A Woman I Know: Me

In past features, the subjects in my A Woman I Know series have been either a relative (see Joya, Bernice, Josephine, Esther) or a dear friend (see Amy, Cathy, Sheilah, Jude). These posts are part of the rotating themes for my weekly link-up for when there is an occasional 5th Saturday in the month.

With the link-up now restarted, I find myself with a fifth Saturday slot to fill. Given the current challenges of taking photos with someone outside of my household, I thought that I might use this AWIK post to tell you more about me. And to finally reveal the day job that I retired from back in April. We’ll start as most stories usually do, at the beginning.

I come from a modest eastern European Jewish background. My mother’s parents emigrated to America as young children Russia with their respective parents and siblings in the early 1900s. These families first settled in the NYC area and later, many of them moved to towns near Albany. My father’s mother’s parents were also from Russia but had emigrated before she was born. My father’s father’s parents were from Poland and came to America around 1910 by way of England where my grandfather had been born a few years earlier.

How a gal from upstate New York met and married a guy from Chicago is a tale for another day. Some of that story can be found in the eulogy I wrote and read at my father’s funeral seven years ago today as well as a post I wrote about my mother, A Woman I Know: Bernice.

As I’ve mentioned in a few previous posts, I have a sister whose name is Bonnie. Just the two of us and never, it seemed, did any two sisters from the same parents look less alike. We were told this many, many times while growing up. And even though we were only two years apart in age, we weren’t by definition “close” back then. We are much closer now as adults. Until recently, we’d lived within a few miles from each other. Our children are within a five year age span with our respective daughters being born only 10 weeks apart. We babysat for each other when our children were young, sometimes for several days at a time when the other went away with her spouse. Celebrations with my husband’s family always included my sister’s family as well as my parents and vice versa. Family is important to me.

Quick recap on what has been shared in previous posts so far. One mom, one dad, one sister. Parents lived in their “forever home” for nearly 50 years. My parents were active members of our temple as were The Husband’s parents which was how he and I met as adults. Both sets of parents are now gone. We have two adult children, a daughter who lives on her own and a son who lives with us.

Back to the tale about me. As a child, I was more introvert than extrovert. However, when I complained to my mother that no one wanted to play with me, she said it was because I was “too bossy”. While I excelled academically, I was teased a lot at school. Mostly about my excessively curly hair. Here too my mother, and my father for that matter, wasn’t a lot of help because they said the reason I was teased was because “they could get a rise out of me”. If I ignored the bullies, they would stop. That’s 1960s modern parenting for you and I can tell you from experience that approach didn’t work then and doesn’t work now.

I did have a few friends along the way and it saddens me that none of them lasted through to adulthood. The friendships ended either because the friend moved away or we went on to attend different schools. Perhaps some ended because we developed different interests. There was my best friend from high school, however, who basically ghosted me about two years after we had graduated and were attending different universities. Despite my attempts at the time to reach out to her, I’m clueless to this day in understanding why she cut off our friendship.  Nowadays, most of my friends are those that The Husband brought into the relationship. He has friendships that go back to elementary school. I envy him on that. There are also the friends that we’ve made as a couple. A few of my former co-workers and the few women I’ve connected with through blogging are the only friends I have that are my own.

My undergraduate degree is in architecture but as it happens, I never became an architect. After graduating in 1984, I moved back home and found a job fairly quickly as a draftsperson working for an architect. It was a one-man operation and he didn’t have a lot of time to spend mentoring me. The job wasn’t a good fit for me so after discussing a job-hunting strategy with my parents, I quit that job. This was in late September. I knew that stores were hiring for the upcoming holiday season and I found a job at a nearby mall fairly quickly. The agreement with my parents was that I would resume looking for a job with an architectural firm after the first of the year.

Ah, I forgot a part of that story. In August, my father had brought home an application for a draftsperson position at the “place” where he worked. There was a testing process I had to go through in order to be hired which wouldn’t be completed for a couple of months. So I took the job at the mall just to earn money while I waited out the hiring process. If I didn’t get hired for that position, then I would resume my job searching after the holidays.

