My mother taught me to ask for raises by enacting the thing she had not been able to do herself. She would have said, if asked, that this was not what she was doing. She would have called it parenting.
She role-played negotiations with me from age fourteen. We did them in the kitchen. She played the boss. She played him like she had studied him for forty years, because she had. He always opened with the same line: ‘I just don’t know if there’s budget for that.’ She made me practice eight responses. I can still recite them. I have used three of them in real life and they have all worked.
When I told her I had finally asked for a raise at thirty-one, she did not say good for you. She said: ‘How many seconds did he wait before answering.’ And I told her, and she nodded and said, ‘Three. That’s a yes.’ She had clocked her own boss’s hesitation across decades. She had passed it down to me like a family knife.
She never asked for a raise herself. She would not say why. I think the closest she came to telling me was once when she said, in passing, that her father had told her at fifteen: ‘Don’t make the men feel small.’ She passed me her workaround instead of her wound. I have a daughter now. I am going to do it differently. The wound and the workaround are the same inheritance, and she should get both.