Juliette Calayag

OK, so I am going to try this. I have never even considered composing one
of these updates, summaries, whatever the expression is, so daunting,
indeed, so terrifying do I find the task. How can one possibly try to
capture 25 years of one’s life in a few paragraphs, particularly when one is
infamously verbose and favors using cumbersome, awkward conventions like
referring to oneself as ‘one’? First, there is the anxiety that one’s life
simply doesn’t measure up: I mean, isn’t this just a giant 5-lb. crimson and
gold-leaf brag book overflowing with news of one’s classmates’ Pulitzers,
Bookers, Oscars, Whitbreads, and honorary Phds with a smattering of Nobels
for Peace or the cure for cancer? How can a life as a failed soccer-mom
ex-Mckinsey lapsed-ballroom-dancer with a nascent Ebay addiction stack up
against such illustrious brethren? Admittedly, I have deep fungible
knowledge of adolescent rehab centers in North America and I dance a mean
tango, but let’s be real. And then, of course, there is the overweening
pressure to compose well: to be pithy yet profound, witty but somehow
sincere, modest while desperately trying to project an air of accomplished,
slightly jaded sans-souci.

Right. So down to brass tacks:

Post-graduation and following a uniquely incongruous stint as a Top-Secret
cleared consultant with a defense think tank in Washington, DC (my most
salient memory being the stock trade joke: what is the highest
classification after TS? BBR: Burn Before Reading), I followed heart and
head to Europe for a three-year odyssey into the world of advertising and
marketing with Y&R and HCM Brussels and Paris, which segued rather
fabulously into a glorious role as marketing manager for a Bass PLC wine
trading subsidiary in Bordeaux, a job no 24-year-old deserved or could
refuse. Here, I learned to drink beefy Brits twice my size under the table
and to navigate a minivan through the Medoc peninsula with a blood alcohol
level of .5.

My resume duly embellished with my Euro experience and polyglot panache, I
scored a Kellogg MBA and a coveted and ultimately beloved spot with McKinsey
& Co., to date, my only real job. At this juncture, however,
fate/destiny/cluelessness/what-have-you intervened and somehow a short-term
toilet paper based engagement in Atlanta led to a long-term engagement and
marriage to Michael E. Pralle (‘78), a widower and father of a 6 year-old
daughter and newborn triplet boys who became my very own cherubs. One thing
no soothsayer could ever have predicted: that I, a first-generation
Asian-American would be the mother of a blue-eyed blond. I’m pleased to say
that my principal claim to fame at McKinsey & Co. was to be the first and
surely the last mother of 4 to be hired as a new associate.

I spent 4 of the next 7 years with the Firm in Paris, Stamford, New York and
Hong Kong, forever torn between family and career before finally leaving for
good in 1996 when a recurrence of breast cancer forced my hand, or more
accurately, opened my eyes. The second time around was a much bigger deal
and obviated the job vs. family debate: I wanted nothing more than time with
my kids. Anyone reading this can do the math: I am deliriously fortunate, a
walking miracle to be ten plus years out and still going strong. To be
diagnosed once with breast cancer is to stare death in the face; to recur is
to feel him climb into bed with you each night and wake beside him each
morning, praying fervently that he will continue to do just that: sleep and
leave you be for as long as possible.

Such terrible intimacy with my own mortality changed me in ways I cannot
begin to articulate and perhaps don’t want to. Somehow, it gave me a pass
on running the race toward fame and fortune; I did not have to be a prisoner
of my own potential and could give in to my deeper, less ambitious,
self-indulgent yearnings: smelling the roses and the like. I by no means
gave myself a pass on child-rearing, however, throwing myself into it with a
vengeance despite the fact that being a stay-at-home mom was about as
far-removed from my ambitions as being a tight-rope walker in a traveling
circus, which trope, I might add, became the defining metaphor of my new
existence.

And what a circus it has been, part Monty Python, part Barnum & Bailey, and,
every now and then, in purely serendipitous moments of grace, part Cirque de
Soleil, (complete with hallucinatory scenes of crazy triplets riding
unicycles across life’s metaphorical high-wires). While Michael was off
building a global real estate empire for General Electric I tried on various
lives: soccer-mom, corporate wife, independent consultant, interior designer
and most recently, professional vacationer, by far my most successful
incarnation. In 2006, in a desperate but unsuccessful bid to shove our kids
out of the nest we acquired a small flat on Manhattan’s UES (somehow the
kids retain squatters’ rights to the CT house) where I now live most of the
time.

Michael has found greener pastures with a real estate private equity fund
and I am trolling around for a second act, most likely in the very hot, very
trendy and I hope, very satisfying field of social entrepreneurship.
Vanessa is married with a gorgeous 6-month-old named Jude Lei, and Andrew,
Will and Chris are in or on their way to college. We are fortunate enough
to spend our summers in the South of France where I would happily welcome
any Class of 83ers who find themselves in the region or are looking for an
excuse to visit the Cote d’Azur.