For the sake of brevity, I can report that I did very well in the testing process, I got hired, and started my new job in late November.  The “place” where my father worked was the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). It’s a pretty big “place”. The second-largest school district in the US. My father wasn’t a teacher nor did he work at a specific school. He was part of a Maintenance and Operations crew that traveled from school to school in a designated region to repair broken windows. My work location was in downtown Los Angeles which wasn’t in the region where my father worked. He and I never worked together but there were a few times when our paths crossed during the workday.

I now had a job (with benefits) that was related to my college degree and there were advancement opportunities. Woohoo! In order to get my architectural license, I would need qualifying experience which I could get if/as I promoted into those higher positions. About a year later, before any of those architecturally related positions became available, an interesting opportunity opened up in another office. Again there was a testing process and again, I did very well. I was moving up, making more money, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my career path had just taken a turn.

So it was that in January of 1986, I began working in the Demographics And Boundaries Unit as it was called back then. This office was primarily responsible for developing recommendations for the realignment of school attendance boundaries to rebalance enrollments as possible to resolve instances of overcrowding. On an annual basis, this office also developed school enrollment forecasts that were discussed with the schools during planning meetings that occurred in the Spring of each year. Additionally, the office was also responsible for maintaining descriptive information about school attendance boundaries and providing schools with maps of their attendance boundaries.

You know how I said that I excelled academically? I did really well in math. Statistics, probability, fractions … not a problem. These skills served me well in my new position. I found the work challenging, in a good way, and I learned a lot. For a while, I hung onto the hope of returning to a more degree-related job but none of the jobs I applied to outside of LAUSD panned out and those within LAUSD made less money than I was earning. About two years later, promotional opportunities within my office opened up. Again there was a testing process and again, I did very well. I was moving up, making more money, but now this new career path was becoming a bit more obvious to me.

If I was writing a book, this part of the story would be a whole chapter. But I’ll be brief. The promotion I got actually moved me up two levels and I became one of two “deputies” to the guy in charge of the office. A year or so later, he decided to retire on the spot without any prior notice. He’d been mostly out of the office for the few months prior to retiring due to a lengthy jury duty service and a couple of vacations. Perhaps when my boss saw how smoothly the office had run in his absence, he just figured that it was time to leave. I didn’t get a chance to ask him about it because I’d been out on vacation the day he returned and given notice.

Those above my former boss asked my colleague and me to continue as we had been in co-leading the office while the testing process for our former boss’s replacement was initiated. It took several months before that testing took place but once it did, I think you know the drill by now. I did very well and moved up again. My new title was Chief Boundary Coordinator and I was in charge of the Demographics And Boundaries Unit. That was September of 1990 and all of this happened within the first six years of my working at LAUSD. I turned 30 the following month.

And a month after that, The Boyfriend popped the question and he then became The Husband the following September. We closed escrow on our first house two weeks after our wedding and set about making it a home. A home that to be our haven, a home where we would host family celebrations, a home for our future children. Things don’t always go as planned.

There is one detail of my life that I’m fairly certain I’ve not yet shared about or even mentioned in a blog post. One day, I will go into greater detail on this matter but for now, here are the basics. In June 1993, The Husband and I welcomed a beautiful baby girl into the world. Samantha looked like a porcelain doll with a head full of dark hair. But there were troubles that marred our bliss due to a health issue; even so, Samantha’s passing 6 1/2 months was completely unexpected.

The death of a child can be a difficult challenge for a couple to weather. Fortunately, The Husband and I equally co-parented our daughter, and neither ever blamed the other for any lack of caring or understanding about how the other felt. Or tried to place any blame on the other for her death. Neither the challenges we faced with Samantha while she was alive nor the tragedy of losing her deterred us from wanting to have children. In fact, it was The Husband who first said to me a month or so later that he was ready to try for another whenever I was ready as well.

Returning to work after my bereavement, I would often encounter people who would recall last seeing me as pregnant and ask about my baby. I know that The Husband faced similar inquiries. The annual series of Spring planning meetings with school principals that I attended that year was especially difficult but I had a prepared short narrative about her life and death and I had a few photos with me to show as well. There was a colleague with me at those meetings who was wonderfully supportive, too.

Although I still grieved, I wanted another baby and by summer that year I was pregnant again. I gave birth to Josephine halfway through the time when the Spring planning meetings occurred the following year. Fortunately, she was healthy and robust from the start. We’d been advised that Samantha’s health issues were not genetic so we needn’t worry that history would repeat itself in that regard. And they were right. Josephine was two years old when her brother Benjamin was born. Also healthy and robust from the start. Meanwhile, activity was ramping up at work.

