical. I used to feel pretty well for months – even years at a time. Before I went back to full time work in 1995, I would have described myself as cured. I went on a bike trip in Nantucket the weekend before I started that job, and rode 30 miles a day. The house of cards came tumbling down a few weeks after I started work full time.

This is the kind of story that Suze Orman doesn’t cover, because she has no answers. This is the kind of story for which I want to find a happy ending. ~~~

Advance Excerpt from: Breathing Under Water, Living With and Lying About Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Copyright 2009, Christina Gombar.

 Was It All a Lie?

The disintegrating company’s news Googles into my inbox like jagged rocks tumbling down an avalanche. The plunging stock price, the sell-offs of prized divisions and landmark buildings. Witnessing the end of my old employer is like attending the funeral of a highly dysfunctional, but much beloved family member.

Reading the outrage of the press lynch-mob, however justified, is like watching distant relatives and far-removed acquaintances — who didn’t even know the deceased yet lived off his largess — spit on his coffin. 

The quickest way to isolate yourself socially is to say that you worked for AIG and that it was a great company. “This never would have happened,” I told people with conviction last fall, “If Spitzer hadn’t forced Hank Greenberg out. It’s been brain-dead ever since, it was a one-man company.” 

In ousting the CEO of nearly four decades in 2006,, Eliot Spitzer did exactly what George W. Bush did in Iraq. Launched an attack against a regime that had long played by its own rules, decided to knock out a leader without investigating what the consequences might be. Without knowing enough about how the financial world works to foresee the disastrous outcome. You can’t take out a leader without a secession plan. In acting prematurely and without foresight, Spitzer made things infinitely worse for the entire world.

All Is Greenberg

“You’ve got a company, AIG, which used to be just a regular old insurance company,” President Obama explained on his famous Tonight Show appearance. “Then they decided–some smart person decided–let’s put a hedge fund on top of the insurance company and let’s sell these derivative products to banks all around the world.”

But the President was wrong. AIG has never been an ordinary insurance company. As Ron  Shelp wrote in Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG, within the company and among Wall Street analysts, A.I.G. has always been an acronym for All Is Greenberg.  John Wiley put out the book in late 2006, soon after Mr. Greenberg was forced from the helm.  I recommend the just-released updated version  as a backgrounder for anyone wondering how a company they may not have heard of until last fall came to be so powerful.

 AIG was an invisible country, with its own rules. I’m not saying that was t a right or good thing, but it was the reality that the average person didn’t know, not because the information was hidden, but because they didn’t want to.

http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Giant-Amazing-Greenberg-History/dp/047191696X

P.S. — To those working in the business, the blow-up wasn’t completely unanticipated. In 2002 I was writing of the threat of a Hedge Fund blow-up in the London Review of Books.  In a piece titled, “Everybody Knows” speaking of the Long Term Capital Management bail-out of 1998, “It will happen again, and there will be pain.”

 http://www.christinagombar.com/pdf/everyone-knows.pdf

Related links:  http://www.christinagombar.com/doc.php?doc=war-zone&p=1

 http://www.christinagombar.com/doc.php?doc=the-pink-dress&p=1

Cut Out of Each Other's Lives

 

 

Cut out of each other’s lives:  friendship was a casualty of illness, money problems, and divorce.

 A Short Story in Three Parts. Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog: www.ritawatson.com

Julie grew more angry and distressed at the strain of the mortgage, taxes, and unanticipated household repairs.

I dropped hints: “You could rent out your house and get a nice one bedroom and pocket the change,” I said. “You could refinance. You could use a roommate service and screen candidates.  You could place an ad.”

 Julie vetoed all suggestions.  She was not going to move, and she was not going to get someone in off the street. Candidates referred through friends proved unacceptable: “I don’t want someone else’s – stuff – all over my house,” she spat.        

Every time I talked to Julie things were worse. She descended into panicked thinking.  Instead of paying $75 to have someone look at her broken dryer, she hauled wet clothes to a Laundromat for months. Why didn’t she get her new boyfriend (a handyman) to look at the malfunctioning appliance?  She didn’t want to be “dependent.” My husband invited her to my 40th birthday luncheon. I should have told him not to, because it was held at a gaudy, overpriced restaurant, attended by prosperous people whose ostentatious materialism, I knew, she would loathe.

