I threw myself into the work. I built my team, traveled to London and Singapore, flew business class for the first time, unfolding the seat into a bed and thinking, if my mother could see me right now, she would either be proud or find a way to make it small. That was the difference I no longer needed to know, because I was no longer performing for her.
The call I’d been waiting for without admitting it came on August twenty third. My mother, having seen an article in the business section about a woman just hired to lead Halden Vale’s emerging markets division. Is that you, Marlo, she asked. It is me, I said. Oh my God, Marlo, what have we done, she said.
I told her everything then, calmly, all of it. That she’d had chances to make it right and hadn’t taken them. That I needed real distance now, not silent treatment distance, but adult, agreed upon distance. She asked how much they’d offered me, and I felt something almost like pity. That is the first question you are asking me, I said. I told her the number didn’t matter, that what mattered was that a stranger had told me my thinking interested her, had built a job around my mind, the mind my mother had always told me was too intense, too much. A twenty four billion dollar company built a job around it, I told her. Do not tell anyone in the family what I just told you, I said. This news belongs to me. And Mom, I am not coming home for Christmas or Thanksgiving this year, and I need you to accept that without a fight. Okay, Marlo, she said.
The next six weeks were, unexpectedly, the happiest of my life. My team was the smartest group of people I’d ever worked with, and for the first time I didn’t feel like the odd one out at the table. I felt like the person the table had been built around. I delivered my first major project three weeks ahead of schedule, and Xavier told me my framework had already been adopted by two other directors as a template. You are surpassing my expectations at a rate that is making my other directors nervous, he said. That is a compliment.
I flew back to Berkeley in early October, the house finished, golden floors, cream walls, the piano in the corner. Ren flew down from Portland and stood in the entryway crying when she realized whose house it was. She would be so proud of you, she said. We sat on the porch that evening, drinking wine, and Ren asked if I thought my family would try again. Yes, I said. My mother does not know how to lose. She is regrouping.
