By a show of virtual hands, how many of you guys like to try to refrain from releasing super personal information about yourselves when at work?
You can’t see me right now, but I’m jumping up and down while waving both my hands in the air as if I’m at some sort of rave party.
I’ve always taken my reputation at work very seriously. I’m a hot mess, but I really don’t care for my employers to know that. As far as they’re concerned, I’m a person who lives, eats, and breathes company protocols from 8 to 5. Once I exit the building, whatever happens in the real world, stays out in the real world. It’s just less drama that way, and for those who know me, know I’m all about the “No Drama Llama” mantra (insert double peace signs here).
Now let me tell you about the time that I discussed my miscarriage story during a job interview.
This was something completely out of the norm for me and doing it really made my skin crawl. But let me just say, before going any further into this story time, opening up about the worst possible thing to happen to me during one of the most uncomfortable interactions in my life, was incredibly beneficial to me in the long haul. So hold tight kids, there’s a moral at the end of this story.
Not to toot my own horn or anything (toot toot), but I’m really good at landing job offers. I have an impressive resume, a diverse skill set, and a plethora of dad jokes to break the ice with. Employers love me, and because of that, I have no problem getting in some place and then climbing my way up the ropes. Like anyone else, I get those “first day of school” nervous jitters before going in. But once my butt is in that interview seat, it’s as if “Eye of the Tiger” starts playing through the over-com in my head and suddenly its go-time from there.
Let me tell you guys something: I have never met a woman more intimidating than the one who interviewed me for the job I’m at now. Intimidation is not normally a code that sits in my system operations, but this woman was terrifying. She was tall, blonde, and beautiful, and that woman asked me a question that pushed me to hit the e-break on the whole situation.
We started off with the usual cycle of “where did you work before”, “what did you do”, and “why are you leaving”. It was the same prompts that you usually sit through with every job interview that ever existed. I sang and preached to her every which reason why I felt like I was the girl for the job, and then this woman decided she wanted to take a hard left turn out of nowhere.
This woman looked me dead in the eyes and said “Tell me about a time when your job broke you.”
Uhh, what? Hold on. Wait a minute.
I don’t know about you, lady, but I thought job interviews were supposed to be all about capitalizing on your strengths, then taking your weaknesses and somehow morphing them to look like a strength-in-disguise. Now is not the time to talk about when I couldn’t handle my job. That is not a question that fits into the usual prompt here, woman. My study guide did not cover this.
The big boss lady must have noticed the stupefied look on my face because she looked at me and said, again, “I want to know when your job broke you. When was a time you just could not handle it?”
This question came directly after our discussion about my previous employer, in which I told her that the specialty of the medical office I was assisting in was high-risk pregnancies. The office was responsible for caring for and co-managing all of the bad sides of pregnancy – drug abuse, positive Down syndrome screens, twin losses, recurrent miscarriages and still births, heart defects, brain abnormalities, and the list goes on. She had wanted to know how I had managed to keep such a positive and enthusiastic outlook on a job that saw so much bad stuff on a daily basis. I had told her that the rewarding feeling of meeting those babies who weren’t supposed to make it was what made the whole job worth it, and that’s why I wanted to go back after finishing school. Overall, I really didn’t have that hard of a time balancing all of the negativity that came from that office. Becoming desensitized to its products was something that came quickly, so after a few years of being there, I honestly had no difficulty getting past it all (as bad as that sounds).
Flash back to the difficult question at hand.
I’m sitting there, trying to rack my brain of when I just couldn’t do it, and this woman, this terrifying woman is looking me up and down in the meantime because, for the first time during that interview, I didn’t have an immediate response.
And then it hit me.
That referenced time of when I just couldn’t handle it anymore, had happened 8 weeks prior to me sitting in that interview. It was about a month and a half after my miscarriage happened. I had already gone through the procedure. I had gone through the grieving cycle. I had been back to work and was already fitting back into my usual routines. I wasn’t fully there emotionally, but I was functioning.
I kind of got to this point where my miscarriage got pushed to the back of my brain and my emotional functions were practically shut off. I was detached. I stopped crying. I stopped feeling anything, really. I was focused on just doing what I needed to do to get through each day.
My doctor had offered to let me take off more time as needed, just given the nature of the practice and what I had gone through myself. I appreciated the offer, but chose to decline. I told her the same thing I had gotten used to telling everyone else: “I’m okay”. I just wanted to get back to work so I could have something to do that would keep me busy and my mind off of my current situation. So that’s what I did. I kept my head low and my hands busy… until something happened that wrecked me to the core.