I’d like to say that now I’m going to reveal the good stuff. But don’t hold your breath, this is about as good as it gets. Also, just seeing if you all are still with me. LOL.

In the Spring of 1997, while I was still pregnant with Ben, a local school construction bond that LAUSD had placed on the ballot passed. Some of those funds were to be used to build new schools that would relieve severely overcrowded ones. A condition for the passage of this local bond would be the establishment of an external oversight committee. After the committee’s formation in July 1997, one of its first acts was to require the development of a facilities master plan based on long-term demographic projections. I was at home on maternity leave when I heard this news from someone on my staff.

Shortly after, I was asked to collaborate with another office to develop these long-term demographic projections. Ok, sure but I’ll be bringing the baby with me for any in-person meetings. Fortunately, there was no push back on that. They wouldn’t dare. Once I’d returned to work full-time, the responsibilities of my office expanded as I became a key collaborator in the development of the required facilities master plan. In the seven years since I had taken charge of my office, everyone had a computer at their desk and we were using a geographic information system (GIS) mapping software to analyze enrollment patterns and to produce a variety of illustrative maps.

In late 1999, my unit was brought in under the umbrella of New Construction in the Facilities Division. We were to play a key role in the determination of where new schools needed to be built. Additional staff would be hired due to the expanded workload, my position would be elevated and my unit would get a new name. That was when I became Director of Master Planning & Demographics and continued to be until last April.

Over the course of those last 20 years, LAUSD successfully passed several other bonds to fund school construction and 130 schools were built to relieve hundreds of overcrowded schools. My team and I played a key role in justifying the need for each of the new schools and assisting other staff in evaluating where they should be built. We helped to assess the impact that programmatic changes such as full-day Kindergarten would have on school capacities and develop plans to address capacity shortfalls.

After the yearly Spring planning meetings with principals in 2008, the Superintendent of LAUSD “asked” if these meetings could be done without requiring school and central office staff to leave their offices. I put asked in quotes because it was more like he said “no more meetings”. The information shared with school principals was important in their planning for the upcoming school year so somehow they still needed to get it. It fell to my unit to develop the alternative. In collaboration with our IT support group, my staff and I developed a proprietary interactive web-based interface that successfully replaced those in-person meetings. While there have been enhancements and improvements along the way, this year marks the 12th year that this interface has been in use.

In another collaboration with our IT support group, I led the development of yet another proprietary interactive web-based interface with the purpose of recording how classrooms are being used and determining the functional enrollment capacity of each school. This was and is light years ahead of the process that had been used before it was assigned to my unit.

I could go on and on and on and on about the work I did. But I’ll stop here. I often thought of the last 20 years or so at work as an additional child that raised and nurtured. Even though I had essentially the same job for 30 years, I had many, many bosses. Too many to count. Some that were wonderfully supportive and some that were awful. And I outlasted them all except the last one. There were times that I’d think about looking for another position but I couldn’t bear to leave “my baby”. At least, not until I was certain that I’d given all the nurturing that I could.

Let’s Wrap This Up

Now, onto the Fine-Whatever link-up. My featured blogger from last week is Shelbee, the immensely kind force-of-nature behind Shelbee On The Edge. Besides being honest and forthright in her writing, Shelbee can whip up an inspirational style creation like nobody’s business. Do give her blog a visit if by some chance you’re not following her already.

If you’ve been wondering about what is written on the back of my shirt, it says “we were born to be real, not to be perfect.” This is very similar to the first line of a post called Be You published on the website Daily Motivator by Ralph Marston. This shirt was another great find at my local Buffalo Exchange. I mean, who could pass up a white shirt with splatter paint and a cool saying?

I’ll call it a day on the story of me for now. Many of the key events in my life that happened in the last five years have already been written about in previous blog posts so no need to rehash those. Interested readers are free to browse through the archive. 2017 was an interesting year, to say the least. I’m curious to know if anyone had been guessing who I had worked for and what the work I did was.

Stay well and let’s keep in touch! Subscribe, tweet, follow, friend, pin … all options are available. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

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Note: This is an unsponsored post; however, some or all of the links to clothing items are associated with an affiliate program where I earned a few cents for each click.