Dear You,
I’ve been trying to write this post for two months with no success. When I say trying, I mean it’s been constantly on my mind, but I haven’t typed one sentence or even jotted down ideas in one of the little notebooks I always keep in my bag. My current notebook is filled with shopping lists and drawings my daughters have made of ponies and Moshi Monsters. I haven’t known what to say because there is so much to say. Finding meaningful work and balancing it with motherhood and the choices I’ve made before this moment is the central question of my life, its tentacles seem to be curled around every aspect of my existence. I’m so close to this issue that it’s been almost impossible to get outside of it and begin to describe the contours, the texture of the problem to myself, let alone to someone else. Even now, I’m tricking myself, pretending to write a letter to a dear friend so I can find a way in.
Not coincidentally, I’m also working on completing an application to go to graduate school in the fall. Because I find applying so demoralizing, I’ve been breaking the task down into little pieces (I hate this about myself, but I’m easily crushed by the process of applying for jobs or anything at all. Writing a resume turns me into an anxious, tetchy mess). I did the straightforward parts first, filling in personal details, my passport information and getting my Brigham Young University transcript. Then I moved on to finding academic references — a difficult task since I left BYU in 2000 and didn’t finish my English bachelor’s degree until 2010. I was astonished and immensely grateful when one of my independent study professors remembered me. I’ve managed to get the second required reference from the editor of a newspaper I wrote for when I lived in the states — but I’m getting ahead of myself because my five years writing there is an essential part of my story. Now all that’s left is writing an introduction and turning in some samples of my writing. I’m applying for an MA (MFA) in Creative Writing. I want to write and teach.
Already, I’m imagining you rolling your eyes. One of my dear friends, my very pragmatic lovely friend who finds herself similarly mired in these career and life questions, always seems vaguely disappointed in me when we talk about my plans. She will patiently listen to me moan about all of my anxieties — my deep fear of failure, my existential crisis over choosing something that I love and choosing something that would allow me to claim the title of breadwinner if I needed to — and then she always suggests that I just go and get qualified to teach secondary school. She’s not trying to spoil my dreams, I put that idea in her head. I keep going back to it as the practical choice even though it’s not what I really want to do.
Actually, I’m not sure what I really want to do. I have two competing desires — I want to write and I want to be able to be financially independent — but I know that writing doesn’t usually equal financial independence and that university jobs are very hard to come by. My mother always says that you shouldn’t let money make any of your big life decisions. I understand what she means — you can live simply, without lots of stuff, and you can put up with a lot if you have meaning in your relationships or your work. I come from restless, creative types — a family tree of artists, teachers and entrepreneurs of varying levels of success. I imagine the creativity and the restlessness in my DNA is what prompted my ancestors to join the church in England and Denmark and then cross the ocean and the plains, bursting with more ideas and energy than sense. But I’ve worried about money all my life and I’ve been working, mostly menial jobs, since I was eleven. I worry about my parents (modestly successful artists) with their tiny retirement and terrible health insurance. I worry about my brother (a modestly successful musician and awesome stay at home dad) and his no health insurance. I worry that if my husband died or left me, I would be like a minor character in a Jane Austen novel, Cousin So and So, a youngish widow with fading looks and few prospects looking for a partner to help her care for her young children.
Ugh. I hate thinking that way, but here is the truth — despite my best feminist intentions and my husband’s deep love and respect for me — I am not in an equal partnership. Operating under the example of my foremothers and my understanding of the teachings of the LDS church, I willingly and naively sacrificed my own ambitions for my husband’s ambitions on two pivotal occasions and the result is that, logically, I just do not count as much as he does when we make big life decisions. I think I do count emotionally and spiritually, but the spirit doesn’t pay the bills and emotions don’t (or usually don’t) determine where you live. I wish money didn’t matter, but, in my experience, it does.
