I love talking to my mother about her career. She’s done so many interesting things and has struggled at various points to succeed by her parents’ standards, fulfill her creative interests, make sufficient money, and decide how to balance a career and a family. The overarching theme of my mom’s work is independence and drive to prove her worth and talent, both to herself and others. From an early age, her parents conveyed high expectations for her and her siblings. Her father, an anesthesiologist, had been pushed into medicine by his own father, though he was a skilled craftsman and perhaps would have preferred to be a poet. Her mother had been a nurse and received a full ride scholarship to nursing school. It was understood that my mom and her siblings would all take challenging classes, do well, go to college, and become professionals. Doctors, lawyers, dentists. Her father especially wanted her to be a doctor, despite his own hesitations. Her independence and drive to practice and prove herself developed from a complete absence of approval and communication from her father. Her mother served as an intermediary, conveying his thoughts in fraught and awkward conversations. While her mother provided unconditional positive feedback (which was promptly written off), her father never gave any indication of approval. So, my mother would practice things on her own, from tennis to math, so that when she did them in front of people, she would seem competent or intelligent and gain approval.
Despite the pressure and difficult home situation, my mom spoke of constant learning and opportunities to pursue anything that was of interest:
She always excelled in school and said that she never felt that any career was off-limits or that she wouldn’t succeed, though she wasn’t sure if that was due to naivety or confidence. Math and science were her strong subjects in school, and she entered college as the culture was changing around women’s careers, and she mentioned women’s emancipation as a strong influence on her experiences. At the suggestion of her then-boyfriend (emancipation, huh?), she decided to study the burgeoning field of computer engineering. She said that she didn’t doubt her abilities until her first job at Boeing, when her minority status became immediately apparent:
She said that her peers in her age group worked well together, and the secretaries were mother-figures and kind. In other jobs, however, when secretaries were her age, she experienced animosity, “Those secretaries were kind to me, but others were not. Envy. They questioned me, hated me, when they were my age.” 
	She did not enjoy the work at Boeing, where she worked on steering and communications with air-launch missiles. She felt that the work was above her head, and she didn’t want to be involved with work that felt so war-like. She then moved to work in computing at Fifth Third bank, which she preferred. When my siblings were born, she decided to stop working at the bank and stay home, for financial reasons, which was not something she had expected to do, and continued to have mixed feelings:
