A terrible time, from start to finish. Awful place. True boys club. ‘We’re like family here’ that always means a group of men are bonded and everyone else is completely disposable.
It was devastating enough going out to look for a restaurant job. I had been trying to take some classes online while working a little more than part time and raising kids.
My ex stopped paying child support altogether so I had to earn more money. Whatever. There had never been a time I had tried to do something for me, and for my security, that wasn’t shut down. I didn’t think of that at the time. It was normal to hear I was selfish if I gave any thought to myself. I believed it still back then.
So I looked for more money.
It’s an awful job. Noise, crowds, hangry people, sexism, classism. Awful, awful. Not all restaurants are like that of course! But some embrace it to use their staff badly. Brio embraced the bad.
Still, I could work hard enough to bring enough money home. And at the start it was not intolerable.
Before there were changes that brought the worst it was what I’d expected. And for me, it was always just about getting through a shift so I could go home.
As always I’d attempt to kind of speak up. But, as always, that was not acceptable. So, like many women will understand, smile and act like it’s not hurtful.
Again, whatever. It’s like being around my family. Don’t be me. I had no choices at the time. I needed to earn money. No one was going to help me. no one was going to be there for me. Especially not family.
My mom got sick while I worked there. It happened so suddenly. She turned bright yellow. Went through surgery. Then hospice. Then she was gone. I couldn’t take time off. There was no money without shifts.
My brother started his torture about a month after that. That didn’t end for years. So I would go home from work to whatever horror he set up. Most of the time I had no idea what anyone was talking about with the estate hell. And trying to get explanations was apparently a terrible thing for me to do. So there was a lot of verbal abuse thrown at me. Of which I understood little.
About that time a different general manager showed up at brio. Brett Adams, a highly toxic bully and misogynist.
He started workplace bullying. Like I can’t see him look at me, laugh, walk to a group of coworkers, whisper, and all of them stare at me. Front of house, back of house. As soon as he was there he bonded with others by getting them to bully me. He can’t deny it. I’m not stupid. I’m stuck in that building watching this toxic man get people to stare at me. It got bad. But I was stuck. I had to keep working.
At the start of my mom’s estate issues I was trying to cover her house bills while Brian held up access to her accounts. Eventually I couldn’t keep doing that. It was physically impossible.
I’d go to work at that awful place and home to horrors.
My daughter’s adolescent mood swings were a blessing! It was normal, expected, and her being authentically real. Thank goodness for those times of real life outside of the misogyny and abuse.
I was overworked and always stressed at Brio. After Brett showed up. Management was worse. I had so much trouble getting days off. They would ask at first for me to take shifts for other people for their personal and religious reasons. Then it was expected. I couldn’t get the same for me. I mean really. I’d ask for a day off and it was ‘how dare you be selfish’
It was months at one time. I was involved in every shift change. Open close, clopen. Every shift change, I was there.
I mention it to Chef Jon one day. 10 minutes later I had my choice of a regular day off. So I had sundays for my kids. I still had to keep fighting to keep it though. They still tried to get me to take shifts.
Jon was a good person. There are so few people I find easy to talk to. He was one of them. He used to talk about what he wanted for his future kids. He would have been a fantastic father. His girlfriend was so sweet, too.
Bright spots in a terrible place.
I don’t want to go through the details of the workplace bullying. None of it was ok. it’s never ok. People target me because I have always been abused. Predatory people see that. What I carry from my past is not open for judgement or more abuse. It is never ok. It is always the fault of the abusers.
They had no idea what I was suffering through outside of that place and it didn’t matter. Brett had an obligation to provide a safe work environment.
It didn’t matter what he thought of me or what he knew of my life. He had no right to provoke harm towards me from anyone.
I tried to approach the subject a few times. He’d get angry and walk away. Or tell me that’s how restaurants are. That I should deal with it or do something else.
Beyond bad! No! I worked ridiculously hard there. Way above and beyond. I had no choice. And he made it so difficult for me.
All of this while I should have been finding time for emotional space to mourn my mother.
Abuse at work, from my brother, everywhere. That possibility left. I’ll never really get to mourn her. I’ll never get to really work through how complex she was. And she was definitely complex.
But there was so much bullying and abuse from men who had power over my safety. I’ll never get that time to grieve, they made it impossible to separate what they did from that time.
Men never have to admit their mistakes. They get to harm any woman they want and always get others to join in the abuse.
My dad. My brother. My boss.
These men know they had power over my life. They know they can do whatever they want and I am helpless to stop the harm to my life. the damage the men in these positions were able to do to me was never repairable.
And that’s what they chose to do. Then they all chose to ignore the damage, ignore my suffering at their hands, and put the blame on me.
I hate them all beyond what I could possibly describe.
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