I HAVE SACRIFICED

Post number two in a series featuring “Getting Further with Honey” An Oral History of a Successful Female Vice President.  Recorded and dictated in 1997……   

“If you do not sacrifice for what you want, what you want will become the sacrifice” Unknown

Last week’s post was an introduction to the “herstory” of the first ever female Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Hershey Entertainment and Resort Company from 1997.  Her honest and vulnerable stories changed my life forever, many of them still all ring true to today.  I hope her experiences and expertise that I will share over the next few weeks will pull at your heart strings and inspire you as well. 

This week, she shares an incredibly vulnerable side.  As I was retyping her words from the only copy I have of the direct dictation, I became teary eyed as I typed.  When I was a Junior in college and interviewed this woman, I had such a different perspective than I do now.   I took her words for very matter of fact.  I now read these words 24 years later as a working mom of 2 boys and I am amazed by how incredibly vulnerable she was with me at the time.  I was not in a place in 1997 to appreciate or even receive that vulnerability, but now in 2022, I am emotionally enthralled.  I believe we will all find a part of ourselves in her words, you will feel her emotional struggle and will recognize that even today, the struggle continues.

Below is a direct quote excerpt from the subject of the paper in her exact words:

“Can you have it all?  You can’t, it is so hard to juggle it all.  I used to say I am going to have it all, but now that I have eased up on myself it is all I can do.  I can just do the best that I can do, but you get and expectation for yourself.  And I have just kind of let go of that and it has made things a lot easier.  Something has got to give, I can’t be a super subordinate, a super boss, a super mom, and a super friend.  I mean something has just got to give.  It hurts me because I know I disappoint my friends who call and I can’t find time to call them back.  I look at my relationship with my daughter which is great, but my relationship with my husband is definitely strained because I don’t give him the time or commitment that I do my job.  I don’t believe that on all fronts it can all be clicking.  I think that something is going to give, something will not click at all times.  I think it is something, you just have to get comfortable in your own skin and know that you can’t deliver all the way around, not that it is okay, but you have just got to let up on yourself because you will just keep beating yourself up all the time and you can’t keep doing that.  My husband wants more kids, we only have one and I don’t feel like I am even able to give her enough, how am I going to give another one enough?  So then I think, does that make me a bad person and I think ‘no, it is just not what you want’, and then he says, ‘well I don’t want to sit around at Thanksgiving dinner 20 years from now with just one child’ and I’m like you know, I understand, and I do feel bad.  I never said that I just wanted to have one child and I still can’t believe I am saying that, but he is 44 and I am 39, we have been married 18 years and I just can’t find time to have another one.  If you would hand me a 6-year-old right now, that would be great, but I have a real problem imagining myself going through being pregnant again.  Just the way people will view me differently.  I had my daughter before I was “this”, and I think, ‘Oh God Karen how shallow are you?’; but will I have the same impact and the same influence if I am walking around 9 months pregnant?  That is a really heavy load to carry.

I don’t get to spend enough time at home, I feel like I do a good job with my siblings and parents, but I haven’t been a good friend and it is a horrible bull shit excuse, but it is time.  I don’t send friends birthday cards.  I have a friend whose mom just recently had a bout with cancer and died and I wasn’t there, I think to myself ‘I have to call Ann today’, and something will come up and I just won’t call.  I just haven’t been good with keeping in touch and that just really bothers me.  The minute I get home I just totally focus my attention on my daughter so that being the case, my relationship with my husband has just…. I mean we are great friends, but I haven’t given him the attention because there have just been other things.  He has been my biggest supporter and has picked up and moved for me and does everything for our daughter.  He takes her to school and picks her up, does the grocery shopping, he just the other night referred to himself as Mr. MOM.  So, I then sit there and think, gosh I wish he was more aggressive like I am on a career but then I realize that if he was then I could not have done all this.  So I have put an expectation on him that really hasn’t been fair, and it is definitely a difficult situation.  Those are the things I feel bad about because I have sacrificed those things for this.

When you are on your death bed, it is your family and friends that surround you, it is not your work and that is a constant underlying thing for me.  I really am not doing anything that is helping anybody, that makes me feel bad too.  I just hope that maybe I am making an impact on this company which is making an impact on the employees and their families, I have to think about it that way to just try and justify it all.”