Can work and home really coexist?
I've always been very conflicted about the whole motherhood thing. I was indoctrinated to think about college and a career--and to avoid men and having children at all costs. I was told, "When you go to college..." Whereas my brothers were told, "When you get married..." I'm not sure if this stems from the fact that my mother was going to community college and had just been accepted to Pepperdine and UCLA (she hadn't decided where she wanted to go) when she married my dad at 21 at the end of the fall semester--and she never transferred to university. She became a housewife, and then four years of marriage later, she had me. The marriage ended in divorce after 15 years--15 years of being a housewife and mother left her with very few job prospects.
While growing up I was told that I couldn't trust anyone, not even her. I was told that I should never rely on anybody to do something that I can do myself, or teach myself how to do. I wasn't told that I shouldn't get married per se, but it never--not once--came up in conversation or was hinted at, and in fact it was implied that marriage was a prison. And finally I learned how children are burdens, and if I hadn't been born, maybe she would have went back to school, maybe she would have left my father sooner, maybe she would've had a better life without me. These musings were were always followed up by, "But I never regret having you." I bought it at first. But after years and years of hearing how much better my mother's life could have been without me, it was hard to believe her.
B has shown me what marriage can be like--and how joyful it can be. Some days I am amazed that we have survived so much together: 9/11, snipers, crappy jobs, death threats, bed bugs, living from paycheck to paycheck, moving across the country multiple times, unemployment, being without friends and family--and I can truly say that I love him more today than I did the day we got married. It's in these moments when I'm sorry that my mother has never experienced this kind of closeness and trueness of love for someone (other than her children).
It is for these reasons that my inner conflict becomes extremely muddled. Because if B has been able to show me love unlike anything I could have imagined and has effectively broken down every preconceived notion I had about men, husbands, and the institution of marriage, then does that mean that my preconceived notions about children and parenthood are potentially wrong?
Because of my upbringing, and indoctrination, I thought it was impossible to have children and a career. I'm not just talking about a job, but a career. My mom slaughtered rabbits for five bucks an hour, that was a job. I'm trying to get my Ph.D. and eventually want to be a professor and writer, that would be a career. These books, each in their own way, has helped illuminate this topic--because it's a topic that I can't really discuss in depth with anyone: my mother is supportive of whatever I decide, B doesn't really have an opinion one way or the other, I'm not close enough to the women with children (or who are currently pregnant) I know (and there are
a lot out here in California) to interrogate them about the reasons they chose to have children or how they balance work and home, and my closest friends don't have or don't want children.
Due to this, I have been reading a lot of books lately about the decision to either have children or to not have children. I thought about separating the titles by category: motherhood and being childfree (or childless) by choice. But I thought that wouldn't be a fair representation on how these books have helped shaped notions in my head. Because I don't think motherhood and CFBC as necessarily two different categories like black and white anymore.
So the books I've been reading lately have been:
What you'll notice from my compiled list is that I most interested in how the media and the people in our lives create and shape the perceptions around the decision to parent or not. Furthermore, there are so many
myths about parenthood, that I don't want to make a choice (in either direction) based on assumptions or indoctrinations.
I'm also interested in how these perceptions effect work performance and home life. I find this fascinating because I see so many assumptions in advertising or entertainment that link womanhood with motherhood, and yet this link is not made between manhood and fatherhood.
For instance, this is a post from a CFBC forum that I lurk upon that illustrated this dichotomy in real life.
A couple of days ago, I sat in on an interview panel for a position we are trying to fill. Company policy is that at least 3 people have to be on the panel. The questions for the interview are written up beforehand, and each panel member gets a copy. The applicants are graded on a scale of 1-4 for each question by each panelist.
One of the questions is "Describe 2 of your greatest accomplishments of the last year and how you achieved them." We interviewed 2 women and one man. Both women said having a baby or raising a child for the answer to one of their accomplishments. The man didn't have children. However, I've sat in on several interviews and women have often mentioned their children as an accomplishment. None of the men have ever claimed fatherhood as one of their accomplishments.
I wonder why that is? Is it an accomplishment for women but not for men? Weird.
This made me wonder, as an interviewer, how would I respond if someone said that their proudest accomplishment was deciding
not to have children and that they recently had a vasectomy or tubal ligation?
Along this line, it makes me wonder why it's acceptable to say that having children
is an accomplishment. A poster responded to the above by saying that having children is the kind of home/personal accomplishment that people aren't really looking for in the workplace, and so it's ultimately inappropriate, and what would that suggest about the employee's priorities?
