Jane Caro reveals the devastation of miscarriage, and being fired while pregnant

AFTER a long career in advertising Jane Caro has seen her fair share of sexism and debauchery. And then there was the time she was fired while pregnant.

Jane Caro’s new book reveals the Mad Men-esque reality of working in advertising.

AFTER a long and successful career in advertising it’s no surprise Jane Caro has seen her fair share of sexism and debauchery.

Mad Men doesn’t come close to what she’s seen in the Australian advertising industry.

In this exclusive extract from her new memoir, Caro reveals the hard reality of working as woman in her child-bearing years.

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I was 29 and my biological clock was ticking. My husband Ralph and I decided to stop using contraception. Well, more accurately, I had persuaded Ralph that we should stop using contraception.

I hadn’t thought about having children much — always assuming that I would, but a long time in the future. Then, quite suddenly, I felt a real urgency about time. I suppose it was my looming 30th birthday, but it was probably also the birth of Ann’s daughter — my niece Alice — that made the idea of a baby seem possible.

The actress Claudia Karvan says she decided to have children because she knew it would make everything more difficult and I know exactly what she means. When I thought about not having children, I realised that all that would happen with my life was that I’d get more of what I already had; more work, more money, more travel etc. It sounds great, but I just felt weary when I imagined that kind of future. I wanted a spanner in the works (I even started writing a book called exactly that when my first child was a baby; I never finished it).

I think at least part of the urge to have children — unconsciously, once again — was to test myself, to take a real risk, an actual leap into the dark. If that was my intention, I certainly got my wish, and then some.

Given what had happened the one time a condom had broken, and my subsequent abortion, I fully expected that by going off the pill I would get pregnant immediately. If there is a god (which I doubt very much), she has a wicked sense of humour. Nothing happened for six months.

Being a fertile female is a pain. I had spent about 15 years being deathly afraid that I would get pregnant and now I was afraid I wouldn’t. For years, the arrival of my period had been greeted with relief; now it was greeted with disappointment — to the point of tears.

Jane Caro’s book Plain-speaking Jane is available now.

After six long months, my period failed to arrive. We got our hopes up, I peed on a stick and the longed-for pink lines appeared. I went to my GP and he confirmed it: we were officially pregnant! Jubilant, I announced the good news to the world.

You may be wondering what a neurotic basket case like me was doing deciding to have children. Wasn’t I afraid I might do something awful? Or that I would find myself succumbing to agoraphobia and so end up locking us both inside the house? Why on earth would someone with my psychological and emotional problems have kids? And, of course, I obsessively asked myself all those questions and frequently woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night to torture myself with catastrophic imaginings.

But I had decided that my anxiety was an abnormality — a deformity — something I would simply have to live with. And, as usual with contradictory, complex me, I wanted to have children as much as I feared having them. I used to wonder what it must be like to be as other people appeared to be, able to make simple clear decisions about what they did or didn’t want. I now suspect there are actually very few people like that.

I asked my GP to refer me to an obstetrician. My only requirement was that she be a woman who had had children. There were only two who fitted that description at that time in Sydney. Dr Sue Fleming was in Annandale and I rang her office to make my initial appointment.

Receptionist: Your name?

Me: Jane Caro.

Receptionist: What school did you go to?

Gosh, I thought, they are thorough! I wonder why they need to know that?

Me: Forest High.

Receptionist: Jane! It’s Rosie Cook here!

Rosie had lived up the road from me when we lived in Frenchs Forest and had gone to Forest High with me. The fact that she was Sue Fleming’s nurse was a good omen, or so I thought. Sadly, I didn’t make it to my first appointment. My next phone call to Rosie Cook was because I was bleeding. She put me through to Sue immediately. It was a Friday. Dr Fleming told me to stay flat on my back with my legs raised and to have an ultrasound on the Monday.

‘Unfortunately,’ she said, ‘you might be having a miscarriage.’

I felt icy with dread.

I did what I was told and stayed flat on my back all weekend, but the blood leaked out of me steadily. If I hadn’t known I was pregnant I would just have thought I was having a rather late, rather heavy period.

On Monday morning I headed for the ultrasound appointment with my mother, who came with me because Ralph could not.