It was a slow day. The office was empty. There were no patients. I was the only person sitting at the front desk. The phone rang. I answered. And then I felt my stomach dip and like a flash flood without any warning, my emotional switch got flipped back on to HIGH. On the other end of that receiver was a young woman, the same age as me, sobbing so hard I could hardly understand what she was trying to say. The only words I heard come from her mouth, and they echoed through my ears loud and clear, were “I lost him.”
I sat at my desk with the phone to my ear and for the life of me, I could not find the words to really say anything at all. I felt my chest tighten, a lump hit the back of my throat, and heavy streams have started fighting their way through the corners of my eyes. It was as if the entire world had just come crashing down on me. Suddenly, I was back to feeling everything.
I sat there in silence, not really knowing what to say. I just listened to this woman cry and felt in my own heart every single break and tear that I knew she was feeling in that moment because I had been there. I was still there.
After a few moments, I was finally able to muster up enough strength to ask the woman to hold, put the phone down, asked my co-worker to finish the call, then walked myself to the bathroom, turned the lock, sat on the cold tile floor and, for the first time in weeks, I cried HARD. I’m not really sure how long I had been in there for. All I know is that my heart was breaking for the millionth time, but it felt just as bad as the first. And for the first time in weeks, I finally admitted to myself that I was still not okay. I was hurting, I was broken, and I just could not handle doing my job that day. I could not handle being the one to put on a brave face and tell that miscarrying patient that “It’s all going to be okay” because I don’t really even know within myself if that was true.
So I sat there and cried in the bathroom, while my co-worker finished the call and dismissed that patient on to the next cycle. For a moment, it felt like the world had stopped. Then I got back up, dusted my scrubs off, cleaned my face up, and walked back to my desk and went on with my day. No one knew what had happened. Just me.
For some reason, this was the only story that sat at the front of my mind when this scary-as-all-hell woman asked me when my job broke me. I could have picked a different scenario. I could have gone with something less personal. Hell, I could have lied through my teeth and made something up. I could have gone with anything, really. Anything but the story of me sitting in the bathroom crying because I couldn’t disconnect my personal life enough to do my job appropriately. Instead, I put on my brave face, because at this point I’m really good at doing that, and I looked this woman in the eyes, and I did what I did best – I word vomited.
I spilled every which detail that surrounded the call that broke me. I told her I had a miscarriage. I told her that I thought I was moved on enough to get back to work. I told her that I was lying to myself for weeks about it. This woman sat, she listened, and then she smiled. And I was so confused by everything that just happened. Here I am, feeling a little whip-lashed from the curveball question this lady just threw me, I’m spilling my guts to her on a deeply personal level and I’m crawling in my own skin while doing it because this never happens for me, and she’s smiling at me. I finished running my mouth, she stood up and shook my hand, thanked me for my time, and dismissed me from the interview.
I got a call that night with a job offer.
Remember that moral of the story that I mentioned was coming? Well here it is (and hang tight, because there’s a few):
First off, what doesn’t kill you, really does make you stronger. I might not have admitted to this back when I was curled up on the bathroom floor or even weeks later in that interview, but it’s true. Back in a previous post, I mentioned how dealing with my miscarriage is kind of like being caught out in the middle of the ocean. Everything comes in waves, and somewhere along the way I had to learn how to float along with it all because fighting against the current seems to only push my head further beneath the surface. Some days are easier than others, and some days I’m finding myself getting hit with a break wall and everything in my internal system does a hard reboot.
Secondly, it is okay to be vulnerable. It is okay to admit when you’re hurting. And it is okay if it breaks you.
Let it. Run with it. Then move forward.
A lot of the other mom’s that I have spoken with have called me “brave” and “inspirational” for talking about these things online. For some odd reason, a scary-intimidating woman, who I later found out to be a director of the company and not just some department manager, felt my honesty was enough to bypass the next two stages of the interviewing process and get me in right away.
That in itself floored me. I was totally vulnerable with this woman about something that I felt really had no place being brought up in an interview. I expected to not even make it to the next interview after that. I thought my emotional break down was going to opt for a hard pass on my resume. Regardless, that woman pulled her own strings to push me forward.
That’s when I realized just how taboo talking about miscarriage has become. Mine was an experience that, overall, made me stronger in my job, even if I did break after just one phone call. It made me empathetic. It made me humble. It made me human. Those are all things I should be proud to claim, especially when trying to preach to an employer why they need to add me to their team. I was vulnerable with a complete stranger for the first time in a while, and it benefited me in more ways than one in the long haul.
Now, here I am, still hurting and finally admitting it to myself, while working a better paying job, saving up more money for schooling, and acting as a shoulder to lean on for other mommas like me who have babies they don’t get to hold.
I guess you really do have to break first before you can build yourself up.