The first sacrifice I made is when I left BYU with only two semesters to finish my degree because my husband found his first teaching position out of state. In hindsight, I could have pushed him into working a crappy, non-teaching job for a year and insisted that I finish school, but I didn’t. At the ripe old age of 23, I thought that there would be plenty of time to finish school in the future. Besides I was going to be a stay-at-home mother, his future career was more important than mine, I had a life calling as a mother. I had always been smart and told that I had so much potential, I believed I would come into my own later, when my then non-existent children were older, it would all be fine. (There was precedent here, my foremothers — stay-at-home mothers all– had also all gone on to work later in life.) But I really had no idea how difficult this would prove to be or that it would, as I mentioned earlier, take me 10 years to finish school, that finishing my degree would be satisfying for personal reasons, but wouldn’t make me miraculously valuable in the workforce.
I already mentioned the second sacrifice. I fell into my job writing for the newspaper (my life has mostly consisted of falling into things, making myself as perfect as possible and then waiting to be called) when my husband took a better teaching position in Pennsylvania where he grew up. The two daily newspapers in his hometown make liberal use of poorly paid freelancers and I thought that as an almost graduated English major I was good enough to be a poorly paid freelancer. I started out while pregnant for my firstborn, covering local school board and government meetings and then, after several years of part-time writing and a series of dramatic events too lengthy to record here, I proved myself enough to be offered a full-time position. I worked evenings on a cops beat (fires, thefts and shootings) and I loved it. My husband taught during the day and I stayed home with my preschool age son and infant daughter and then I handed them over and went to work when he got home. Oftentimes, I would bring my police scanner home with me for breastfeeding and a dinner cooked by my husband and then back out again. That was as close as we ever got to an egalitarian marriage, the pace was exhausting, but satisfying.
I learned some important things about myself during those years. I learned that I could write, that thinking through the puzzle of an issue or somebody’s story and communicating it clearly to others makes me happier than just about anything else. Newspaper writing isn’t particularly lyrical or substantive (although it can be), but having to meet deadlines every night, having to force myself to get over my own perfectionist tendencies was a tremendous gift. I learned that writing is not magic, but a craft like any other that takes tenacity and practice. I also realized that I really like working, not as a means to an end, but as an end in of itself. I’m not romanticizing here, I had my share of awful or boring days, but, in general, I loved my job. I had thought that motherhood would make use of all my restless, intellectual and creative energies, but it didn’t. Motherhood cracked me wide open, it made me softer and more fluid, it broke my ego down and has given me tremendous joy, but it still leaves huge parts of me stagnant and unmoved. I still believe, as I did then, that the people in our lives and our relationships are more important than anything else. But I reject the idea that there is one ideal form for those relationships and I experience writing, and the art of others, as a deep sense of connection with the rest of the world.
Anyways, there we were with the seemingly perfect balance. For the first time in our married life, we were getting out of debt and all was well. And then, one momentous week during a particularly sticky July, I found out that I had accidentally gotten pregnant and my husband was offered a teaching position in England. The allure of moving to another country was huge for both of us, (I had always dreamed of travel, but never been able to afford it), but we were also returning to those early patterns. The position paid as much as we made together in the states. It seemed to offer my husband an opportunity to rise more quickly than he would in his current position. Whilst I had been working at the newspaper, my bachelor’s degree still unfinished, my husband had completed one Masters degree and began a second. Although we were both working at the time, we were still living with the consequences of those earlier choices. My husband was, and still is, worth more than me financially and his ambitions, plans and opportunities have always been given more weight. To do otherwise, to maintain that we stay where we were because I was in a job I loved, honestly didn’t occur to me. It’s only now that I see where we might have had more options or done things differently. At the time, it would have seemed silly and petulant. I wanted (and still want) my husband to be happy and my children to be comfortable and well-cared for. Besides, I was pregnant. (What is it they say about well-behaved women?) And, of course, it’s not just women like me who’ve built their marriages on traditional gender roles only to find those roles ill-fitting that struggle with this problem. Most two-career partnerships I know face inequalities, one person with better pay or doing something they love and the other just doing what they have to. The ideal of both partners working in fields they love with equal salaries rarely exists.
