Four Conversations and a Passport to Change by Sue Van Der Hout
When Spring comes around, fresh blossoms and buds begin to fill the dull, dry surroundings. We all welcome the change of scenery. What about a change of scene? Sometimes we reach a stage where we feel the need to evaluate the level of self-fulfillment we are attaining in our personal and professional lives. At this point, how do we muster the courage and wisdom to venture into the unknown? Girlphyte President, Sue Van Der Hout, tells her story of the choices she was faced with and the changes she made.
I became a tax litigation lawyer in 1979. I took a sabbatical from practicing law in 2004. In law, I faced interesting and challenging cases and had some great clients, but the twenty-five year mark was an obvious turning point. I had achieved some success specializing in tax disputes; twenty-five years in litigation had made me a tough negotiator, a relentless opponent and a fantastic beggar, desirable qualities in any lawyerette. However, when I dug beneath the legal veneer, I wasn’t sure if I could find anything else besides law. If I wasn’t going to reinvent myself at this juncture, I was probably destined to become a legal and tax lifer. All the frown lines would become permanent and all the botox in the world couldn’t save me. My contribution? While I’d like to think I made a contribution to serving justice, justice is such an elusive and amorphous concept. As a lawyer for the Justice department I’d forced some corporations to pay more tax, and in the private bar, I enabled other corporations to pay less tax. My job often felt like playing on a seesaw with my alter ego. My twenty-fifth anniversary as a tax geek was also a turning point in my life as a parent. It marked the last year at home with my youngest child who would be heading off to college in the fall of 2005. In addition to professional and familial zeitgeist, I was in full empty nest trauma. And then to top things off I was teetering on the verge of fifty. All right, that’s an overbid. I was only turning forty-nine, but fifty was definitely within spitting distance. Best-case scenario was that I had a good fifteen years of work left in me barring manmade, natural or biological disasters. I decided to flee the jurisdiction mentally and physically. I left the downtown towers on Bay Street, Toronto’s own little Wall Street, where I had been a devoted and skilled participant in the rat race for over two decades, dove into a major book chain to purchase an armful of coaching and self-help books, and signed on to a teaching stint at a law school in Australia for part of the 2005 academic term. I was running, not walking to chapter two of my life. As I studied and prepped for chapter two, I stopped to think about what determined my career path during chapter one and what made it acceptable to leave.
I’d become a tax litigation lawyer because of three conversations. I was finally able to leave because of one.
During my second year of U.S. politics and history at the University of Toronto, a stunningly bizarre and largely solitary choice for a Canadian university student, my father broached the question of my future plans. When I suggested teaching he bristled, launching into a long tirade about teaching, women and menopause that still makes my head spin. Once I was obviously off-balance, he asked why I hadn’t considered law. Being a good and compliant child I did. I left academia for Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto the very next year.
During the last semester of law school, I was surprised to learn that I had qualified for a scholarship to do a masters degree in law. But where, and in what? I didn’t consider myself an academic. I arranged lunch with a professor who’d taken me and many other students under his wing. At that point, he’d been appointed a Justice in the Supreme Court of Ontario. He asked me a simple question: What do you like? I told him that I liked torts (negligence law) and tax. He then asked whether I planned to become an academic or practice. I was unequivocal that it was the latter; I wasn’t an intellectual. He claimed that the right choice for me was a masters in tax. I subsequently obtained a Masters of Law in taxation at the University of Toronto law school.
To be admitted to the bar of Ontario in those days you had to article (apprentice to a firm) for a year once you’d completed law school. Given my desire to travel I approached and was accepted by a firm that carried on an international tax practice and had offices throughout the world. Notwithstanding that acceptance, the senior partner of the firm suggested that I spend a few years with the Department of Justice before I made a life in private practice. True to form, I joined the Justice Department, married, had my two boys and spent the next twenty-five years in the public and then private practice of resolving tax disputes.
As I neared hitting the wall of professional miasma, I began having conversations with other women about personal satisfaction, making meaningful personal choices, taking risks and finding one’s way. Some were insightful, others miserable and the rest as confused as me. I felt frozen in my intellectual and emotional development, unable to turn one way or another. I was afraid to wiggle a toe in any professional direction, fearing that a little motion in one sphere of my life might bring an avalanche of unexpected and not entirely desirable consequences. I feared the warning in the adage of "Be careful what you wish for". Salvation finally came over a glass of wine with a dear friend I’ll call Pearl ((s) of wisdom). Pearl had left the private practice of law five years before as a result of a decision that she might be happier on a professional road less traveled. The words that resonated with me and freed me to pursue a middle-aged review of my personal universe went like this:
When I left the firm of Pressure, Panic and Breakdown (PP & B) I had to justify the decision to a lot of nay Sayers. Why would anyone leave one of Canada’s most prestigious, lucrative and renowned law firms? The "greater wisdom" was that it had to be all downhill from there. Before I set out to find my new calling, I took a well-deserved vacation to a whitewashed resort in the sunny Caribbean. After a day of unwinding on the beach I was able to stop mentally reviewing files and take in the local color. The beach was packed. People were lounging, laughing, talking and playing. Guess what? They all had jobs that were sufficiently lucrative that they could vacation in a beautiful place at a great resort, eat and drink and party themselves silly. Better yet, they managed to do all of that without PP& B. In fact, not one of them had ever even heard of PP & B. PP & B was not the center of the universe.
Pearl is now Vice-President of one of Canada’s largest and most successful corporations. She’s successful by anybody’s standards and the decision made her more determined to define life her way. She’s still an inspiration.
It was not until that moment that I realized that I had choices, most of which I was not even aware of and none of which were permanent or fatal. So I left the white tower. Realizing what should be obvious, that the world is bigger than the one you currently inhabit, was enough to allow me to run, not walk to my self-defined second chapter. The first few pages are looking interesting.
08.11.2007
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