What women do
My mother was taught the concept that a woman could have it all: children and a high powered career and social success and a slim body and great hair. She graduated from college, one of relatively few women to do so, in 1954. I don’t know how she felt about a slim body or great hair; she looked like a short round grandma by the time her sixth child was 10 years old, in 1980.
For several years in the 1960s she taught school while my dad earned a bachelor's degree. She told me that when my oldest brother turned 14, she realized that her children really needed her present and paying attention. She stopped teaching then. My mom told me that most teen pregnancies (statistic from the 1980s) start in the home, between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., while teens are unsupervised. I was a teen, but so oblivious and such a rules follower that it never occurred to me that I could have done such a thing. I was not unsupervised after school, of course. My mother chose to teach piano lessons in our home so she could earn money while being present.
I never expected to "have it all"; I planned to be a stay-at-home mom. I got a year and a half of college before marriage and one semester after our first child was born, but the rest of my formal education had to wait about 20 years. Instead I have devoted hours and hours to reading, with my children, while watching my children, while staying up late with children. Now I listen to educational Youtube videos with my son, the last one at home. There's so much more access to information now that I think it would be easier to learn a lot while staying home now than it was for me. However, there's also a lot more distractions. It takes real guts and determination to stay on task now.
Do I want a paid career? That’s tougher to answer. I never wanted to be a CEO or even a high level manager. I wanted to raise children. I did that. Now I need the work experience that I didn’t get before, because my husband isn’t here earning money. I don’t have a slim body; I did find a short, easy care hairstyle that looks good on me. Everything I hear about the working world is that it’s dog-eat-dog, where some of the dogs are AI and some of the eating is literal. Good thing God is still in charge. He knows what I should do.
