How The Siren's Call of Having It All Seduced and Abandoned Me

It never works... but it might work for me!

The myth of the modern woman “having it all” has been lambasted for so long that it’s now only possible to use the term ironically. 

It’s the “it” doing so much lifting that renders the phrase silly on its face. “It” contains multitudes. Inside of the “it” is crammed a fulfilling partnership, a happy and healthy child, a beautiful home, a great career, professional respect, maternal success, marital bliss. Part of the “it” still seems to be passing it off as though you’re doing it without help.

As a rule, it’s considered stupid to pursue a goal so impossible that books and books and books have been written about how it’s unobtainable, but I possess the hyper self-assurance of the oldest daughter of a high school teacher who grew up a big fish in a small town  – the Dark Triad of Believing In Yourself– and so while I believed that having it all was an impossible standard for everybody else to hold themselves to or for society to expect out of mothers writ large, it was not an impossible standard for me to hold myself to. To paraphrase a great moment from Arrested Development, it never works for those people... but it might work for us.

And when I got pregnant, I thought I was well-positioned to get as close to having it all as modern life allowed. Okay, yes, we were thousands of miles from the nearest grandparent or close family member who could step in and watch the baby for a few hours if, say, I needed to take the cat to the vet.

Okay, yes, day care waiting lists in Los Angeles are months to years long and many don’t take children who are under 2 years old. Yes, okay, one on one childcare is exorbitantly expensive in a high cost of living area. But we wouldn’t need that, baby! We had me! 

I was going to do it all!

I was far enough along in my writing career that I set my own schedule and only took on projects that I had time to take on. I made a decent income from my podcast Hysteria. My husband was working steadily as a freelance creative director and was eager to be a hands-on dad who shared child care duties as equally as was practical– and since Juniper’s birth, he’s proven to be a truly top-tier dad. Our schedules were fluid enough that I thought that once the baby came we’d just sort of figure it out, that I’d be able to both work from home and step in to do mommy stuff whenever the baby needed it. 

I couldn’t wait to be a hands-on mother. The idea of staying home with my baby because I wanted to and could make it work felt unimaginably luxurious to me. My own mom had to return to work when I was just a few weeks old, because it was the 1980’s and the assumption was that after giving birth women would either quit their jobs until their kids were in school because that’s just what women do or be important and rich enough that they could afford to hire somebody to look after their child when they returned to their urgently important careers. The mental and physical health of the mother weren’t taken into account, nor was what was beneficial to the baby’s development, because if there’s one thing that the American government can agree on across ages and eras, it’s fuck them kids. 

But I digress. I knew what I wanted for myself and for my family. A career to be proud of. A mother who was present and hands-on. Somebody who could cook interesting foods and kept the house in a pleasant state (cleaning relaxes me… in moderation). I believed I was in a position to make it happen. 

Sure, writing required prolonged periods of focus, but my husband could just take the baby off my hands when I needed a few hours! Right?

But then Josh got a full-time job with an hour-long commute. While it’s great for him and hopefully for us in the longn term, in the short term, that put an end to the dream of endless parental tag teaming. I ran head-on into my own finiteness. 

It took me over a year to realize the hard truth that even with all of the factors in our favor, it was simply not possible for me to work as much as I thought I’d be able to and look after an infant and keep the house clean and cook, even with a partner who helps out when his work schedule allows. There are not enough hours. There is not enough me.

Even without the commute. Even without the schedule and the computer-based job. “Homemaker” or “stay-at-home mom” is already a word that encompasses, like, eight different jobs. It did not leave enough space for me to write the way I need to write, if I’m going to write. 

Child care is not only fully engaging in the moment, it also reduced my capacity to do my other work when I wasn’t physically in custody of my kid. It is somehow all encompassing and boring at the same time. My brain needs the space to generate ideas and thoughts, space that’s now cluttered with stuffies and logistics. Full days of looking after Juniper are draining the battery of my brain like a data-stealing Maps ap on an old iPhone. I am giving so much of myself to my kid that there is less of me to give to other areas of life. 

I feel like a failure all of the time. I feel like a failure when I open instagram and see somebody who I kind of know got staffed on a show that I wouldn’t want to write for anyway, even though I haven’t been actively trying to get staffed on shows for years (and am only now seriously considering getting back into it). When I go into bookstores, I see the names of people on books who I knew back in New York and cringe at my own lack of industriousness. When I see somebody jogging down my block, I curse myself for the months and months between me and the last time I went out running. I used to knock down more than 40 miles a week; I’m afraid to try now. I feel like I have no friends when I see pictures of people I used to hang out with hanging out without me. 

I’ve been having strange dreams. The details vary but in many of them I’m wandering around an unfamiliar city with no awareness of who I am, feeling intensely like I’ve forgotten something. Somebody will ask me my name and I won’t remember. The anxiety of not knowing who I am or what I’m missing will become so intense that it will wake me up, and it will take me a few seconds to calm down and remind myself where I am, who I am. 

I recently reread Catilin Flanagan’s 2004 Atlantic piece “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” just for the adreneline. [Pre-Flanagan block quote disclaimer here: Flanagan is a complicated figure for a lot of feminists. She’s somebody with whom I often disagree but whose work I never miss, because even when I think she’s wrong, I find her to be honest and challenging.]

The piece’s main point is the uncomfortable truth that in a country without universal day care and necessary support systems for mothers, middle-and-upper-class women can’t “have it all” without exploiting the labor of women on lower economic rungs– a subject I’ll get into more in a future post. But this bit, on Flanagan’s controversial secondary point about the roots of “mommy guilt,” stood out to me, and not only for its pugnaciousness: 

What few will admit—because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities—is that when a mother works, something is lost. Children crave their mothers. They always have and they always will. And women fortunate enough to live in a society where they have access to that greatest of levelers, education, will always have the burning dream of doing something more exciting and important than tidying Lego blocks and running loads of laundry. If you want to make an upper-middle-class woman squeal in indignation, tell her she can't have something. If she works she can't have as deep and connected a relationship with her child as she would if she stayed home and raised him. She can't have the glamour and respect conferred on career women if she chooses instead to spend her days at "Mommy and Me" classes. She can't have both things.

This bit stood out to me because, while I lack the audacity to claim this is true universally, for all mothers in all circumstances (because if there’s anything I’ve found that’s universal about motherhood, it’s that nothing is universal), it feels very true to my feelings and fears about my own circumstances.

Most of my choices since the birth of Juniper have centered around avoiding the pain I’d imagined I’d feel if I wasn’t able to be hands-on in raising her, attempting to have all of the things I was told I should want at the same time. I don’t feel guilty about how involved I’ve been in Juniper’s early life; the fact that my kid is so obsessed with me that it’s almost oppressive feels like a positive, if occasionally annoying, reflection of our bond. I do feel guilty about how, in trying to do it all, the time available to meet my career demands has shrunk. In the power struggle between work and baby, baby won.

I’m trying to be more forgiving of myself during this last year. Things happened the way they happened; I made the choices that I made. I cannot beat myself over doing what I felt was best at the time, given the information I had. But if I do this again, I’ll do things differently and leave a little more space for the person I was. Eventually my baby will grow up, and I can’t lose sight of who I am without her.

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