When Having Enough is Enough

I’m going to admit right up front that I didn’t read this 12,000-word piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic because I work 40 hours a week and have two kids, so I just don’t have that kind of time. And if I stumble into some free time to read before I fall asleep tonight, I’m going to pick up “A Storm of Swords,” the third book in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series because I mostly read for escape, and Slaughter’s piece is certainly a whopping dose of reality.

She writes about how the feminist movement has set us all up to fail, unless you are one of the handful of savant super goddesses out there who really can do/have it all: Successful careers that are lucrative and fulfilling, families featuring happy well-balanced kids, and personal health and vitality (read: smokin’ hot bodies that belie the brood they’ve carried).

Before I had kids, I wasn’t totally deluded that I could feel 100 percent awesomely complete in all aspects of my life at all times. But I don’t think I realized just how much becoming a mom would slam the breaks on my notions about my career trajectory. Namely, right now with kids as small as mine, I don’t currently aspire to dizzying heights; I’m finding that it’s enough to define success by working hard to maintain where I am today. This is different from where 22-year-old me saw myself in my mid-30s (or is 37 more accurately my late 30s?)

Like the majority of women (and men, I assume) who earn bachelor’s degrees and beyond, I saw myself steadily moving up the ladder in some kind of orderly, natural progression of promotion. Of course there are many outside variables that factor into whether that happens; that was always a given. But now that kids are in the picture, I’m most interested in achieving work-life balance and even so, there are definitely sacrifices to be made to get there.

I think that the current model that our parents’ generation worked hard to eke out leaves working moms my age feeling like failures for not living up to the feminist ideal. For us, time devoted to the kids means status quo at best on the career front, and time devoted to career could lead to something even worse, if the horror stories are to believed: children who are suffering because they don’t have a mother who’s completely there for them 100 percent of the time.

I guess that’s the whole point Slaughter is trying to make, at least based on the chunk of it I managed to find time to read: A more realistic view of working motherhood needs to be modeled for today’s working mothers. Someone needs to say to us that it’s ok to just do the best we can rather than excel at a breakneck pace, and that doing so won’t doom you and your children to failure.