The Myth of Having it All

The Myth of Having it All

Written by Frieda Tuesday, 24 November 2009 11:10

I was among the first generation of females to at least be paid lip-service as far as equality with males in education and professional opportunities. Although our great-grandmothers had secured women’s right to vote, their daughters were still shut out of a wide range of career options due to their gender and childrearing duties.

By the time my mother became an adult in the 60’s, birth control had given women many more options in life. But when they did work outside the home, my mother and grandmothers still worked in traditionally “female” fields, as teachers and secretaries.

I attended a liberal college in the early 90’s, where I took an Intro to Feminism course, and had friends who majored in Women’s Studies. During that time we explored many topics that affect women: eating disorders, homosexuality, date rape, and the objectification of women in media, among others. Yet somehow the issue of motherhood, or the option of choosing not to become a mother, never came up—in classes, textbooks, or any of our late-night discussions.

Isn’t motherhood one of the bigger decisions and life-altering changes a woman makes in her life? It’s strange to me that we were educated in the women’s movement, yet no one ever thought it important to mention that if a woman chooses not to have children, she will be somewhat of an outcast, or that people will judge her negatively as cold or selfish. Women will hear the message that they are not even “real women” if they never bear children.

Here we were realizing so many benefits of women’s rights—voting, equal education, a university major in Women’s Studies even, but apparently motherhood or non-motherhood was not a subject that warranted any discussion at all, much less education about how one would integrate motherhood with life as a working woman helping to support a household financially.

From what I could tell at the time, most of my friends planned to go on to grad school and enter a worthwhile profession, then somehow shoehorn parenthood into the mix, and they were confident they could handle it all. It’s only two decades down the road when, mainly thanks to Facebook, I can see what many of my peers from that time are doing. Most of them seem to have children. Was I the only one who was considering taking another path, or the only one who felt strongly enough to make this choice in spite of the pressures otherwise?

I was taken by surprise the first time I heard a woman say she was not a feminist. I was exploring the internet and mommy blogs, where I was discovering a world of women who were a decade or so younger than me, who were anxious to turn back the tide, be supported by a husband, and stay home with children.

Apparently the 50’s Leave it to Beaver lifestyle was looking more appealing after women got a taste of the working world. I admit, even in my struggle to find work where I was challenged and treated with respect, I was appalled. After all the work our ancestors had done to give us these rights and freedoms, and now women seemed afraid to claim their due.

Yet, I could understand their perspective. Feminism had glossed over the fact that childrearing is a big job, and trying to have a successful career and raise decent human beings, have a satisfying marriage, hobbies, and friendships, is spreading yourself very thin even in the best of times.

I was also observing that there was a certain pride taken in the fact that a man considered you worthy enough to raise his children and would voluntarily pay all your bills. Women were not necessarily willing to give up these perks. SAHMs had the freedom to walk away from corporate life and lead a fairy tale existence of going to read-alouds at the library, long walks pushing a stroller, attending mommy play groups, while the rest of us toiled away in cubicles. The more I thought about it and watched the parents around me, the more stay-at-home motherhood didn’t look half bad compared to being a working mother, if you were a parent.

Maybe nature intended for these gender roles out of necessity. Maybe these women had the right idea, and I had fallen for feminist propaganda that said I had to do it all, or was completely silent about how I was supposed to accomplish a career and motherhood and still have a tolerable life.

I also noticed that men hadn’t really bought into this grand idea that they were supposed to take on half of the housework and parenting while we both worked. They realized it wasn’t so bad if we had jobs and helped pay the bills, but somehow they didn’t notice the bathroom was dirty on the same timeline, or were satisfied eating spaghetti every night.  Then when a pipe burst under the house and someone had to crawl under there to fix it, or the rain gutters were clogged and someone needed to climb up on a ladder in the pouring rain, I was very appreciative that gender roles called for someone else to step in.

I had naively assumed that men my age would be raised by newly modernized women who would train them to cook and clean in the same way as they did with their daughters. I didn’t consider that there were a myriad reasons that this wouldn’t happen. Their mothers might have needed someone to do the traditionally “male” chores around the house. She may not have liked cooking either and just fed them microwave dinners every night. She may have had a house cleaner. She may have believed that children shouldn’t have to do chores at all.

Previous generations of women laid the groundwork for our rights and freedoms, and then we just assumed we had arrived, and could now sit back and reap the benefits. We were not really planning how this concept of “having it all” was actually going to play out in our lives.

People who choose not have to children are often called selfish, but I eventually decided that the assumption that everyone is entitled to have it all is actually what is selfish. Attempting to do it all assumes that you can dabble in anything and everything, and still do as good of a job as someone who focuses all their time and energy on just a few things that are important to them.

At the same time as I was studying the women’s movement in college, I was also studying Eastern religions. In Buddhism we are taught to accept what is—quite the opposite of relentlessly striving to have it all. Learning to accept the life I already have, and the people who are already in it and deserving of my attention and love , has helped to move me off the fence, even while hearing the voices around me scream in horror at my choice.

Our society’s refusal to discuss and accept the option of not having children as being a positive choice for some women has led to ignorance, judgment, and only added to the division between women into warring camps who cannot “imagine” life in any other way but their own.

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