I’ve been fired two times in my life.
The first time was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina when I was seventeen and my boyfriend was eighteen. We drove down with the idea that there would be more jobs in a lively, hot-spot tourist town than in New Paltz. Better still, we’d get to be together, on our own, for the whole summer, and make lots of money.
I found work – not in a lively, hot-spot restaurant, but as a waitress in a small, how-is-this-place-still-standing shack that hung off the end of the pier and smelled of low tide and burnt coffee. It was the diner where the local fishermen for breakfast, all at the same time. I don’t have many memories of that place since I didn’t last there long: White bread popping pale from the toaster, four at a time; eggs, fried, scrambled, hard boiled waiting on a thick plastic yellow plate for their side sausages, bacon, and hash browns. And I remember the tea, which in South Carolina was as sweet as candy, and served in tall, orange-tinted, textured plastic cups, filled with ice, with free refills. No matter what the fisherman ordered for breakfast, they all wanted that tea.
Best I can remember of that fateful 5am morning shift, I had made the decision that instead of pouring ten glasses of tea, balancing them on a tray, and handing them out to each fisherman at their seat, I stacked the plastic cups, carried the pitcher filled with tea, and poured each glass right there at the table. This breach of fine etiquette was apparently inexcusable, and I was fired on the spot. Frankly, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, just as the sun was rising over the inter-coastal waterway.
I quickly found another waitressing job, at the Channel Marker, where I wore a blue and white sailor suit and served fried food and unlimited Hush puppies.
The second time I was fired – some twenty years later– was from the Quaker nursery school where I ran the lunch bunch. I started at 10am and stayed through 1pm, when the parents who had opted for the longer day came to gather their 3 and 4-year-olds. As soon as I was done working for the day I would hurry home and carve out a few hours to work on my novel before my two sons came home from school.
This schedule worked pretty well, until conflicts between the new head teacher and myself came to a head one morning, and I was called into the director’s office to discuss the dilemma. Since she was full-time and I was part-time, I was the one who had to leave.
This time, I cried— in her office and all the way out to my car. But frankly, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. This gave me three more free hours that day — and every day until I found a new job — to work on my writing. I finished my first novel within a month, and four months later it was sold to Little, Brown and Company.
Understand at this point, I had been writing and sending out my work for almost nine years. I had a lot to learn— about plot, character development, pacing, theme, story arc, dialogue, language. During those years, I hadn’t only been teaching nursery school, making a home, and raising two young kids, I had also been taking classes, workshops, and going to conferences. I had been reading voraciously, learning some from the spate of boilerplate rejections, but more from the personal rejections that were a lot more encouraging.
I cannot say for sure that if I had written that novel nine years earlier, already having learned the skills I needed in order to write a well-crafted story, it would have been published four, seven, eight years before it was. But I do know for sure that I am embarrassed to take out the writing I did in those years leading up to 2000 and look at it now.
I am also certain that getting fired from that the Quaker school had nothing to do with getting my first novel published. But it’s indelibly connected in my brain, like an omen. It felt like a gift, a silver lining, a sign from the universe, if you will. Whatever it was, I gladly took it.
Years later, I bumped into my old nursery school director in the cereal aisle of Gregory’s grocery store. She apologized for what happened, explaining the conundrum she had been in. I assured her I understood completely. We hugged sincerely, and said goodbye. I thought about telling her how grateful I was that she fired me, but I still didn’t think it was a fair decision and I wasn’t about to give it a positive spin.
Getting fired never feels good. But give it time and, maybe, it can.
Contact me here to talk more about your work-in-progress, or to schedule a free 20-minute consultation, and speak nothing of my long and disastrous career as a waitress!