My initial response
is to think that either response (having children or vasectomy/tubal ligation=proudest accomplishment) would be unacceptable to such an interview question. I think that is largely because I am proud of so many things that I have accomplished in my life (or to be specific to the interview question, the past year) that I wonder how could having children or a tubal ligation even possibly come close to a personal point of achievement? It's not rocket science to get knocked up or be cut open by a doctor. Even though I try to support whatever lifestyle people choose, I think both answers fall into the TMI category, and I'd be left to wonder what would provoke someone to divulge such information in an
interview to strangers. Sure, either one is a great accomplishment when considering hard decisions we all must make in life--but why should I be applauding someone's personal choice in the workplace?
On the other hand, and this is where my booklist comes into play, I have started to wonder if perhaps I am also indoctrinated by society to believe that the home and the workplace should be kept separate.
The most common problem working mothers face when having children is that their priorities change, and they usually want to be home on time, as opposed to 50-70 hours elsewhere. However, I don't think this dilemma is relegated simply to Stay-At-Work Moms. After I was laid off from Aero Film, I never applied for another job in the film industry because I saw that I would have to give up my personal life if I wanted to get into production. I may have hated being a receptionist/office manager, but I damn well made sure that I left at 6 p.m. every day--because I could have stayed until 7 or 8 o'clock at night on a regular basis; I wouldn't have been monetarily compensated for those hours, but I would have made a "good impression" and perhaps weaseled my way into production. But turns out that working 18 hour days, 7 days a week, for three months straight is not my idea of a good time.
I believe that men, women, parents, non-parents usually don't get enough support at work anyway--and by support I guess I'm really talking about flexibility, which is something I think everyone universally longs for. I still think film production would be
so much fun--but I am unwilling to trade my personal life for that career. What would a business look like if it valued employees as people instead of workers, and structured its company to be more flexible? Have employees work five or six hour work days, or eight to twelve hour days 3 or 4 days a week? Would that inherently change the structure of our attitudes about the separation of work and home? Is it necessary to have that separation?
I think most of us labor in life to make sure work doesn't bleed over into life. Life is what we do at home, on our own time. Work is what we do in order to afford life. The potential problem with asking the workplace to consider our home lives is that they may feel they own, or are entitled to, some aspect of our home life. I doubt many of us would expect an employer to consider us as whole persons whose life sometimes interferes with work, without expecting that they would also want work to bleed into home life. So how can the flexibility be achieved?
The answer to that question may be to work for yourself. Freelance or start a business. Although, I bet both freelancers and entrepreneurs would argue that when you're working for yourself, you usually have to work twice as hard. But according to
How She Really Does it: Secrets of Stay-At-Work Moms the way flexibility generally is achieved is by striking out on your own.
The reason why I am so interested in this topic is because it is pretty much the only point of contention B and I have about logistically having children in the future: our careers. What would happen to them? B doesn't worry about this as much as I do, and I can't help but wonder if it's because he hasn't been taught that his identity as a man is tied up with fatherhood. And although I can say that I wasn't taught by my parents that my identity was linked to motherhood, society suggests otherwise.
I realize that I my childhood indoctrinated me to value work over children (ironic, no?), but I still consider my education and the career I hope to achieve as an integral part of my identity. My mom was a Stay-At-Home Mom, B's mom was a Stay-At-Work Mom, and each of us think that our childhood was pretty swell, and wouldn't mind duplicating our experiences. However, I know that I can not relinquish my identity to be a parent, and I wouldn't want to force B into that position either.
Looking back, I really appreciated my mother being home when I got back from school, helping me with homework, making dinner and Halloween costumes, and I think I grew to be the person I am today because my mom was around. However, just because B's mom worked, doesn't mean he didn't get those things. His mom turned him into Link one year that rivals my Rainbow Brite. But whereas B's mom did have help in the form of a nanny/housekeeper--she knew the woman and was friends with the woman before that, so she was really comfortable with the person looking after her children. If B and I were ever to have children, there would be no other option other than to use daycare. This is not to suggest that daycare is a lesser option, and in fact I have read studies (from
I'm Okay, You're a Brat!: Setting Priorities Straight and Freeing You From the Guilt and Mad Myths of Parenthood) that demonstrate that children who participate in daycare develop social skills more quickly and more easily adapt to social situations. Those findings are consistent with my own experience; I remember the first day of school--I was six years old and I had essentially never been without my mother--and I cried my eyes out. And it wasn't quietly sobbing to myself at a desk, I mean I was loud. It embarasses me to admit, but it's true. It's also true that I would be uncomfortable with the high turnover rate that daycares generally experience, because I wouldn't be able to research or maintain updated knowledge on the employees.
So can work and home really coexist? As a grad student, Assistant Lecturer and writer, I really have no choice but to "take my work home with me." There ain't no way that I'd be gradin' papers in my tiny office for 20 hours on top of all the time I'm already on campus. Maybe, in the end, it's all a matter of industry and career-choice.
I suppose it's a balance, like everything else.
Labels: cfbc, childfree by choice, childhood, children, grad school, memories, parenthood, parents, real life, the children question, uncomfortable questions, women
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