By Molly MacDonald, founder of The Pink Fund
It was the summer before my Junior year at The University of Michigan. I will never forget the angst I felt as my mother shoved me out of the front passenger seat of her car, to the curb of the Michigan Union where I was to register for classes, and more importantly select my major.
As a baby boomer, the check I was to make on a form, meant for me, a lifetime career, employed with the same company until 45 years later I would be given a pension, a 14K Gold Watch and released to go home and rock away the rest of my life into oblivion.
Crying, I pleaded with my mother, “I have no idea what I want to do.” What if I decide I don’t like what I check?” It all felt so etched in stone, irrevocable. Stuck.
“Just check something,” my mother said, “You can always change your mind later.”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said.
As I labored up the steps to the Michigan Union, I thought about the things some people said to me.
“You’re too nosy,””
“ I’m curious,” I replied
“ You ask too many questions”
“Well how do you learn,” I asked.
“Your vocabulary is simple.”
“Well how can the average person understand if I use big New York Times words?”
And finally, “You always procrastinate.”
“Deadlines inspire me,” I insisted.
Journalism. I checked off journalism. Following graduation, I took up a career in journalism.
Over the next 12 years, I was a journalist in one fashion or another, working for a weekly newspaper, then one of Detroit’s top dailies, to a PR firm, to a speech writer for the Chairman Emeritus of a world wide advertising agency—a guy who had managed the Cadillac account in the 60’s, sat in our meetings enjoying a large tumbler of clear liquid, which I assumed to be water, but was in fact, vodka.
I married a man I met on a blind date, blindly marrying him nine weeks later. Settling down in the suburbs, I gave up my career, birthing five children in nine years, while living a life of luxury we in this country refer to as the 1%.
Like many women born during the baby boom between 1946 and 1964, our career options were just beginning to advance beyond Rosie the Riveter, and the traditional nurse, teacher, secretary.
I was raised to graduate with a liberal arts degree from one of the schools, graduate, work for a few years, then marry the right guy and settle down to a life of raising children, playing golf, tennis and bridge and volunteering through The Junior League.
Six months into my marriage, I wanted to go back to work. I missed the challenge of advancing myself professionally, and frankly found suburban life lacking the stimulus I loved in the workplace.
Just as I was about to seriously broach the topic of returning to work with my workaholic husband, who later admitted to me that he rushed our 9 week courtship into marriage, because “I have to get back to work,” I found myself pregnant with our first child. And two years later with the second.
Returning to work was off the table.
Until my return to the workplace was no option, as it was not up to me to support myself and my five children.
Fifteen years after marrying, Mr. Right, the brilliant Harvard educated lawyer, I drove up the driveway to our 1940’s Federal style home on two acres in the city of Bloomfield Hill, MI. My five children ages 4-13 securely strapped into the back of my Surbuban, I noticed a small note tacked on our front door.
Pulling it off, I read our home was to be auctioned off in 30 days.
That night I had an unpleasant conversation with my husband during which I learned the deal in which he was in hot pursuit was being fronted with our money. My name had been forged on important financial documents, leaving me potentially liable for millions in debt. Stunned at his greed and deceit, I made plans to take our children and leave.
Selling my worldly goods that had any substantial cash value, liquidating my IRA’s and cashing in a small whole life insurance policy, I was able to cobble together $100,000. Enough to hire three attorneys, rent a house for cash and look for work.
There was no advancing myself.I needed a job.
Interviewing for any position for which I might be considered, I am certain I appeared to look like a deer in headlights, stopped in my tracks, unsure which way to move to save myself.
I was reminded of my days at The Detroit Free Press, when I was Peter Principled to Assistant Promotion Director, replacing a man 37 years my senior, who was retiring. We were hiring a new receptionist/secretary who arrived for her interview with that same deer in headlights look. It was obvious to me, she had recently experienced a major life change spelled D I V O R C E. Her entire demeanor shouted
T E R R I F I E D.