My best Wall Street-era girlfriend boasted of having just bought two mink coats. Noting the acid downward curve of Julie’s mouth, I thought, I ought to have told her not to come.  She hated these people, and she was starting to hate me, with my marital compromises, stay-at-home life, my new blond highlights.  About six months after Julie sent Dave away, she began to talk about her neighbor’s husband. “Don’t waste your time,” I told her, “flirting with married men.” This wasn’t what I expected when I handed her a check to help speed up her divorce.

More than half a year passed without a dollar repaid. My husband and I had money stresses of our own by then, and I had to come out and ask for my loan back. Julie had just spent a weekend with millionaire friends.  As I’d been talking about our own unexpectedly huge tax bill, I assumed she’d got the hint and arranged her visit to relieve me. I was wrong.  Julie was livid.

“Look,” I said in my defense. “You’ve had a boyfriend for six months. Why can’t you ask him for a loan, or to move in and help with the bills?”

Julie hung up on me, furious.  Within a month, I got a check for the full amount of my loan in the mail. We had no contact for a year. I finally called and learned that her handyman boyfriend was long gone, and her ex-neighbor’s husband was living with her, and that he, too was divorcing.

Sounding upbeat, but hardened, Julie dismissed my good wishes for her new relationship; she had no interest in marrying this man. He paid his share and did things around the house. His ex was awful, took the kids back to Maine.  She would make use of him till the expiration date ran out.

Hanging up, I thought back to Julie’s wedding — the white dress, the lilies, the dark cathedral, the hopeful, holy words, the peacock bursting into full plume. I thought of the dance performance the night she announced her divorce.

I suppose I often see myself in marriage, indeed, in any relationship, as the Minotaur – stumbling along, half an awkward hybrid body, struggling to reconcile the ugly with the sublime. I easily forgave Julie her bad temper and outbursts at the time of her divorce, but could not forgive the home wrecking, nor could she forgive my judging her dark side.

Naively, I’d thought our friendship would outlast our marriages; I thought it would flourish forever. But like the peacock’s fan, its glory was short-lived. I thought of her declaration: “All relationships have expiration dates.”

Ours, apparently, had run out.  ~~~

 

Chronic Illness strained my marriage almost to the breaking point. I chose to stay; Julie took a different path when she and Steve hit the rocks.

Expiration Dates: A Short Story of Friendship and Money in Three Parts.

Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog. www.ritawatson.com

 “You know,” I confessed over our Cobb salads, “when I was cleaning out my closet, I thought of throwing out the dress I wore to your wedding.”  It was a cheap, pale green catalogue dress from my days as a freelancer, when I watched every penny while saving the down-payment that finally liberated us from our suffocating New York apartment. “That was the only time I wore it,” I said. “I was only holding onto it for sentimental reasons. I guess it’s O.K. to throw it out now.”  She agreed.

There was another reason I wanted to toss faded green dress — it signified bad times and I was ready to embrace a new future.

I was enviably thin in those pictures at Julie’s wedding. I smiled, but my eyes belied deep distress.  If anyone had asked me then if I thought my marriage would make it, I couldn’t have answered. 

At the time Julie married, I had just found my husband out in a betrayal. He’d run up debts that nearly canceled out all the money I’d been scrupulously saving and investing for house, baby, and our future.  His betrayal of trust wiped out years of dreams.

Somehow, putting that pale green dress in the bag for Good Will, gave me a new sense of purpose. I wanted to believe that I could put an end to the hurt that I experienced during those four years between Julie’s wedding and her divorce dinner. 

I watched her eyes and wondered if people would see pain in my own if I chose to end my marriage rather than stick it out?   My husband and I managed to get out of debt and heal the emotional wounds, but overwhelmed by the strain of working full time while battling my illness, I lost my health and any hopes for a normal life.   

Perhaps learning from my example, Julie chose another route, refusing to take a financial hit for a man. Since she and Dave had moved in together six years before, she’d switched jobs several times, doubling her salary to afford the modest home they’d purchased in their third year of marriage. 

Dave, on the other hand, was in the same job, earning the same money, so they could barely afford their new mortgage payments. Despite her constant encouragements, which degenerated into nagfests, Dave did not jump-start his career, see a therapist, get tested for a range of physical maladies, lift a finger around the house bought with only Julie’s money, learn to balance the checkbook, shop or cook, or get a car so Julie wouldn’t have to drive him everywhere, as if he were the teenage son she never had.