So, we moved to England and we love it here. My husband has found his niche in the world, although he has given up some of his own dreams in the process. Every couple of years, he has taken a new job, each one resulting in a better salary and more opportunities. My children are thriving and all in school now. I stayed home for five years, my first real experience with full-time parenting. It was beautiful and terrible, as paradoxical as life usually is. I finished my degree. I had the space to go through a crisis of faith and came out on the other side finding peace with everything turned upside down. I’ve written a lot. I joined the PTA and sing with a choral society. Additionally, I’ve applied for half a dozen career-type jobs. An aide at the high school, a temporary position writing and researching at a university, any journalism jobs that pop up. I never get past interviews, oftentimes I don’t even get there. Part of it is the economy; part of it is that I’m not very competitive. I moved to a new country and didn’t work for five years, I didn’t network, didn’t know enough to keep myself relevant. (Young women, learn from my mistakes!) Over a year ago, I found a part-time job in a shop, selling luxury clothes to mature women (imagine loads of fine camel and navy wool, clothes fit for the weekend at your country estate or flowery dresses and brightly colored fascinators for the races). Sometimes I think I should just be satisfied with that. I like the women I work with and the women I serve, I’m grateful to have work. I wish it was enough, but it’s not enough.
Consequently, I’m 35 (36 in June) and working on a graduate school application for a degree that may make me really over educated for my retail job. I’m terrified. I’m plagued by my fear of really risking failure as a writer (if you can call the safety net of school truly risking failure) and my fear of never doing anything that gives me any kind of financial independence and weight in the world. But I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff because I am afraid. I don’t want to spend my life waiting for a perfect moment that may never come or a perfect career that may not exist. Sometimes when things fall apart, as they did for me with the church, motherhood and traditional gender roles, you want to reject everything that came before. It’s easy to do because you can see all the cracks; you know where things got broken. There is important work to be done in teasing apart the fibers of your existence and understanding what you are made of, but you can also become trapped in resentment because there is no escape from what came before. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about working with what is. The irony is not lost on me that supporting my husband’s ambitions all these years has now put me in a position where I can afford to take the risk of graduate school and that makes me very lucky. I’m trying not to resent the naive me that was, I’m trying to be gentle with her unbounding, unwarranted optimism in her own intelligence and potential while keeping the cynicism and fear that can come with life experience at bay. Now it’s time to stop waiting and get to work.
Thank you for listening. I hope you find peace and happiness along your own journey, wherever it may take you.
With love,
Heidi xx
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Dear Heidi,
Thanks for sharing so deeply. I’m sure you know that your story is echoed many times and in many places. My husband and I have a similar situation, but in reverse. He is the stay-at-home parent, and always has been since our first was born 8 years ago. I dutifully go to work every day, leaving him to the dishes, laundry, and poopy diapers. Sometimes I feel guilty just leaving him there, like I’m not adequately sharing the load. (How ironic is that?) But most times I feel relief at getting to leave him to the dishes, laundry, and poopy diapers. As our youngest turns 4 tomorrow, he contemplates what is next for him and feels so similarly in the “what on earth am I supposed to do now?” crisis. We are lucky to live off my single income, so he doesn’t have to worry about making a lot of money. A true artist, he could never be happy in mundane. Again, ironic given the nature of stay-at-home-ness. But I know he feels some level of guilt (shame?) for not bearing his manly duty as the breadwinner. I think he’s come to terms with it, for the most part, but it’s been a long road.
Is this the struggle we are meant to come out the other side of? Questioning true importance and meaning, and our place in the world? Is this what older adults have been trying to tell us about?
I believe that whatever we find ourselves doing – mundane or meaningful or not – work hard, do it with excellence.
XOXO, Jessica
Thank you for your thoughts, Jess. It’s a good reminder that these dilemmas aren’t the sole domain of one gender, but one of those big, complex human questions. I find that there aren’t any easy answers. There is a part of me that is fine with the daily grind and can find satisfaction in the ordinary business of living and caring for my family, but then there is this other yearning part of me and I guess the big thing is to find a balance that feels right between the two.