The woman performing the ultrasound seemed to take a very long time about it (not that I’d actually ever had an ultrasound before) and dug her wand roughly and repeatedly into my pathetically flat stomach.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t find anything.’ She searched for a heartbeat again, and there was another agonisingly long pause.

‘Are you sure you were pregnant?’

The remark went through me like a knife. Was I sure? Had I just made this whole thing up? Was I as crazy as that? But I had peed on a stick and a GP had confirmed the pregnancy ... or maybe he’d just gone along with what I’d told him. Perhaps I was even nuttier than I thought? That ultrasound technician’s remark added a layer of humiliation to my grief. I suddenly felt like a fool. I went to the loo and emptied my uncomfortably full bladder (anyone who has had an abdominal ultrasound will know how good that feels). I left the appointment fighting back tears. I had wanted that baby.

Life went back to normal, sort of. I had to go through the dispiriting and strangely humiliating experience of telling everyone

I was no longer pregnant. I felt like a failure. People were nice about it, of course, but all they had to confirm my pregnancy was my word and I was still fighting my own doubts about that, thanks to the ultrasound lady. I felt like a fraud for being upset.

‘Never mind,’ people said, ‘you’ll get pregnant again.’

But I did mind. How did they know if I’d get pregnant again and whether, if I did, it would stick?

Some people even told me that it was for the best and that miscarriages were nature’s way of preparing your womb for the proper pregnancy. That made me feel my grief was somehow illegitimate. Funny, isn’t it? Women are meant to feel devastated by an abortion but philosophical when they have a miscarriage.

Three months later, we were pregnant again, but this time I wasn’t jubilant. I was wary. Beyond immediate family, Ralph and I kept the news to ourselves. This was not easy, especially when I went to a shoot for a commercial my work teammate Lynne and I had written and the make-up artist and producer were pregnant (they were a couple) and due at almost the same time as I was. They were bubbling over with excitement about the baby and their future. I said nothing.

After 12 weeks, I finally felt confident enough to make my pregnancy public. The baby was due in early June so I told Jack I would be leaving my job at the Palace at the end of April. There was no such thing as parental leave back then, paid or unpaid.

It seems odd to me now that women like me just passively accepted that we’d have to give up work once we had children. There were few alternatives. Despite all the brave talk of women’s lib in the 1970s and the huge strides women had taken in education and — yes — the workplace by the 1980s, once you got pregnant it was like sliding right back to the 1950s and my mother’s situation. It became secret women’s business. Men were more involved than my father had been in pregnancy and childbirth — including participation in prenatal classes and at the birth — but child-rearing? Still women’s work. The price of children on your career and income, both current and for the rest of your life? Still paid entirely by women.

Looked at like that, it is arguable that men only gave ground on the things that benefited them — it is entirely due to feminism that fathers today have a much closer relationship with their children than they used to — but no ground on the things that might actually cost them anything.

Of course, I was too busy contemplating my own next move to worry about things like that at the time. I had no real plan about what I would do after I had the baby. I suppose I thought I’d spend a year or two at home, then find childcare and go back into the fray. Bwahhahahahhaha!

I was (still a little nervously) happy to be pregnant but I was sorry it meant I had to give up work.

I never considered that I could somehow hold on to my job and have a baby. Partly this was the demanding nature of being a copywriter and partly it was that Ralph had just been promoted into a job where he had started to travel a lot. Somebody had to be home with the baby, at least at first, and the only practical person to do that was me. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I couldn’t see any other realistic alternative.

U on SUNDAY ONLY - Jane Caro and daughters. Pic supplied

***

In the early days of my pregnancy, I started driving to the office for the first time. It helped me to cope with my overwhelming feeling of tiredness at the end of the day. Across the road in Burton Street at that time there was a small mechanics workshop. My car was due for a service and I booked it in. I dropped it off in the morning and crossed the road to work. That afternoon I walked back across that road to pick it up. The guy who handed me the keys inclined his head towards the elegant green and black terrace I had just left.

‘You work in there, do you?’

‘Yes.’

He leant a bit closer to me and lowered his voice. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an ad agency.’

