Be a Secretary

I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a little girl in the Fifties, I did all the girlie things. I performed modern dance routines in our basement rec room, leaping and twirling with abandon around the room. I played piano and sang in the school chorus. I drew floor plans of imaginary houses and designed fancy dresses on a pad of paper with my crayons. I had big ideas about who I could be, but mostly I was a goody-two-shoes daughter, who did well in school and obeyed her parents.

In 1966, when I graduated from college, a girl was supposed to find her future husband at college, marry him right after graduation and support his career choice. For those of us who didn’t meet Mr. Right at school, the acceptable choices were limited. You became a teacher or a nurse or a secretary. I had a degree in English composition and thought I’d be a writer not a teacher.

“You can’t make a living at that,” my father said. “That’s a hobby.” He was a corporate executive who thought business was the way to go.

“The only way for you to get into the business world, Elizabeth, is to be a secretary,” he said. He always called me Elizabeth when he was being serious, so I listened carefully.

Since I thought he was always right about everything, I said, “Okay, Daddy.” And since I didn’t even know how to type without looking at the keys, I signed up for secretarial school in Chicago. Within four months I was ready for the business world, having learned to type at blazing speeds and take passable dictation. Secretly hoping to get my foot in the publishing door, I became a secretary for The New Yorker magazine’s Chicago advertising sales office, where I corrected my boss’s writing and made him look good. I moved to California and had a string of secretarial jobs until I got married, always doing someone else’s writing, my own creative instincts long neglected, always relegated to the “someday” category.

While I knew the choice had ultimately been mine, I resented my father’s advice for years, even after I was happy with my life as a wife and a mother and a business owner. It still bothered me that I never became a writer like I had thought I would.

Years later, my father was visiting from Chicago and we were all out for dinner – my father and I, my husband and my two teenage boys. We were talking about my life path, beginning with those years as a secretary, when my father spoke up.

“You know, I never could figure that out. I was so disappointed that we spent so much money to send you to college and all you did was go to secretarial school and learn to type and take shorthand,” he said.

“But you told me to do it,” I said.

“I did?” he replied, a puzzled look on his face.

I gaped at him, incredulous. All these years, for different reasons, we had both resented my decision to be a secretary, the choice I thought he wanted me to make. I could have been anything, I thought. I could have done so many other more important things. But I looked at my husband, whom I’d met while I worked as a secretary for a real estate developer, and I looked at my boys, who were my most cherished creations, and realized I didn’t regret my decision after all. And I could still be a writer when I grew up, if I wanted to. The choice was mine.

Copyright Liz Zuercher, 2009