I have always worked but my passion and focus has been mother and wife so my jobs have had to adapt to fit that goal.. I am in my fifties working as a full time nanny for two sucessful carrer people with their own businesses.From where I stand I must speak for the kids. Every day I see how unstable family life can be when everyone is working fulltime with high demands. I also see what it can mean to a two year old when I go to get her up from her crib after a nights sleep because her mom is out running before work to train for a marathon.I see clearly why a five year old holds on to my leg as I leave for home and only lets go when I promise I will be back in the morning. I feel the importance of taking time to hold on my lap anyone that needs a safe place to land. I think about the anger, confusion, frustration and panic I see in all four of the kids I take care of 10 hours a day. When I lie down for books and naps with them I hear the cries of their hearts, their dreams and passions and so so so many questions. I see the pivotal topic regarding career path equality and fullfillment rests on two important questions, Do you want kids? and, Do you have room in your life for them?
Janae,
I can appreciate your perspective as someone who spends a lot of time with children whose parents are, as you suggest, largely absent from their children’s lives. My experience, as a working mom with a career that I worked very hard to develop (and as somenoe who recently trained for and ran a half marathon, ha ha), has been different for a couple of reasons:
1. The questions you pose at the end of your comment don’t really work for me for a couple of reasons. One, my life has not been so linear that I could have asked myself those questions right before having kids and then, perhaps, ultimately decided not to have them because of my career. I’m not saying I would’ve done that–just that my decision set never looked like those questions. I was working on my career for about 10 years while also having children, so it was very much a recursive process. Two, my Mormon worldview never allowed for me to think of myself as potentially a whole and valuable and good person withOUT having children. So in many ways, I feel I am ill suited for parenthood and perhaps should not have had children. And yet, I have three and they are amazing. So whaddya do? ;)
2. I have certainly missed things in my children’s lives due to my educational training and due to my work, but I don’t feel guilty about that. Call it seeing the glass half full, but I am profoundly grateful for all the women–the “other mothers”–in my children’s lives. They have had numerous people who have taken care of them and who have loved them and whom they have loved. I don’t apologize for that. If I were to ask them whether they would have preferred to have me around rather than those women, they would ALL respond with a resounding “no.” Those women have enriched their worldview so much more than what I could have done for them as just one person.
3. The time I have spent working on my career has given my husband opportunities that lots of other dads don’t have to really get in the parenting trenches, so to speak. It’s been very important to him that he has been the primary caregiver at times in our lives (although that was my job more often than his). We have my career to thank for that.
4. I am frustrated by the idea that women are considered “selfish” (and you didn’t say this) for doing things like having careers and having hobbies that take up time (like training for marathons). No one considers dads selfish for wanting to go play 18 holes of golf, which takes them away from their children for hours. Even though I’m a mother, I’m also a person who should still be able to develop herself and her interests–even if that takes time away from her children.
In the end, I just figure hey–life is hard. We all have different decision sets that we’re working with. Everyone’s family is unique. People make different choices. We can do more to support each other as women if we respect other women’s choices, even if they’re different than ours.
Raw! Absolutely raw. You couldn’t have been more honest. I really believe that your choice to be vulnerable will open doors for you. Your heart and mind are so big. I wonder if we are afflicted in similar ways. I live such a small life, but I want to live it loud and big. And yet, I don’t know how. I am recently realizing that as a woman, I need to prepare to enter the work force again because as a stay-in-house-mom, my hobbies are not enough. If I don’t get out more regularly my husband will miss out on learning about his kids in deep and profound ways. I am around too much for my kids to grow closer to him. And my sanity and need to find more purpose is just as valuable as my children. In fact, I need my children to see that I can do more, too. It is strange to put this thought into words.
Thanks, Heidi, for keeping it so real. Your courage to speak your truth is truly inspiring!
