My not normal life used to seem normal to me. Country kids are not city kids, and I was eleven when I started working. My first job was mucking stalls on an Arabian horse farm. These were endurance racers, and it wasn’t long before I was exercising those amazing animals on the mountain trails where we lived.
In high school, I opened my first company and took a job at a grocery store. I built up a clientele but stayed at the grocery store, until I’d paid off my high school tuition, then college bills. It took ten years, but I’d bought my freedom and remained self-employed for the rest of my working life.
Project work has a beginning and an end, so I was able to set my own schedule. I worked 60-80+ hours a week for just about half the year, followed by a light work load.
My kids are in their early thirties now and recently they started talking about how weird our family was. Until now, I had no idea my work had made it hard for them to fit in at school, or how many times they’d had to cope with other parents, even teachers, who questioned our lifestyle. Is your mother on welfare? Who supports your mother? Is she independently wealthy? My kids told people the same thing I did when they asked me. My mom designs public spaces, she works on all kinds of different projects. Since people did not understand what designing public spaces meant, or what the work entailed, they viewed me with suspicion. While I’d given up trying to explain what I did for a living, I never realized my kids were struggling to answer the same questions.
Only in hindsight, do I see what people in town saw. Men coming to my home during the day, expensive cars in front of my house, people seeing me at restaurants having breakfast or lunch with different men and my unexplained disappearances for a week or so. All this unusual stuff added up. I bet you can guess what people decided I was doing for a living. My clients included global corporations, government agencies, huge nonprofit foundations, even the military and people in my town assumed I was a prostitute. They assumed that because I did not have a “normal” schedule and they saw no “normal” signs of someone who earns a living. My fabrication shop was inside the airport, where I rented a hangar. Airports are not shopping districts, so people didn't see my business. Over the years, I hopped rides with pilots who were happy to fly me to meetings in their little planes (which did not help my reputation – at all). To make matters even more confusing, my kid’s dad spent time at our house almost every day. We were lousy spouses, but great parents together.
It didn’t matter where I lived or worked, I had projects all over the country, often overseas. All those men were coming to my home office to negotiate contracts, review plans, and budgets etc.. I did a lot of work for government agencies, so yeah, politicians came to my home office. I did work for global corporations, so yeah, rich men in fancy cars and suits came to my home office. I’m a frigging designer, not a CEO, so yeah those clients picked up the lunch tab. I supervised installations, so I flew to wherever the project was being installed and could be gone a week or two. My kids’ amazing dad stayed at our place whenever I was gone or overwhelmed with work. We spent holidays together and had dinner together every Sunday too. Since I controlled my own schedule, I took summers, spring and winter breaks off and spent them with my kids. I scheduled my work around my kids’ stuff at school - not the other way around.
Not once, was I invited to anything by the other mothers at my kids’ school. In fact, they treated me like a disease. The only time they were friendly to me, was when they needed my help (I did not have time to waste, so I got shit done). Wait, there was one mother who invited me to her house for lunch. Patty is the person who told me the rumors (naturally, I did not repeat those rumors to my children). Patty and I are still friends, and we still laugh about my profession.
By the by, I breast fed for three years in a row and no one said a word when I brought my babies to meetings in their fancy corporate offices. In fact, two companies changed their policies and several men started bringing their babies to work too. What a hoot – right?
Epilogue. I thought I was normal ( I still do). As things turned out, other people decide who is normal - and G-d help anyone who does not fit the mold. My kids decided they loved our lifestyle and started their own companies.
Sounds like you aren’t any more normal than I am.