Twenty years later that terrified woman was me.
The world of work had changed since the advances of the computer, to the internet. Like Rip Van Winkle in the Washington Irving short story, who went to sleep for 20 years, only to awaken and find the world he knew was unrecognizable, I did not recognize the new workplace.
Over the next seven years I bounced around, taking any work I could, writing anything and everything from school auction catalogs to newsletters to website content. I even had a short stint back in the newspaper business in the now combined promotion departments of The Detroit News and Free Press, working for a woman who once reported to me.
Determined to advance myself, I sucked it up and went to work, grateful for the job.
For a while I even peddled lipstick as a Mary Kay consultant. A former Chairman of the Board of McKinsey worldwide assured me that cosmetics were recession proof and that women would always buy another lipstick.
After four years of contract work, I landed a job with Ford Motor Company in the marketing department managing the top 100 dealer incentive programs. A former babysitter of ours, had married the man who was now running that program. He knew I needed a job and gave me the opportunity to interview.
I was hired by Ford’s outside agency, Imagination USA, to write scripts for dealer shows, but in reality the position was far more administrative and required me to put things into excel spreadsheets about which I knew nothing and dive deep into Ford’s computer systems to retrieve all kinds of dealer information.
I worked for a woman 18 years my junior, who was understandably frustrated with my lack of computer skills and finally asked me one day, “Why are you working this job?” When I shared with her my need for employment to feed my five children, I sensed she did not get it.
When the twin towers fell in September, I was one of the first to be let go. But with the help of Ford land another job with an agency selling marketing programs.
The summer I met and married my husband, he asked me to take an Interest Analysis test, the same one he used for hiring purposes. In retrospect, I suppose he was “hiring” me for the position of wife.
The test showed my skills were strongest in sales.
Ditching writing and PR, I segued to sales.
In the spring of 2005, I was about to start a position in sales, a job which for the first time in almost eight years, would allow me to live month to month, rather than week to week. A job with unlimited earning potential, a car and health insurance.
However my annual mammogram looked suspicious for breast cancer. A biopsy showed that cancer cells lurking in my milk ducts were waiting to bust out and form a tumor.
My career plans were detoured to the off ramp while I underwent two surgeries and six weeks of daily radiation.
Without my income and the addition of a costly COBRA premium to insure our family and my access to life-saving care, we went into financial free fall.
Our home faced foreclosure. Late notices and threats of shut-offs stuffed my mailbox. Co-pays for treatment costs, stacked neatly in a pile, remained unopened. And at the end of my treatment, during which friends and family supplied us with lasagna in every form imaginable, I found myself standing in line in the basement of a local church for food.
The woman with all the advantages of a great education and determination was feeling defeated.
How was I ever to advance if we ended up in a shelter?
That summer when I believed I hit rock bottom, there was only one way to advance. My quest to get help became one determined to give help.
I began to believe that I could make a real difference in the lives of women and their families in treatment for breast cancer, by creating a non-profit that would address this very gap in support I was experiencing. Non-medical financial aid.
With $50, I purchased the book, How To Form a Non-Profit Corporation and together with my new husband we formed The Pink Fund.
Today The Pink Fund has advanced as one of five breast cancer charities worthy of a donation, as so designated by Time and Money.com; we are one of four charity partners of Ford Warriors in Pink and in the second year of our cause marketing contract with Snap-on Tools. I have received many awards and recognition for our work, which has further served to advance the mission.
In 1998, I was given the Meyers Briggs test. Probably from some potential employer where I was hoping to advance myself. The result was a very strong ESFJ.
In reading over the characteristics of an ESFJ, I see myself as I am today in my role with The Pink Fund
“Warm-hearted, talkative, popular, conscientious, born cooperators, active committee members. Need harmony and may be good at creating it. Always doing something nice for someone. Work best with encouragement and praise.
And this, the most important, that speaks to my work now, “Main interest is in things and directly and visibly affect people’s lives.”