His expression cleared. ‘Ah! We’ve been trying to work out what it was. We thought it was some kind of high-class brothel. The most beautiful women in the world work in there.’

I thought this was hilarious. However, the mechanic was right: the women I worked with were very attractive (the men, not so much). This was no accident, of course. A new account director hired an assistant on her merit, and rumour had it that he had received an earful from management because she was dumpy and plain. He was told that the clients expected glamour when they came to the agency and looking good was part of the job description — for female employees only, of course. To his credit, the account director defended his hire and the woman kept her job. She was terrific.

Glamorous or not, the Palace suffered the ups and downs that bedevil such a volatile industry. Not long before Christmas, we lost a major account and suddenly rumours were flying around the agency about who would lose their jobs. When an account is lost in advertising, overheads must be cut and the only overheads an agency really has are its people. I was pregnant, noticeably so by now. I was pretty sure I’d get the chop. After all, I had already told them I would be leaving in April. I prepared myself for what I assumed was the inevitable. I had my strategy planned, thanks to some wise advice from my father. I would ask to be interviewed on my own and try to negotiate the best possible deal for myself.

Then an all-staff memo landed on everyone’s desk. It ticked us all off for spreading rumours, unequivocally stated that no-one would be fired, except perhaps the idiot who had started the rumour — if they could ever find out who that was. I relaxed. I would be able to work out my notice as I had planned.

That Friday at lunchtime I lay down on the couch in the office to take a short nap. Driving to and from work was only helping so much. Lynne was out somewhere and I took advantage of her absence to sleep. I woke to see Jack poking his head around the door. It didn’t matter that I was pregnant or that I was entitled to have a break over lunch, I immediately felt both muddle-headed and guilty. I sat up quickly.

‘Where’s Lynne?’ he asked.

‘Gone out for lunch. She should be back soon.’

‘When she comes back, could you both pop down to my office?’

‘Sure.’ I was unsuspecting. After all, hadn’t there been that memo denying that any staff were going to lose their jobs?

I thought that maybe he was going to give us a brief. That was unusual for a Friday afternoon, but not unheard of.

Lynne returned from lunch and we went down to Jack’s office.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’

Oh no! What was my strategy for dealing with this? I was to ask to be retrenched separately.

‘Can we do this separately?’ I said, starting to stand up.

Jack dropped his head into his hands. ‘I can’t do this twice!’ he said.

Feeling sorry for him, I sat back down, and Lynne and I were duly informed that we were no longer employed at the Palace and that we were to clear out our desks and leave the premises immediately. It was awful and made us feel as if we were criminals and had actually done something wrong.

Once the interview had finished and Lynne and I were leaving Jack’s office, I couldn’t resist a parting shot.

‘You do realise —’ I turned to look at Jack as I reached the door ‘— that you have just fired the only staff member who cannot get another job?’

He had the grace to look even more stricken.

I felt terrible for Lynne. If I had not been pregnant, would we have been let go? My situation had made her more vulnerable. She was good about it, but she wouldn’t have been human if the thought hadn’t also crossed her mind.

We weren’t the only staff members who lost their jobs that day. Six of us were cut adrift. When Lynne and I went to see the accountant to pick up our final pay, she confided that the cheques were generous and that Jack had fought hard to get us a decent payout. That, at least, was some comfort, but I still felt miserable. I was going to leave the advertising career that I had worked so hard to establish with no farewell, no card with witty remarks from wellwishers, nothing. I just skulked out of my brilliant career feeling rejected and humiliated.

When I got home, I discovered that Ralph was having the exact opposite experience. While I was paid $10,000 to leave (given my salary, my payout was generous), he had been offered

$50,000 to stay in his job as part of a golden-handcuffs scheme. Oh well, it meant we could pay off our mortgage.

APRIL 25, 2001 : Jane Caro & Ralph Dunning with daughters Polly (13) & Charlotte (10) at their North Shore home, despite being high income earners are opting to send girls to public schools. Pic Andrew Baker.

This is an edited extract from Plain-speaking Jane by Jane Caro, published by Pan Macmillan Australia and available now.

Originally published as Jane Caro reveals the devastation of miscarriage, and being fired while pregnant