Shame

[Note: My stomach is churning as I get ready to publish this post. It is the first draft of the beginning of a memoir that I have tried and failed to write for many years. I hope that blogging each chapter as I write will break the logjam. In a few paragraphs, you will understand my stuckness. Please forgive–it’s hard to be honest. ~LaVonne Ellis]

A dozen or so years ago, I had a cushy job doing customer support at home for a music website. The hourly pay wasn’t great but I was able to work from home and the work was easy enough. It was a huge comedown from a successful, 22-year career in radio news, but I was grateful for the job. I had developed a daily routine: yoga, write, blog what I wrote, interact with the small online community I’d become part of, then do a few hours’ work answering customer’s emails. After that, my 14-year-old son would get out of school and we had the rest of the day together. Once a week, we took the bus  down to Mission Valley or Grossmont Center to see a matinee movie.

We lived frugally—no car, no luxuries except those movie matinees—but they were happy days, even though I struggled to avoid getting migraines from exposure to fragrances and chemicals every time we went somewhere. Just as bad were the fragrances Robby brought home on his clothes and hair after visiting a friend’s house. I’d make him take a shower and put on clean clothes immediately after getting home. He couldn’t invite his friends over unless they were willing to shower and change into his clothes—and only one of them was. I still had migraines almost every day. So when I say they were happy days, well, not completely.

I had given up my last radio job as a traffic reporter because of coworkers’ fragrances, plus those on the bus ride to and from work, so I was grateful to find the part-time customer support job working from home. Grateful, but frustrated. The owner, an aging surfer with a distinct lack of people skills named Frank, was by turns kind in his email interactions and verbally abusive. I never knew how he was going to react to a mistake or a suggestion. But I learned how to get along with him and eventually, as he hired more women to work at home for customer support, he asked me to train and manage them.

I was glad to get a small raise, but some months the money was barely enough to cover the rent. And then there came a month when there wasn’t enough. So I thought I’d just pad my timesheet a little bit, just enough to cover things, and then make it up with extra work the next month. Which I did. But then… well, you know… slippery slope and all.

After a while, I justified it to myself by saying I wasn’t getting paid what I was worth, that my boss was abusive—wasn’t that worth extra pay? I made all kinds of excuses to rationalize the fact that what I was doing was stealing. I tried not to think about that, to push that thought away whenever it came up. And it did, every day. But by now, I’d gotten used to the extra money and the comforts it bought: a new pair of shoes, dinner out, more matinee movies.

Over time, I got bolder, until I was claiming an extra thousand dollars’ worth of hours a month while delegating most of my work to the women I was supervising. I had developed a good relationship with them—they liked and respected me. So did my boss, in spite of his frequent ALL-CAPS emailed outbursts. They all trusted me. I betrayed them all.

My little scheme came unraveled one morning when I got a phone call from Frank.

“I’m looking at your hours,” he said, “and comparing them with the number of customer emails you answered, and it doesn’t add up. What’s going on?”

I hesitated, my heart pounding.

“I–I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered.

Frank said he’d call later. I called an old friend and confessed.

“What should I do?” I wailed.

“Deny everything,” she warned. “Deny, deny, deny!”

So, when Frank called back, I did. He accepted my denial reluctantly. I could tell he didn’t believe me. My stomach churned as we hung up.

How could I have let this happen? How could I have let myself return to the old me, the little girl who stole from her mother’s purse and her grandmother’s dresser, the teenager who shoplifted a dress, the twenty-something hippie who thought nothing of stealing a gold-plated flute from a music store, the young mother who took money from her parents’ restaurant, telling herself they owed it to her for not sending her to college?

All that was decades ago. I thought I had changed. I had vowed to stop lying and stealing when I got on the plane with Robby’s older brother in 1972, and moved to California. I would start a new life, I vowed. At first, it was a strange feeling walking through a store and realizing I didn’t need to worry about cameras watching me because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. A police car driving by was no longer occasion to wonder if it was coming for me.

Morphing from a small-time thief into an honest woman happened overnight physically—just a promise to myself on that plane was all it took—but mentally, it took years. I often choked back a lie and forced myself to tell the truth. I had to remind myself when temptation presented itself at work that whatever money I gained wasn’t worth losing a paycheck—or going to jail.

And now, apparently, it hadn’t taken at all. I had built a new life, all right, one that gave me the self-respect I’d never had before. I didn’t think of myself as a thief or a liar any more, but I was just lying to myself. It was easy to be honest when money wasn’t a problem, but as soon as the chips were down, I had reverted to my old ways.

I cried for hours that night. I told my son what I had done, and apologized. Robby hugged me and forgave me. I cried harder, alone with my shame and regret. In spite of my friend’s advice to deny everything, I knew I had to tell the truth.

In the morning, I quavered and picked up the phone.

“Frank,” I said slowly, painfully, “you were right. I am so, so sorry.”

He was kind, even gentle, and then it was over. I told him I would pay him back somehow, but he said not to worry about it. He said his partner wanted to prosecute but Frank had refused. He knew that I had a son to raise and couldn’t work outside the home because of my health. He was sympathetic but of course, he had to let me go.

I hung up and relief washed over me like a cleansing rain. It was almost as if I’d wanted to be caught, to end this constant struggle with conscience, to be done with it at last. But there was a consequence I hadn’t thought of:  the five women I supervised—how would they take this?

The next day, I called each of them to apologize. But by then, they had all been given a choice: come into the office to work, or find another at-home job—an almost impossible task at the time. Because of what I had done, Frank could no longer trust anyone. The women were surprisingly forgiving—all except one. This part-time job had been her retirement lifeline, allowing her to keep her home. Now, she said, she would have to move in with her son.

“I will never, ever forgive you,” she said bitterly.

The words felt like a slap in the face, a slap I well deserved.

The one thing I had never counted on when I made the choice to lie and steal was that my actions would hurt anyone else. How wrong I was. Two of the other women and I had become close friends, and they both insisted this wouldn’t change anything. For a while, we still talked on the phone but eventually all contact ceased. I couldn’t blame them.

But now, I needed to get some income. The rent was coming due, and I had a son to support. I applied for jobs at some of the fast-food places in the neighborhood, but I got so sick from the cleaning chemicals at a Pizza Hut that I left without handing in my application. At a small Afghan cafe where I had been a frequent and friendly customer, the handsome young owner took me aside and said he was sorry he didn’t have an opening for me.

“But let me tell you,” he said, “in Afghanistan, my family was rich. We even had a palace. When we came here, we had nothing. It was very hard but look at us now. You will be all right,” he promised with a gentle pat on my arm. “I know it.”

I went home in defeat and cried again. The fear and stress manifested in physical pain that was so intense I could barely walk for several days.

Then my older, grown son called from Minnesota. He and his girlfriend were coming to San Diego to get married, and they wanted me and Robby to be there. I was overjoyed, but I knew that I would have to tell him what I’d done… and ask for help.

[To be continued…]