Prologue

A Chapter by Jacquie

CONFESSIONS OF A CORPORATE S**T

By Jacqueline Gum

PROLOGUE

Over the course of my sixteen-year marriage, I’d entertained thousands, hosted hundreds of dinner parties, kissed countless asses, brokered untold deals and colluded with dozens of employees to assure the growth of my husband’s company. But the day my marriage ended only my ex-husband, our attorneys and I, bore witness to the death of this corporate wife. The settlement had been negotiated out of court and our final meeting was a formality required by law. My maiden name restored, my severance package finalized, I was moving to Florida to begin a new life at age fifty. I had paid a high price in terms of pride and self-esteem, and my recompense was less money per year than I would have earned had I not left my own career to better my husband’s.

I was sitting alone in my car in the garage under the Milwaukee County Courthouse, my head against the headrest, seemingly glued there. My arms, wrists bent backward as my fingers grazed the leather of the steering wheel, weighed a hundred pounds each, and my legs felt like cement pilings driven deep into the ground. I was convinced the level of Lake Michigan had risen at least an inch with the volume of tears I’d shed in the last fifteen months—tears of anger, frustration, sadness, madness, gladness, and humiliation, and some triumph mixed in, too. Today my eyes were dry. My eyelids, suddenly heavy, involuntarily closed and images started rolling through my head like a bad 16 mm movie reel.

There I was serving dinner to ten company executives while convincing a desirable job candidate that he would be better appreciated and encouraged to grow at my husband's company. After dessert he accepted the offer.

I was organizing a luncheon for potential customers and then planning a welcome party for the new employee and his wife. Secretly meeting with the executive vice-president, I was showing him a new approach to gain approval from the CEO, my husband, for a project that had previously been rejected.

I was shocked to hear my own laughter reverberate around the car, a repetitive echo bouncing from surface to surface like a ricocheted bullet. Could my life really have become such an appalling cliché? I had carefully crafted and culled my uniqueness from a very early age. Exactly when, and how, did "unique" sour like outdated milk and curdle into "cliché?" My laughter, changing key, took on a slightly maniacal pitch. What the f**k? How had I let this happen?

That very moment, I reluctantly began to unravel the basket of my life with John Wendall, reed by reed. I had to…before I found myself in a home for abandoned corporate wives/corporate s***s, weaving real baskets for retail. There had to be millions of us out there…walking clichés dumfounded by the absurdity of it all, hunting like scavengers for the distinctiveness we had branded since our childhoods. We were proven frontrunners in innumerable fields who had given up working for recognition and singular achievement. Our livelihood now centered on propelling our husband's success, we had merely traded careers.

When you are a woman without children, the social expectation is that you have a career, or at least a job. Being a corporate wife doesn't qualify as a career. Most people can't comprehend the difficulty or complexity of the task. Not exactly the same as a woman who works and supports her husband while he attends dental, medical or law school, a corporate s**t actually has intimate knowledge of the business and works to better her husband’s company and his image. In my case, I created an illusion. I reinvented my husband and managed his life, our lives, and his company while remaining resolutely behind him, thick curtain between us, insisting the spotlight shine solely on him. At the height of my career, my initiatives were so cleverly couched that my husband supposed he birthed all the ideas alone.

Though I had years of experience as a business owner, an entrepreneur, a top salesperson, and a corporate manager, when I sold my company and married John Wendall I became one thing only: a corporate s**t. My self-appointed title always got a laugh. “Domestic Diva” was a pretentious title I couldn't abide. It connoted a spoiled, kept woman, languishing in luxury. Contrarily, a corporate s**t is a working woman, albeit an unpaid one.

I've always thought of a s**t as an unpaid prostitute. Prostitution by definition is the action of selling one's talents for a base purpose. For sixteen years I poured the best of myself—my talent, my ability, my brainpower, even my body—into creating and sustaining a successful man, a successful business, and a successful marriage. It worked for a while, but in the end I was rewarded by being surreptitiously terminated with no notice. There was no remuneration for my services.

It was my ambitiously driven nature coupled with John's mounting demands that created a very successful manufacturing company and produced sixteen years of pyrotechnics glimpsed from a roller coaster moving forward, then backward, and ultimately reeling out of control.

© 2008 Jacquie

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Reviews

John Lauterbach

I love the definition of 'corporate s**t' you provide. I can't relate to the wife thing, but that concept bridges gender and really opens up your target audience.

Excellent use of description-relevant words to enhance the overall read. I wish there was more than just a prologue. Looking forward to your next chapter!