When I was a little girl, in the early eighties, I believed women could be three things. Secretaries, nurses, or teachers. That was the whole list, as far as I knew. Then one day my grandparents took me along to their accountant’s office. I don’t remember why I was with them or what the visit was for. What I remember is the door. It was a giant door, and we pulled it open, and behind it was an office, and in the office was a woman. It was her office behind her door.

I was too young to think I want to be an accountant. That’s not what happened. What happened was quieter and bigger than that. I stood there looking at that enormous door and that woman behind it and I thought, in whatever way a small girl thinks it, that maybe the list was wrong. Maybe there were more than three things. Maybe something else was possible, something with a door like that. I wanted a big door. I didn’t know yet what would be on the other side of it. I just knew I wanted one.

For a long time I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to do. In community college I took a counseling class, and they gave us those aptitude tests that are supposed to tell you who you are. Mine came back with two suggestions: funeral director, or accountant. I have laughed about that many times since, the two careers apparently sitting right next to each other in my soul. I took an accounting class to test the theory, and I did well, and that was that. A coin that happened to land on numbers.

I graduated right as the world was changing, AOL and email just arriving. My first job was at one of the first remote modem companies. My second was at one of the first webcam companies, and I loved it there. For a while I was a young woman in the early tech world, and it was good.

Then my marriage took me to the Central Valley and out of that world, and by the time I needed to climb back into it, everything had changed. I was coming out of treatment. My divorce was starting. I answered an ad at a small CPA firm, met them, and was hired the next day.

I stayed nine years. They didn’t pay well, and I’ve thought a lot about whether the low pay was the price of what they gave me instead, which was understanding. They were flexible about the kids, about appointments, about the chaos I was carrying. When my ex-husband once emailed them directly to try to get me fired, the two partners called me into a room, and instead of letting it land, one of them, who had been through divorce court himself, simply understood. They kept me. Another time a coworker came in and told me there were police going through my car in the lot. I walked out and there was an officer rummaging through the car I had from the marriage, still registered to both of us. He found the temporary restraining order in my glove box and started asking me if I knew where my ex was. I told him no. He didn’t have an address anymore.

I tell you those things because I want you to understand what that office actually was to me. It wasn’t just where I earned money. It was, strangely, one of the few places in those years where people showed up for me. Where I was protected. The women I worked with, most of them mothers, a lot of them divorced mothers, became my rocks. When the obscene texts came in, they settled me. They listened. They gave me advice out of their own hard-won lives. I was so alone at home, and then I’d go to work and I wasn’t. There’s an irony in that I’ve never forgotten.

And I learned a lot about taxes, audit, QuickBooks, the whole machinery of small business accounting, from the ground up. Later, at a larger firm a friend helped me get into, I learned even more, real estate and construction clients, attorney trust accounting, all the compliance nobody thinks about until it’s wrong. I moved up to lead, then senior, then manager. I was the first manager they’d ever had without a CPA. I think that matters. In a field where the license is supposed to be the ticket, I got there on ability alone. They promoted me past the credential because I was good. I was really pretty good.

There were tax seasons I worked seven days a week. I was exhausted in a way that went past tired. I had no help, none, and sometimes there was simply nowhere to put the kids, so I’d bring them to the office with me. They’d color at an empty desk while I worked, and I’d look over at their heads bent over the paper and feel the whole enormous weight of it, that I was the only thing between us and the floor, and that being the only thing meant you spent Saturdays coloring in an accounting office because your mother could not be in two places.

That was love. It didn’t look like love. It looked like spreadsheets and deadlines and a tired woman and a box of crayons. But every one of those seven-day weeks was me keeping a roof over our heads with the one skill that never left me. Men left. The systems failed us. My own parents left, in their ways. But the numbers always made sense, and the paycheck always came, even when it wasn’t as much as I wanted. So, I stayed with it.

For most of my life, work was a place of real pride. The last couple of years, that changed. Toward the end of my time at the larger firm I started to feel undervalued, and then things fell apart, and somewhere in there I lost my confidence. I don’t fully know what my work is to me right now. It used to be pride. Lately it feels closer to survival. I’m still trying to find the other thing again, the pride, the sense that I’m the woman behind the big door and not just someone hanging on.

That little girl looked at a woman who had a life bigger than the list she’d been handed, and she wanted one like it. And whatever else is true right now, whatever I’ve lost track of lately, the plain fact remains: she got it. She became the woman with the office and the door. She kept three kids alive with her own two hands and a head for numbers a career test found almost by accident.

This is what my best looked like. It looked like a big door I walked through without knowing what was behind it, and a whole life I built on the other side.