I want another crack at that desire I have to live big and loud. I just spent some time looking up job openings in my small Idaho town and cleaning carpets is a real option. But, I don’t feel passionate about it, I wish I did, maybe I could be a really good carpet cleaner. I do have a bachelor’s degree and I would like to be compensated for the efforts I made to achieve that education. But, more than that, I want to become immortal. It feels like my career choice is the only way to become remarkable in the eyes of my children, their children and their children. I should be able to make it on their family tree charts. But, I’m certain I will not be remembered for my clean house. I won’t be the beauty in the old photographs. Maybe I’ll manage to have my name attached to a few recipes that someone uses. But, I want more. I want a career that opens avenues for my daughter and those that come after me. I want accomplishments that can define me when I’m gone. I want to make an impact and I want good compensation, too. It that altogether too much to ask of myself? Are my expectations of myself too high?
I have a sense that I find the greatest peace and pleasure when I’m reaching for something. I think it’s the stretching, the growth that does it. This is not to say that I wouldn’t be thrilled to finish my book of stories or getting into the program I’m applying for, but I think I’m happiest when I’m doing something that uses this part of myself. I have asked myself a lot of times if I could be happy doing it in a room by myself or just for my own pleasure, but the answer is no. I like the push and pull between collaboration and listening to the inspiring ideas of other people and then sitting with those ideas by myself. I’m never going to develop the way I want to on my own. I also think that it is so easy to have your aspirations pushed to the side by the demands of daily life, I feel like it is essential to stake out a claim on some part of my time and say I’m serious about this.
Hinged, I love the ambition you are expressing. Too often, women are told to quiet their ambition, but we all want to leave some kind of mark on the world and the people we love.
To all of the mothers who find they can find a great balance between family life and carreer demands I say, awesome. Of course it is not my intention to judge lives of people I do not know. Each family finds the balance that works for them. I have been a teacher and caregiver for 33 years and an advocate for children in court as well as in the classroom.I do not believe I know what is best for any other woman. Life is about choices and we all make the best ones we can.The best ones for ourselves,
I do think that parenting with our whole hearts is never just about the quantity of time we spend with our children. It’s about the examples we set, about the time we take in each day and the attention we give the moments we spend together. I have known women who are not at their best selves when they are working — they are exhausted, worn out and miss their children terribly. I have known other women who are restless, bitter and distracted whilst being home all day, their bodies are present, but their hearts are not. They need some time away to fill those hearts and bring that back to their family lives. And, of course, there are a million variations — things change as the demands on our lives change, as our children age and grow, as we age and grow. Add to that other factors — whether we are in a partnership or not, what the strengths of our partners are and how much we demand or allow them space in parenting (for my part, my husband is so different to me and such a strong nurturing presence in my children’s lives, I am grateful for his big warm presence, without him, our home would be calmer, but colder). I think the balance individuals need to strike is clarified by understanding these things about ourselves, by responding honestly to how we are and what makes us our best selves. There is only so much energy and time in any day, but understanding our best selves makes that endless balancing act easier.
What a day it will be when quality parenthood is measured by the love, nurturing, patience, and healthy boundaries a parent provides–not by the amount of time s/he spends with the child. Janae, I can see how it’s hard/sad to see your employers’ children seem more attached to you than their own parents. I’ve also seen the same symptoms you mentioned from children of SAHMs. Even worse–children who are not thriving or developing or happy, because their SAHMom is depressed and checked out. It cuts both ways, to be sure. I like what you said about choice (Janae). I love these discussions, because I always hope it brings someone who hasn’t thought of the alternatives to being a quality mom–especially in the church–as simply staying at home full-time. (Not saying this towards you, just more towards mothers I know in the church who feel the only good/righteous choice is to stay at home full-time.)
Heidi, as many others have said, your post resonated with me in so many ways. Thank you for putting to words thoughts that I have on a daily basis these days! My dh and I had such a good work/family balance until we had twins (after our 1st dd). I decided to quit my part-time job when they were 1, b/c my salary would not have covered childcare for 2 infants. We’re trying to find alternative approaches as our children age, and I hope my mid-life career (do I say mid-life at 38!?) change will give us this flexibility (to both be able to work flexible hours).
It’s unfortunate that people have to experience panic attacks, it’s not something I would wish on anyway. I think there needs to be a lot more research into exactly when there was an uptick in the amount of panic and anxiety attacks reported. I’ve posted on my site that I think it has to do more with the stress we add in our daily lives.