My senior year in college I had dinner at Dan’s parents (still living in Newton, MA) every Sunday night. Gladys might help me with my lesson plans first semester, as I was a student teacher and she was a seasoned one. Second semester, after Dan and I became engaged, we talked about the future. She (later claiming she was joking) told me that if she had to take the last name Pfau, so did I, quite emphatically. She was a tall, commanding presence, with distinct opinions about everything. We grew to be great friends and she helped me tremendously as the years went on. On her death bed, she told me that I was her fourth daughter and I loved her like a mother.

In those early years, we had long debates about the first wave of feminism and “can we have it all”? Can a woman really find a fulfilling, demanding career, be a good mother, and do everything else with her life to find fulfillment? It was, and continues to be, a perplexing question. My in-laws moved away when Dan and I had been married about three years. Then I had no close relatives in the area to look to for advise, or emergency babysitting help as the years went on.

I have written many stories about my career and how I got to various positions, so I will link to those stories (some are quite old now), rather than re-tell them. I was a Theatre Arts Major, graduating with a BA, magna cum lauda, with departmental honors from Brandeis University in May, 1974. I had a secondary education teaching certificate in speech and English. Dan and I married and moved to Waltham, MA a month later. He began graduate school that fall and I needed to find work. I never got a teaching job.

I was not going off to wait tables, audition and try to seek my fortune in theater. I wasn’t a great actress and I needed a steady paycheck. I went to work at the software company where Dan worked, knowing nothing about computers. I did data input, not understanding anything about computers. Over-Educated, Under-Qualified.

From that job at SofTech, I moved to Chicago to get into professional sales, which really better suited me. I stayed 16 months, worked very hard, was quite successful, though there were obstacles along the way. Seven Double Chivases on the Rocks. No doubt about it, it was difficult to be a woman alone on the road, or doing a sales job in those days. But I persevered. I worked for ASI a total of three years, then, FINALLY got to Management Decision Systems, another company founded by smart MIT professors and a few of their students, selling software and consulting services. Here, I found peers and a welcoming work hard/play hard community. The sales cycle was long, the sales typically large. I became their top sales person during my 3+ years there. But I traveled a lot and worked long days. Walt at MDS.

At this point, in 1984, I was trying to become pregnant, which was not happening. After a year of interviewing, I took a job at a start-up company, selling software that could be used as a front-end to the product I sold at MDS. Three of us were hired on the same day, with the same job offer. I, of course, was the only woman. I had the local territory, much smaller than the other two (which I protested and was basically told to pound sand). I tried to hang on to one of my old clients in North Carolina, who had already told me they’d purchase this product, based on my endorsement, but was not allowed. The salesman who did come back with the signed contract told me they absolutely signed because I was with the company. It didn’t matter to this new crew. I became pregnant a month after joining the company, a fact I did not reveal for a while, but I had – not morning sickness – but all-day sickness. When others were concerned that I had the flu and was contagious, I finally ‘fessed up. I told management that I planned to take a four-month (unpaid) leave. They still had not announced how much stock we sales people would be awarded. Finally, just as I began my maternity leave (two weeks before my due date), the stock proffer came through. I was furious. Mine was considerably lower than my two male counterparts. My manager had not defended my work in front of the board despite the fact that I was demonstrably the most successful of the three. 60% of the Revenue, 40% Less Stock. I was 10 days late delivering David, had a difficult delivery, took a while to heal, had little help, then began life with a newborn and a traveling husband. We lived in Boston’s Back Bay and I loved walking everywhere with my baby in his Snuggli or stroller to do my errands, or walking him to the Public Garden to show him the statue of George Washington on horseback, or the ducks in the pond (he was too young to pay attention, but it was all wonderful for me). I determined I would not go back to that company.

We moved to Newton and just as David turned 18 months old, I decided I was ready to go back to work in February, 1987. Dan mentioned this to someone at his office who ran a series of paid executive conference programs. He already had one working mother (a former employee of his) working for him and invited me to come in and interview. He told me that it was all telephone work, I could do the work from home and it would be easy. But I’ve always felt the need to be in front of people to be successful. Lynn, the other salesperson, had already held many of the companies where I had contacts, so for me, the work entailed travel (Dan and I now both traveled) and I quickly hired a live-in nanny, with mixed success. Jill-Sharon. Who Slept Here?

We couldn’t both be out of town at the same time. David wouldn’t let me touch him if I’d be away. It wasn’t a good situation, so I contacted a former manager, now working in Waltham at Cortex. They had been in business for ten years but still functioned like a start-up company. They has just received a new infusion of cash and were looking for more salespeople. Barry wouldn’t be my supervisor but facilitated an interview. Drew asked if I planned to have a second child. I told him that was an illegal question but yes, I did, just not immediately. I began work there in Oct, 1987. I found the place incredibly disorganized, with no idea how to approach clients or talk about what their product was or the benefits thereof. No wonder they still had a limited client base. I also found that having a young child at home was a great distraction. I would make a grocery list at my desk; think about running errands on my way home. Being SuperWoman is HARD! For the first time in my career I encountered a product that I couldn’t figure out how to sell. I transferred to marketing and became the liaison to existing clients and the User’s Group. They had their big User Conference coming up in October, 1988.

There had been so many reorganizations that at this point that I was working for my old friend Barry. I was early in my second pregnancy and has already told everyone that I planned to work through it, then retire. I would not return after the birth of this second child, but the company was in turmoil and Barry called me into his office. Rumors of lay-offs were rife. I told Barry that he could lay me off – no problem. This pregnant lady would not sue. He was relieved. And I could stay home with my youngster, collect unemployment and get ready for #2 as I got bigger and bigger (I put on a mere 44 pounds). By this point, I’d had three nannies and was not about to look for another. I was working just to pay the salary. My children needed me.

