As I recently sat in a room full of women who’d found themselves in leadership roles within their field, I listened to a speaker talk about the choices she’d made over the years. Declining roles because of her need to be with her family and accepting other roles because she felt like it was a time in her life when she could focus on her career.
I was surprised at how much this frustrated me – not that she’d made choices at work because her family needed her but that she was forced to make those choices at all. I, myself, had made similar choices a few years back choosing to take myself off of the corporate ladder track for a while due to more pressing needs at home and had never regretted that choice so why now? Why did this woman’s story stir something in me that my own story never did?
Timing.
Lately, I’ve been confronted with stories of friends who’ve tried to have it all and felt like failures because the reality is that something is always being sacrificed. In an age where forty hours is no longer the standard work week for a “top performer,” the pressure to be all and do all can come at a steep price.
If you attend the school awards ceremony on a Tuesday morning, the critical project you’re working on might require extra hours on Thursday. Conversely, if your child is struggling with a specific subject in school, you might spend the after school hours at work wondering if your presence would make a difference.
You see, as mothers, it isn’t always about the battle for our time but the battle for our thoughts and attention that can cause us to feel like we’re giving less than our all to our home life or work life.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve spent more than my share of days wondering if this is really all that I have to offer. If I’m not filling the full-time Mom role, shouldn’t I be solving world peace or feeding hungry children? It’s like the Mom version of a male mid-life crisis. Instead of buying fancy new cars, we start filling our lives with hobbies and passions or accept projects at work and more volunteer opportunities at school because damn it, we are going to prove to the world that we can have it all.
The women before me fought too hard to make sure we had options. We’ve come so far and yet we still don’t have equal pay. If I don’t keep pushing harder and proving to the world that I can be all and do all, how will we ever get laws passed that guarantee paid maternity leave?
Those women’s rights issues aside, where exactly are we trying to get and what is our ultimate goal? Is it to have it all and do we even know what having it all looks like? This might not be a popular opinion, but I’ll say it anyway. You can’t have it all. Not if the definition of all is that you’re there for your family 100% of the time and also 100% focused on your job. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad mom or a bad employee. It just means that there’s a choice to be made, and it’s an every minute of every day kind of choice.
Trying to be everything for everyone can leave you running from place to place all day every day trying to prove you’re an involved parent and the employee who can be called upon day and night. For me, I want to feel good about the work I do every day and feel confident that I’m raising kids who’ll contribute to society in a positive way. I don’t want to choose between those two things, and I shouldn’t have to choose. Luckily, I am blessed with flexibility that helps in making those choices, but I am in the minority, and even that flexibility comes with decisions about next steps in my career and how much I’m willing to sacrifice.
We, as women, shouldn’t want to have it all based on the current standard because when held under a microscope, that standard doesn’t hold up. We need to redefine what having it all looks like for ourselves and not be confined to some standard that’s been set by history, current expectations, or Corporate America.
This redefinition of having it all doesn’t negate our responsibility as women to continue to influence change in the workplace fighting for equality, work/life balance, and policies that impact us. What it does do is allow us to breath a little. To stop feeling like we have something to prove every day and take the time to be proud and feel good about the work we do for our employers and our families.
