LEANING IN
Women almost never make one decision to leave the work force. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, “I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day.” Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, “I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.” These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back.
– Sheryl Sandberg
The sound bite from her now-famous speech at Barnard College two years ago has haunted me because it so accurately and succinctly captured the unconscious trajectory of my own career. It startled me into the realization that I had been planning for my life as a mom before I was even aware that I was doing it.
In my cohort I was not alone. With few exceptions, my group of smart, sassy, well-educated and liberal-minded girlfriends made the same kinds of choices. Given what we believed we were faced with, it all seemed so reasonable. If our moms worked, it was at low-paying, part-time jobs that still allowed them to do all of the cooking and cleaning. Or if they did manage to find something that they truly loved, it was downplayed and made to take a backseat to anything else that was going on in the family.
In our surrounding culture, while the second wave of feminism drummed away on Wall Street and beyond and women were indeed making great strides up the escalator to the glass ceiling, the messages and mentoring that we as white American girls of the 1980s received were at best mixed, and at worst glaringly wrong.
“We were sold a bill of goods,” my friend Kristin is fond of saying. We were told we could have it all. We could study whatever we liked and work and get married and have a family…and low and behold the Super Mom myth took hold in our psyches. Never was there any discussion about how impossibly hard this might all be, what with expensive day care and husbands who were uncomfortable with our high salaries and most of all, our own closely-held beliefs about what a good mom should be. We used curling irons on our feathered hair to look like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, believing that our intelligence would indeed take us as far as we wanted, and laughed at Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom, understanding that our marriages would be just that funny and flexible in the face of so much stress.
Enter the babies. Or even, just enter the thought of babies. We were all wise enough to see that given the model currently in place, we couldn’t work full-time at the jobs that truly filled us and be the wife, mother, and housekeeper that we seemed to think that we needed to be to keep everyone happy.
So we – or let me now bring this back to I – leaned back.
I am not here to say that I am entirely regretful of my decisions. I feel incredibly grateful and fortunate for my life. I am married to the love of my life, I have three smart, healthy kids, I live an expat life that is wicked fun, and I am in a position financially to not have to work.
But I want to. Desperately.
What is more, my nine-year-old daughter has now told me that she does not want to get married or have children because she believes that it will keep her from her dream job. Now, her dream job is to study wolves living in the Yukon territories, which is surely a job that would be hard to have and maintain friendships and shaved legs, never mind a family. But that isn’t the point. The point is that at nine, she has already surmised that there are going to be some choices to make. In a way that I am guessing that her male peers have not even begun to think about.
So I will try to teach her at the same time I am learning myself. Because we both have a lot to learn, and we both deserve better than just a bill of goods.