1974 to 1978:
This is a really difficult time to try to account for, and it's crucial. I know I met Karen in April 1978, when I had her come in for an interview after she'd responded to YFC's ad for a new Director. I know that by 1980 I'd asked Ed for a divorce. But what led up to these events during the four or five years previous?
It was the era of Women's Liberation. I marched on Springfield with my daughters to suppor the Equal Rights Amendment. I went to hear Betty Friedan with one of my friends from North Shore Unitarian. We had joined Sarah Turner's 'group', and I had presented the Unitarian Sexuality program to the group; some of the members, especially Bill Browning, thought the material was pornographic. I taught a course for kids called "Free To Be You and Me" at the kids' school. As I became closer to Sarah and Chris, I began to wonder with them or rather with them as an audience whether it wouldn't be nice to 'be with' a woman, sexually and romantically, rather than deal with men, who seemed so difficult. Sarah used to like to talk to me about it and woujld ask 'what we would do together.' I said I didn't know, exactly, but I was sure it would be good...I don't know how much I was equivocating in this since I think I'd already fantasized about breasts and perhaps also about oral sex with a woman.
It was an era of crossing boundaries, of women feeling solidarity with one another. Ed was hard enough to live with, but now I attacked him on ideological grounds as well. Still, I never fantasized about being sexual with any woman in the group, just felt an interest in the direction of women. I had been talking to Ed for years about having 'a nameless longing.' But I'd never connected that longing with a yearning to be with a woman.
Until Karen.
Karen's was the only resume and cover letter without gross typos and/or spelling errors sent to YFC in response to our ad in the social work journal for a new Director. When I saw degrees from Shimer and U of Chicago, I was impressed. She was a regional director for DCFS, and I didn't think we had a chance of getting her, but she did agree to come in for an interview. Later she shared that this was the first time she'd actually gone out and applied for a new job; she'd been recruited for all of her prior positions.
The Counseling Center at that time was housed on one of the upper floors at the local nursing home. I interviewed Karen in one of the rooms that had been an office for the nursing home. It was a longish, rectangular room, with one wall all windows. It was early April, but happily sunny, the light streaming in from the windows. The floor was bare wood, dark, the way they made them in buildings constructed a hundred years ago. A long couch covered in white vinyl was set along the wall opposite the windows. Karen sat at the end of that couch nearest the door. I sat three feet directly in front of her on an old fashioned wooden chair, the kind with rungs underneath. I hooked the heels of my medium-height black patent leather pumps over the rung underneath me and leaned slightly forward as we conducted the interview. As she conducted the interview, that is: she wanted to know the budget of the Center ($57,000 a year), how many employees (our current Director and one half-time counselor; a volunteer kept the books). She asked about our commitment to serving marginal populations.
It was probably the mention of what I took to be her commitment to serving people with serious mental illnesses that impressed me most of all. She told me she'd worked in a psychiatric hospital with severely impaired youth and that two of her former patients still corresponded with her. She said they were schizophrenic. I had two schizophrenic people in my own family.
She was a small woman, six inches shorter than I, and her dress was unremarkable except for its almost stereotypical representation of 'social worker' boilerplate garb: an A-line beige gabardine skirt, tailored white blouse (shirt, really), navy blue blazer, medium-heel navy pumps. No jewelry to speak of--a couple of rings on the smallest hands I'd ever seen on an adult. Makeup was little to nonexistent--a bit of lipstick, maybe some powder. Her dark blonde hair was short, straight, and thin--cut to fall just past her ears. The eyes set wide apart and deep, the nose straight, small mouth, high forehead, strong chin.
The force emanated not from her appearance, but from her voice and a sense of presence about her that felt almost palpable.
There I was, leaning out of my spare wooden chair, my long legs hooked beneath it, my full dark cotton skirt with a bit of lace at the ruffle edge, my natural ecru cotton blouse with three-quarter sleeves with ties that swung while I talked. My hair thick, dark brown, wavy, medium short. I was six inches taller and probably thirty pounds weightier, but Karen seemed to me to carry all the force in that room.
I was taken. At the end of the interview, I was completely unaware, until he spoke, that our Counseling Center Vice President, a local business leader, was sitting next to me, had been throughout the interview, although he'd not said anything, not asked one question. Now suddenly he spoke, expressed a wish that her undergraduate degree had been in business rather than sociology. I hope I tried not to show how irrelevant he and his opinion felt to me.
She came back for a second interview, this time with the entire Board. Everyone felt in the presence of excellence; it;'s hard to miss when you see it. She was fed up with DCFS and its political shenanigans, wanted out, saw the chance to get in on the ground floor to grow a little community agency. She told us she'd take the job at the salary we could afford if she would guarantee health care. Our business board members took care of that, and by May we had her on board.
After that group interview, I approached her outside the house of our Secretary, where we'd gathered for the interview, both of us on the way to our cars. I started talking to her about my life, my brief experience in therapy with the current Director some years in the past. I knew vaguely that such conversation was inappropriate. It was the first signal that boundaries were becoming softened.She responded minimally, straightforwardly, appropriate without rejecting my approach, which only drew me more.
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