This title of this blog post is sort of a lie. Sort of. There is no truth about women here; just one woman, little old me. Taking my stab at representing all women, humanity. Or maybe just some women who might be struggling with the same stuff I have been. Here's what's on my mind. I was running around the kitchen yesterday getting ready to have two of my best girl friends over for dinner. I spotted a Georgetown Law Magazine, my alma mata, on the counter that my husband had likely left out for me. The cover showed a sheet of newsprint paper with ideas written all over it, everything in black marker in capital letters. The article was called a "special report" on revamping legal education.
What does this mean to me?
For a few years now, I have been trying to determine that. What did my legal education mean to me?
What did I get out of it?
Am I glad I got it?
Any regrets?
Would I change anything if I could?
If you are waiting for an answer-all catch phrase, don't. It isn't coming. I still don't have the answers to those questions without a thousand qualifications. But what I do have is this: I have an idea that is gonna blow your mind because it is so simple. Women are on the verge of something new *again.* We are on the verge of defining a new era in the workforce, motherhood; and everything in between. I am talking about women who are smart, happy, energetic, degree-seeking, career-wanting, but for whom traditional faces of the working world don't seem to work.
Let's take a step back for a minute to understand what I am saying the context of history.
We have the 1950s. The message to women was sort of universal: STAY HOME. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Do not collect anything, save groceries. Married, but no kids? No problem! All the better to look fabulous, smoke, socialize and blow more smoke around. No need to collect $200, husband will have it ready for you as an allowance if you are so fortunate. The one-size fit all model might have suited some but like all one-size models, it did not fit all.
Enter: the 1960s and 70's. This is before the "you go, gurrrl" era of the 90s, but still, that message seemed to be some of the changing face of women in the working world. You go out and go. Do it. Get out there. So seemed to say Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. So seemed to say many activists on both sides of the gender lines. Go out. Get that career. Law? Business? Well, chuckle, chuckle, sure why not? And then the chuckles stopped because it was no longer a joking idea. It started to happen. One fold. Two fold. Ten fold. [Today people still have that chuckle, chuckle over dinner with friends when the conversation about a female President of the United States comes up. Those chuckles will end soon too. But you get the idea of the chuckle with the new changing faces- let's laugh at the crazy new tide of women out there!]
Women were getting out and loving it. Not just college. Graduate school. But it didn't stop there. Traditional fields were no longer good enough for women.
"Do more than teach," the activists would scream. "Run your own company."
"Don't stop until you are a partner at the biggest firm. You can do it all!"
Hence, we are arrive at the beloved 90s. Go-go music, and truly spoken, "you go, gurrrl" era. Women were out in the workforce. It wasn't a question of if, the message was when. Nothing was too good. Nothing was impossible...or was it? What about the women who wanted to stay home and raise a child? What about the idea that raising a child was not a dying art, like say, bayonet-making, or carbon-copying? The idea that a mere three months maternity leave felt like the blink of an eye when raising a small human mammal who could not move on it's own and was still deeply, deeply dependent on its mother? Is it possible we (as women) overshot with our message? Had Betty Friedan anticipated that the women who might have been happy at home would not longer even consider staying home to raise their child because of the new(ish) cultura stigma against doing so? What about the women born to stay home and raise a child who always knew they would? Were they losers for not getting PhDs? Masters degrees? College degreses? High school degrees? Where were we drawing the new lines? What was the new message for what a woman should do?
I don't know. But what I do know as a high school graduate in late the 1990s, the message I received was decidedly one-sided: working was the way to go. Of course I would find time to one day raise a child, with nannies, babysitters, help from my parents, in scraps of time just like I found the ability to run a law practice, serve on a corporate advisory board, and teach as an adjunct professor of criminal justice to undergrads. Plus, I had weekends, vacations (that's what they were for, right?). How much time could it take to ga-ga, goo-goo, change a diaper, read a story, give a bottle? Why did I go out and keep going toward new education and career pursuits only to toss those things aside like they were nothing later on? I was a go-getter and I would continue to be.
Motherhood would not get me down!
But what if it had the opposite effect on me? What if being a mom brought me up?
What if the new love I felt for this little creature was more powerful than any force I had ever felt in my life and I was more passionate, excited, and compelled to stay home and raise him?
What if I felt like a knife going through my heart every time I had to leave my child only to come home and find he was asleep and we had missed each other, the small window of time he was awake that day?
What if I wanted to be a big influence in his life and for the first time ever, weekends weren't enough time to let me catch up with this little creature?
What if, after being away from my son for six hours, I felt like a person trying to exercise who had taken a week off-lethargic and out of sync?
What was going on here?!
Was I lame? Lazy? A loser? Who would ever chose mopping up apple juice (ah, the infamous apple juice reference!) over sitting in a plush office sipping a latte? Or entering my cozy cubicle at a nonprofit where I was transforming civil rights for gays in America? I wouldn't, or so I had I thought.
