The Corporate Ladder

by Irene Sieders

Climbing up the corporate ladder, we moved 450 miles to the north, close to the city of San Francisco. Because of the housing prices, we bought a small house with a little garden, but were surrounded by bigger and better houses, where bigger and better people lived, at least, that was the unspoken message I got from my ex-husband. He said he would never invite his boss or colleagues to the house, because he was embarrassed by the smallness of it. I grew to have an inferiority complex about the house and every day, when I drove around the neighborhood, I saw the bigger and better houses that we should be living, and our dog grew neurotic in the new house. He started catching birds in the garden and peeing on precious objects in the house. One day, he broke through the fence and physically attacked the neighbor’s dog, which made the neighbor scream hysterically as if she was being gang banged by a group of skinheads and afterward we took the dog to the Humane Society and put him up for adoption.

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Irene Sieders, whose website is here, is a Dutch woman living in the Netherlands. She's an amateur writer, a housewife, an English literature reader, a daily blogger, and a dog walker.