A reader writes:
I recently wet myself at work. I was actually in the bathroom at the time and it was right at the end of lunch. I was in a state such that I was able to go a nearby store and buy fresh clothes, but by the time I cleaned up, changed, and got back to work, I was over an hour past the end of my lunch and I had missed a standing meeting.
I had let my manager know when it first started that I had had an emergency and would be a while getting back. When I returned to my desk, my manager took me aside and pushed me quite hard about what happened. I tried to evade the question, said it was a health issue and private, but she kept asking what was so important that it stopped me from going to a meeting and was clearly angry. I was so embarrassed and upset I said the first thing I could think of to make her stop. I told her I had had a miscarriage. That did indeed end the conversation; she said okay and left the room.
A note — I am aware that I sometimes tell lies when I feel out of control. I have addressed the issue with a therapist and haven’t really lied like this in about a decade. I have never been dishonest at work before. I am really angry and upset with myself first for lying, but also for what a horrible thing it was to lie about. I know I am in the wrong and what I said was unacceptable. I am taking this as an indicator I’m in a bad place so I intend to go back into therapy to address some major stressors in my life and try and prevent something like this ever happen again.
The difficulty is that a friend on my team (same manager) announced today she was pregnant. That colleague told me the manager had asked her to delay the announcement for my sake (I actually already knew so my friend came to apologize to me for sharing unthinkingly and make sure I was okay). I’m concerned my manager will tell more people something similar, since she is a known gossip and little stays private. So my lie may become common knowledge, and I’m worried about the harm it might do to other people who had actually miscarried. The manager is also treating me differently, being very careful with me and speaking to me primarily through email. I’m worried about repercussions if she thinks I’m trying to get pregnant, I’m worried I’ve upset her (I don’t know her story), and I’m scared my working relationship with my manager in jeopardy.
I don’t think telling my manager I didn’t really have a miscarriage will improve anything, but my instincts on this are obviously poor. I know I’ve made an enormous and hurtful mess. Is there any way for me to extricate myself from this situation that doesn’t make everything worse?
Your manager made this mess, not you.
You told her that you’d had a private health emergency and she kept pushing to know what it was. That was none of her business. The only correct response to “I’m so sorry I was late getting back, I had a health issue that I’d rather keep private” is “I’m so sorry to hear that, is there anything you need?” and perhaps “Do you need to go home for the day?”
There was no health issue that would be her business or that she needed to know the details of. You’d provided all the info that was relevant to her and that should have been the end of it. But instead she pushed in a way that threatened your privacy, and you panicked and landed on something that seemed likely to shut her up. It’s understandable, and you’re beating yourself up more than is warranted.
Nor do I think you did any harm to people who have actually miscarried. Many, many people have miscarried; you’re not stealing anything from them by having landed on that when grasping for an answer that would make your manager stop prying.
And your manager is the one who has clean-up to do here, not you. She told your coworker without your permission that you’d miscarried — that’s a huge violation of your privacy, regardless of what actually happened and even if she divulged it in a well-meaning way. You could go back to your manager now and say, “I’m very private about this sort of thing and didn’t want to share it with anyone at work, so please do not repeat it to anyone.” If you’re comfortable being more specific, you could say, “Jane told me that you’d shared it with her, and while I understand what your thinking was, I want to stress that I do not want this shared with anyone else.”
Do you have competent HR? Because it might also be worth a visit to them to say that your manager pressured you to share private health info and then repeated it to someone else and you’ve seen her gossip about others in the past, and ask that she be trained in handling employees’ private medical info. You can do this even though you didn’t actually miscarry; your manager was in the wrong regardless.
Hopefully the reason your manager is treating you so carefully right now is because she knows she messed up. If so, good — maybe it’ll be a lesson for her not to push the next time someone says “private health issue” and maybe that will help out others who work for her in the future.