Julie tired of screaming. As she explained over our salads, she was basically a happy, peaceful, loving person. Under the current circumstances, she could no longer act kindly towards her husband. “I just see myself as an embittered old hag at 50. I want to get out while I’m still young enough to meet someone else.” 

But I was worried about how she would manage. Under my fiscal guidelines, she and Dave could barely afford to run a house together. She claimed she could do it on her own, for at least a month or so. Then she’d get a roommate. 

Two weeks after our divorce dinner, Dave was still in the house. He couldn’t find a place he could afford. Julie dropped hints; I offered a loan to hasten his departure. I’d lent her money before, for her down payment, and she’d paid it back in full and in a timely fashion.     

“All relationships have expiration dates,” she announced philosophically at our next lunch.

“You’re getting a roommate soon, right?” I said, handing her the check.

But month after month went by, and no roommate, and no loan repayment. I knew she needed time on her own, without the additional stress of sharing her home with a stranger. But I couldn’t help noticing she had money for new clothes to cheer herself up, for entertaining her young co-workers from the city, for buying wedding gifts for people she hardly knew.

(End of Part II)

  

A Short Story of Money and Friendship in Three Parts

Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog: www.ritawatson.com.

When my best friend Julie told me she was splitting with her husband, it didn’t come as a complete surprise.  She’d sounded uncharacteristically tense when we talked on the phone over the past few months. We hadn’t had an in-person heart to heart since the winter before, when on her 41st birthday, she talked in desperate tones about facing the future with her husband, Dave. 

Since then she had stopped complaining about her husband, hardly mentioned him at all. Our telephone conversations skittered over the surface of things – updates of her hectic job and crowded commuting days, contrasting with self-deprecating anecdotes drawn from my less eventful life – which went from a corporate whirlwind to a first-time suburban housewife – thanks to a relapse of a chronic illness about which I am often in denial. Nonetheless, courtesy of my company’s short-term disability insurance, I felt a mixture of childlike glee and adult guilt at my first laid back summer in decades.

With the anticipation of a child going on a favorite play date, I awaited seeing Julie in person for the first time in months.  When I flung open the door to embrace her, standing before me was a woman with a pinched, tormented face.  Her emaciated frame said it all before she delivered her news. It was painful to see her lovely, happy-go-lucky self suppressed; I was glad she was exiting a torturous situation.

She told me of her plans to divorce just before we sat down to watch a dance recital held in the Riverside Cathedral, whose majestic grey stone silhouette dominates the western shore of the upper west side of Manhattan. Four springs before, Julie and Dave were married just a few blocks east, in another great Cathedral, on a small budget but in great peripheral splendor, in one of the chapels of St. John the Divine. 

Four years before, I had shopped with Julie at Laura Ashley for her wedding dress, observed her arrange the entire event elegantly but cheaply — negotiating with chaplains and cajoling florists and caterers to offer their services as wedding gifts. I’d seen her research, book, and single-handedly pay for the honeymoon.  

The misty weather that day suited a ceremony in the dark cathedral. Outside, the spring foliage was bright green and new, the trees just bursting into flower.  She’d instructed the minister that Children and the Will of God be mentioned during the service. To honor her husband’s Scottish heritage, bagpipers played Amazing Grace at the exit, and the sounds moistened our eyes. As if on cue, one of the peacocks that prance around the rectory burst into plumage: a good omen. 

But four years later, as I look back, I see it was a false omen.

At the reception, as dry ice clouded the stage, eastern flutes piped over the soundtrack, and the dance performance began. The dance’s theme centered on the ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur — the half-human, half-bull god who, the program notes explained, “represents the collective dark roots of humanity that have been denied, repressed and locked away.” 

It was a bit too obvious an analogy to the realities of marriage Julie and I both knew too well — realities white-washed by images of happily ever after, Baby Gap and Range Rovers. We both knew what it was like to feel, within the framework of marriage, like the Minotaur, his dual nature a shame to be hidden by the ruling gods.

Julie and I didn’t have to talk much about the problems that killed her marriage, or the ones mine barely survived. We’d dissected them endlessly over the course of our eight year friendship, analyzing the challenge of asserting our feminist selves within the framework of marriage, deconstructing each power struggle in detail, all the while looking forward to the happy resolution when career, husband, home and child fell into place.

After the performance I drove us up to the suburbs where we now lived, and bought my friend dinner. The end of a marriage called for a solemn observance of its own. (End of Part One)