I have never regretted that move. With Dan traveling as much as he did, I was a single mother three or four nights a week. Vicki’s diagnoses (ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome/autism spectrum disorder, severe depression, and at that point, difficulty putting her thoughts on paper) accumulated and meant that I was able to spend a lot of time volunteering in her classrooms, taking her to various doctors and therapies, supervising her homework, and just BEING there for her. As she grew up, I volunteered on other boards that had meaning for me.

So my discussions with my mother-in-law about women doing it all, almost 50 years ago, gave me a moment of reflection. The only women I know who “had it all”, either were able to afford significant, steady housekeeping help that gave them great freedom, had lots of family close by, or had very supportive husbands who were home and took on much of the household responsibilities. Others had to make choices; there is no such thing as “having it all”.

Twenty-eight years ago this week, danger came in the form of domestic terrorists striking Oklahoma City.
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In 1989, there were several reports of tourists being killed while visiting game parks in Kenya. When people found out that we were about to travel to Africa, they asked with alarm, “Should you really go?”
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Where Have the Years Gone?

I surely don’t remember getting older, but here I am!   (See Bus Stop)

And yet although I often forget where I parked my car,  or where I left my eyeglasses,   I can still remember in loving detail the big rubber boots my father wore as he pulled me on my sled during the northeastern snow storm of 1947.  (See Blizzard)

This thing called aging is strange if nothing else ,  but a saving grace has been this amazing website where fellow writers – many I’ve never met – have become kindred souls sharing some of my memories,  my joys and sorrows,  my victories and defeats,  and even some of my regrets.  And reading their stories has helped validate my own,  made me a bit wiser,  and even more grateful to have journeyed this far!

But tell me please –  where have the years gone?

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in Lower Manhattan.
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I don’t remember if the first time Homer broke a hole in one of the lower screens and escaped was during a thunderstorm, or during some Fourth of July fireworks...
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Both my partner and I often express our desires to return home. Each has a different version of home, having been born in widely separate locations, economic stability, and cultural surroundings.

My wife is from Manhattan. She was born in Greenwich Village and, when her family moved to a larger apartment uptown, she continued going to school in the Village. As a teenager, she came of age during the golden era of Village life: the bohemian scene, folk music and coffee houses, and all the lame, sexist bullshit that followed an attractive, very hip, politically aware teenager around in those days. In some ways, home to her is still the West Village. Of course, we have seen the Village change over the years, so her desire to go home again is drastically compromised by what the Village has become. We both love New York, but her family properties are gone, and any time we spend a few days in the city’s wintery weather, we look at each other and say “nice place to visit.”

I was born in Boston, but our family moved out to the suburbs as the first ring of post-WWII medical and electronic r&d industry began to form around Route 128, the first Silicon Valley. We moved to Littleton, Massachusetts a small New England town, rural before it became a suburb, a bucolic community full of cows and apples, lakes and forests, and old yankee farmers and mechanics.

A wartime entrepreneur named Ted McElroy, an inventor and the World’s Fastest Telegraphist, started a factory in our New England town, with my father as partner and electronics engineer. However, my father had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, when many idealistic young people joined the party for altruistic reasons. Most of the new company’s contracts were with the federal government, and they weren’t having any Commie bastards building electronics equipment for them.

After my father was blacklisted, we probably should have moved back to Boston. Both my parents were intellectuals and progressive people, and there wasn’t much of a scene for that in picturesque Littleton, Massachusetts. But we stayed on, through my graduation from high school. On one hand, calling Littleton home was great. I was outdoors all the time, riding bicycles over the New England hills, exploring the forests, swimming in the summer, skiing in the winter. Many of my friends were the kids of farmers, so we built forts in hay lofts and got paid for picking apples and corn and boxing potatoes.

However, by the time I was 15, I had read Kerouac’s On the Road and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, and a raft of other macho manuals, and I had begun to play folk music. At 16, I was driving in to haunt Cambridge coffee houses, mooning over a very young Joan Baez, and getting my mind blown by Jim Kweskin and Bob Dylan. I was ready to bust out of “home.”

After I graduated high school and entered university life, Littleton began to fade. My father died after my second year in college, my mother moved to New York to complete her graduate studies, and Littleton ceased to exist.

California beckoned. Although they had met in New York, both my parents were from California. My California aunts and uncles had kids who were my peers. By 1965, San Francisco was “where it’s at.” Every summer during college, I drove in an assortment of beaters, old station wagons, sedans, trucks, across the country to hang out in the San Francisco Bay Area, just as the scene was beginning to blossom. After graduation, I left the East Coast for San Francisco and never looked back.

In the 1980s, San Francisco’s progressive communities had fragmented and the radical arts scene had deteriorated. My partner and I migrated to Los Angeles. We’ve been here ever since, but, despite building a strong, creative life here, LA has never felt like home.

As we grow older, we are beginning to ask “where is home?”

I love our Hollywood house and its garden.

I grow nostalgic and love the beauty and dynamics of New England. I even keep in touch with some of my small-town school pals, but I doubt we’d move back there.

New York has changed drastically and, although we have many friends there, it would be one hell of a challenge to set up shop in Manhattan or even Brooklyn.

San Francisco feels the most like home — the Bay, the weather, the surrounding eco- and geo-environments but…Would we ever return?

Maybe the answer lies in the title of Thomas Wolfe’s powerful but antiquated 1930s novel — You Can’t Go Home Again.

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Going home can produce dramatic results, but probably not the ones you were expecting.
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