Family Friends

KEEP YOUR OAR IN THE WATER

My own mother’s words loomed large before I got pregnant, “do the things you want to do before you get married and have babies.”  And it was great advice.  By the time I gave birth to our first child, I had climbed the ladder in the marketing world, traveled and lived overseas.  My dream was to write a book and although I had cranked out a few measly chapters when we returned from a year in China, I didn’t have the JK Rowling in me to do it in between a full time job and my newly married life.
A mere two years later, our son was born into a time of personal transition.  My husband was leaving the security of the legal world and the moneyed track to be a broadcast journalist.  If I’d had any desire to stay home with this new baby, it was snuffed out by our new economic reality.  We qualified for wic ohio, which helped pay for formula and other foods.

Moving around the country to bigger TV markets, having another baby, visiting domains like onlinemoneypage to find ways to make additional money and keeping my freelance writing and marketing business stoked was an enormous juggling act.   There were many times I envied the Moms who played tennis and lunched, the ones who didn’t feel the weight of financial contribution.  But mostly I loved my life.  I was energized and appreciated by forces outside the home.  I liked what I did and I moved among a slipstream of disparate and engaging female friends.  Before motherhood, I hadn’t thought a lot about whether or not I’d be a stay-at-home mother or try to work, there were no pre-conceived notions.  My role just kept evolving amidst the backdrop of our family and a larger picture.  I had no real master plan.

Today I sense a polite backlash among the present generation of young women who have watched their Moms buckle under the duel pressures of jobs and motherhood. They have shrewdly observed that the “sharing” of household duties by working parents still skews more like 70-30 in the most equal of unions. There is an often-unarticulated criticism, a whisper about the generation of mothers who came before who put careers first and motherhood on hold, stressed by the reality that you can’t have it all. At least not all at once.

It’s hard for younger women today to understand and appreciate the jackhammering that was done by previous female pioneers to even get to this point, the luxury and ability of women to choose.  The striving for equal pay and management positions seems so very quaint now, so “Mad Men” and yet it was not so long ago.  I still remember marching in a boss’s office my heart thumping, to tell him I’d discovered my male colleague, with the very same job and tenure, made $10,000 more than me.  I got a raise.

Many young women think of “feminism” as a radical, cleaving and dirty word.  All that militarist bra-burning.  Yet it was that stridency, the elbowing and the path paving that allowed women today to expect to sit on boards and run for office, to go into space or attain a high rank in the military.  If you want to make a revolution you have to break a few eggs, said Chairman Mao.  Sometimes you get an omelet.

My young daughters instantly fathomed the solution to the head-scratching riddle during my childhood about the injured child admitted to the ER.  The doctor, who was not his father, recused himself from operating because it was his son.  Q:  What is the relationship between the doctor and the boy?  A: She is his mother.

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

Few people got that answer correct in the 1970’s.  And yet today it’s a quaint and dated joke.  For all of the glass ceiling busters and groundbreakers, the throwbacks and the backlash, motherhood and career have moved slightly off the combative “either-or” arena and have mellowed into a “what’s right for me?” choice.

Young women today tell me they will not delay childbearing.  They have seen too many women wake up at 40 wearing the “I forgot to have kids” sandwich board. And I hold my tongue.  There is no cookie-cutter approach to any of this, no one-size fits all.  And when those young women have children who leave the home and they yearn for a reinvention, trying to explain the two-decade gap in their resume to a prospective employer can be disheartening.  The mothers of my older children’s friends confide that the empty nest has brought a search for meaning, an internal ransacking of who they are now and a need to re-purpose that is soul-searching and often stressful.

On a recent episode of CBS’s “The Good Wife,” a young law associate shame-facedly reveals she is addressing wedding invitations at work and discloses that she is engaged, newly pregnant and quitting the firm to become a wife and mother.

“But you can do both, you don’t have to give up the law,” says the older, wiser, now single Alicia Florick, who has returned to the workforce after her husband’s Spitzer-like public infidelities are revealed.  “But I love my fiancé,” is the young ingénue’s doe-eyed answer.

A priceless expression crosses the face of the older, experienced woman who has learned the importance of being able to care for not only herself, but also her children.  It is one I recognize on my own face as I think about my once bright naiveté, the beauty of that expectation that we can nudge life in the direction we wish by just applying a little will power and positive thinking.   And how we hope it will.  And yet the young lawyer has not allowed for the possibility that the child she is carrying might not grow to term or be healthy, that her fiancé might not always love her or be able to provide for her.  It is the great divide between 20 something and 40 plus, the canyon between innocence and experience.

I recently lunched with a friend who’d been blind-sided by the economy, her husband’s job loss, depression and subsequent raiding of their savings.  She had left her job 22 years ago to raise the kids and was wondering now, in the midst of divorce, how she would pay the next tuition check.    She is an indomitable, resourceful woman and she will undoubtedly reconstitute herself in a new world order.   Our talk turned to raising our girls, the messages we would give them based on our life experiences and the choices they would inevitably make about partners and marriage, careers and kids.  How would each of our experiences as working and stay-at-home Moms shape their own visions for their lives?

“Keep your oar in the water somehow,” she said wistfully.  “That’s the advice I’m giving my daughter.”  And, thinking about my own life, I nodded my head in agreement.

  1. Corey

    March 27, 2012 at 6:30 am

    I couldn't agree more with that advice. So eloquently put.

  2. Kelley Cody-Grimm

    March 27, 2012 at 10:38 am

    Very thought provoking. I've worked most of my adult life and had to make that balance between work and family. It's been very difficult. I was laid off in November and have been home since – trying to find work and worrying about just a few months gap in my resume – never mind a gap of 20 or more years. It's been good to be there when the kids get home from school, but I'd still rather be working more from a financial standpoint but also it would make me feel like I was contributing more.

  3. Lisa Hanlon

    March 30, 2012 at 12:27 am

    I REALLY needed to read this right now….thanks for you insight and the beautiful way you "say it all in a few words."

  4. Linda Richards Adzigian

    March 30, 2012 at 3:10 pm

    I remember when I graduated from Tufts in 1962, most women had basically three career choices – teacher, nurse or secretary. Very few of my friends worked after they started their famililes. Today, the world is open for women (and men) to do whatever he or she wishes to do. My mother was a teacher in 1939 and had to give up her teaching position when she married my Dad, so that she didn't take a position away from a man who had to support a family! How times have changed – and for the better, I might add.

  5. Caryn Sullivan

    March 30, 2012 at 6:35 pm

    Lee,

    I'm continually amazed by the way that our lives and our thought processes are so often on similar tracks, although we only met so very briefly. I love this piece – as I love all of yours. I hope you don't mind if I link to my latest column, which is, I think, a nice companion to yours. It's entitled "Dear Daughters" http://www.carynsullivanscribe.com/dear-daughters-2/

    Keep your great work coming!

  6. Anne Angowitz

    April 3, 2012 at 6:11 pm

    I will be sending this to many women I know. Lee, you hit the nail on the head, once again. The boat only moves forward with its "oars in the water" and while we don't always know where the journey is leading us or how quickly we will get there, I have come to the conclusion that standing still or getting stuck in an eddy is not the way to go.

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