Breaking Up is Hard To Do.

By Myrna Blyth

Has work been the love of my life?

Maybe. Probably. But you are not supposed to say that, are you?  

No matter how many times you put work first and even though most people I know, men, certainly, and women now too, define themselves by what they do.

When I was growing up caring about the work they would do if they even worked at all was not expected of girls.   You already know what other things were expected.  Marriage, of course. By twenty-five at the latest or your mother worried, and you, admit it, worried, too.  Children, at least two. Preferably a boy and a girl.  And even today, aren’t you supposed to say it is your children you care about most?   Or your husband, if you still have one.  And yes, I love my sons.  And yes, my husband was for a while the center of my younger life, but I admit Ihave been thinking about my work and it has been filling my days since high school.

I took journalism as a course in my Junior year at Lawrence High and  was the Editor-in-chief of the school paper by Senior year.  The paper had the dumb, pretentious name, Mental Pabulum, food for thought.  It turned out I just could do it, and my prissy journalism teacher, who didn’t seem to like me much, could see that and to save her time and effort gave me the job. She also taught a course she preferred called SubDebs which was really homemaking. Seriously, it was a high school course with full credits then. The final project was making a poodle skirt. I wasn’t so good at that.  

I was the editor of my college magazine, a rather flimsy thing. And the first real job I had was on a magazine for teenagers called Ingenue. At Ingenue I learned never name a magazine or, in fact, any product a name the customer can’t pronounce. The teenage girls called it In-Jen–You and bought copies of Seventeen instead.

I have had friends, other editors, who dreamed of being at the helm of a major magazine, fantasized about it, initiated elaborate campaigns to get the job.  That wasn’t me.  I just knew I could do it so why shouldn’t I do it? Why shouldn’t it be me? They wanted the job  I wanted the job so I could do the work. But to be honest I wanted the job too.

And so when I got the job, at first, at Family Circle and then, later,  at Ladies’ Home Journal and  More  Magazine and finally at AARP,   I worked.  From early in the morning till late most nights. Weekends too. The work obsessed work on weekends, and holidays. We claim we have to.

For over sixty years.

Back then, Family Circle was the largest women’s magazine in the world. Selling seven million copies every three weeks out of the wire racks that hung at the end of the cashier’s aisle in the supermarkets  It was a  monthly Frazier vs. Ali world championship slugfest against Woman’s Day, our competitor, displayed  upright  in the next rack . Our coverlines against their coverlines to see which thrifty recipes or money saving tips the coupon clutching shopper would prefer, and add a copy at the last minute to her cart.

There were so many right-hand pages of advertising that the magazine needed vast quantities of left hand pages of feature content so I, the feature editor, could assign, or often write, whatever I wanted.

Example:  I went to the Johnson Ranch near Austin. a very simple place with shag carpeting and wicker on the porch, to talk to Lady Bird Johnson and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan about The Southern Woman. Did the readers care? Probably not much. And nowadays our ex-presidents have much classier digs.

 I flew to Rome to interview Audrey Hepburn who hated the movie version of a potboiler novel she was starring in.  She looked, big eyed and too thin like Bambi in menopause. The gossip in the Italian tabloids was that her husband was cheating on her. Cheating on Audrey Hepburn?  And he was.

I interviewed Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce who had wonderful stories and trouble with her eyes.  She wore tinted glasses and told me as soon as I sat down opposite her, in her stepson’s lavish Park Avenue apartment,  that I had beautiful eyes. They were okay. I now have trouble with my eyes and wear tinted glasse. I always look at younger women’s eyes first, with envy and regret.

I also insisted on interviewing Billy Graham, presidential pal, starting a nationwide Crusade. He asked me what religion I was.  I said my family was Jewish.   He said, with booming emphasis, Mrs. Golda Meir is  a very good friend of mine. I didn’tlaugh.

I have a son whose first name is Graham.  When I got home, I told my mother who was babysitting that Graham was interesting.  See, she said, didn’t I tell you he was a wonderful baby?  I don’t think she ever read my interviews or the stories I published in different women’s magazines. She only read one story that was about her. My one-hit wonder in The New Yorker. She hated it.

 I remember way back then in those Family Circle climbing upward days a Christmas when the kids opened presents delighted by the haul, while I was cutting a best seller bonus excerpt for  an upcoming issue.  I had spent  too much money on it to beat out the competitor. Hacking away–from ninety thousand words to ten thousand that I hoped would make sense to a reader. That obsessed Christmas I worked most of the day while the kids played, and my husband complained. I almost forgot to put the turkey in.

Ill deeds, large and small. My older son complained I didn’t go to his baseball games in the middle of weekday afternoons.  He was the pitcher.  The team usually lost and I had work to do.

More recent: I almost missed my tour to Pompeii, standing aside, talking on my cell to the office about some now-forgotten crisis.  It took me half an hour to catch up with the group somewhere near the brothel. I have been to Pompeii but there are mosaics that I missed. Pompeii only once.  Crises big and small, daily for all those years.

Maybe the worst of all: I was offered a job in another city when my husband was already sick. He had stopped wanting to go anywhere. He was  in bed, on a chair or at the computer.  He would call when I was out to lunch with a friend at least five times in an hour and a half.

It was the only job I could have been offered.  Who gets offered a really great job at 73? He told me to take it though I would be gone from Monday to Thursday every week. I wonder now was he testing me?  Of course I took it. He died a year and a half later on a weekend when I was with him. I had ten more years of work.

Now it is over. Finally over. I say I have had enough. I say I just don’t want to do it anymore.  I say I want time for other things: travel, seeing the grandkids, exercising more.  What everyone says.

But then I keep wondering why does it still hurt so much?

Myrna Blyth writes frequently for many publications. She was until recently the Senior Vice President and Editorial Director of AARP Media, after being the editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal. She was the founding editor of More magazine, and before that the Executive Editor of Family Circle and Senior Editor of Family Health Magazine. She has written two novels, Cousin Suzanne and For Better and For Worse, and two non-fiction books, Spin Sisters, which was a New York Times bestseller, and How To Raise An American.