So what stopped me dead in my tracks? Life. Feelings. The same things that make me want to go window shopping when I don't have money for real shopping, or put on my makeup, or call my girlfriends and do a coffee date or a walk. Female instinct. Love. Being who I am. Call it what you will, but being a mom felt more right, more necessary, more full of love, and more logical than anything I had ever done in the working world ever ever ever.
Which brings me back to the first paragraph of this post and to the title, why in-betweeners? In a big nutshell, I think that is where our generation is headed. I think we are the in-betweeners. In between tthe must-stay-at-home-women of the 1950s and the go-out-and-make-difference women of the 1960s. In between the "you go gurrl" women of the 1990s and the current growing body of women who are happily higher-educated, and who want to partake fully in motherhood, but out of choice, not force, nor lack of options.
So what's the problem? End of story, right? "And we all lived happily ever after." Cinderella, of 2013: Her shoe fell off when she had to get home by midnight because she had a law school final the next morning. Prince Charming still found her, made her dinner while she studied for the bar exam, and got a $250,000 job when she got pregnant so she could stay home and raise junior. She is after all, Cinderella, the coveted beauty waiting for a prince. Does that sound right to you?
It didn't to me. I am none of those categories. I feel like an in betweener because I am in between the idea that I must forever utilize my higher ed. degree for 45+ hours of work a week, even though I greatly enjoy being a full-time mom. I am in between because I received the message growing up that working was basically the only route so I never thought of choosing a career path that might have been more mommy-baby-family friendly. I am in-between because even if I had been better informed about the joys and necessity of being home with a small child, I likely would not have heeded the advice anyways. In between because I love being in school, loved in then, love the atmosphere now, but seemingly am not using any degree and muddle through as a new mom with no idea and no guidance except for intuition many days. I am in between because, now, having made the choice to at least temporarily stop teaching, stop my criminal defense legal practice, and to stay home with my son, I wonder if I could have been better prepared to do so. In between, because as I write these words on the screen, I wonder how much time I have, before my most demanding, special client, howls in need of me again. In between, knowing and not knowing because I just don't know and no one was having these conversations when I was growing up.
I think this has come up with every generation. The idea that "nobody was having that conversation" and as a result people made decisions without considering all information.
"Mom, dad," I would ask in the 1980s, "why do you smoke? Everyone knows smoking is bad for you." " You are right, Megan," they would admit, "But nobody was having that conversation when we started smoking."
Same question and response for why did you drink whole milk? Saturated fats? Why didn't nanny (my grandma) finish college? How could anyone have thought it was a good idea for my great grandmother to drop out of school in 8th grade in 1916? Same answer: That was the trend.
It's hard to beat the trend.
So let's take a step in the future for a moment. What do I say when my son asks me one day, "mommy, why did some many women go to law school and then not have time/option/ability to take care of their little ones? Why didn't people see the connection between kids not being raised in warm communities and suicide bombers/terrorists/school-shoot outs? Why did people let their kids stay home after school with only a TV and computer, and no one there? Why didn't people see that family does matter? That perhaps one of the most important jobs, if not the most, is raising children to grow into mindful adults? Why did no one stop and meditate more?" You already know my answer and if you are similar to me, you have lived some of these moments so you can commiserate. This has not been the trend.
My argument is that we have overshot as a culture. No, not as far as giving women rights, but as far as the must-work mentality. It's time to take a step back and look at how far we have come since the 1950s as far as women working but to also acknowledge the the new one-size fits all approach of everyone working has the same issues of the any one-size-fits all approach: not every woman wants life in the fast, over-tired, over-stressed, rat-race, trying-to-do-it-all-but-doing-nothing-100%-in-the-process lane. Whoo, that is quite a lane. Hopefully, whatever your decision is, you are happy with it, and not in that lane that I have been in.
So, that leave me where I am now in my nameless in between-lane. An inbetweener.
In between the fast lane of doing everything and the slow lane of doing nothing because there were no options.
In between loving education but not sure what future degrees/certifications might be in my future.
In between message of feminism and being feminine (both are cool, right?).
In between the angry idea that somebody, somewhere along the way should have brought up that I had chosen a career path that was too challenging to do with full-time parenting on the one side and the idea that I myself should have done more soul-searching on the other.
In between the idea that I will one day tell my son that some of my decisions are based on "what people were/were not talking about then" that has influenced me and the idea that is a total copout and I should rise above that excuse now. Is that an excuse? Who knows.
But I do know that the truth is this conversation is not over. Whether you are at-home, at work, fulfilled, or still seeking, let's ask the questions that haven't been asked. Today. Let's see what the new truth of today is. Let's speculate as to what our page in history holds for us and what the new face of the in-betweeners will be.
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