A reader asks: How Do I Lean Out?

Strategies for not having it all

Since forever, the 50,000 dollar question for mothers has been something like: how do you make it all work? Just recently Freya, a 21-year-old American reader, wrote to me asking for my advice on planning her own life - and also on how to persuade friends and family that her lack of interest in the girlboss life doesn’t mean she’s wasting her education.

How, Freya asks, should she think about work and professional development knowing she wants to be a mother, and ideally to raise kids at home herself?

I would love to be a SAHM temporarily or be in a career that gives me the flexibility to exit and re-enter the workforce while raising children. I understand and respect the decision to hire nannies, but I want to be the primary caretaker of my children. The issue, as you know, is that most jobs in the US are not hospitable to motherhood in a variety of ways.

This is, I guess, the $60,000 question. I don’t think there’s a prescriptive answer to it, because so much depends on individual inclinations and abilities, but here are a few reflections from my observation and experience.

It’s prudent to have at least some marketable skill or skills. This isn’t so much about hedging your bets in case a marriage goes wrong: though this does happen, you’re borrowing trouble by planning your life as though it’s a foregone conclusion. Rather, it’s in pragmatic recognition of the fact that life is long with a ton of twists and turns and sometimes families need a second income.

Consider thinking in terms of three careers, rather than one. In my observation a lot of women have not one career but three, and that this is under-discussed because we frame ‘career’ so reflexively in male-typical terms. But women’s availability and energy can vary hugely depending on caring obligations, and you may find that how much you want to participate in public life will vary too.

Consider portable skills that you can do flexibly and/or remotely. There are a ton of occupations that permit some or all of your work to be done remotely. There are also plenty of hard skills that are often reflexively dismissed by bourgeois women as “beneath me” but that offer great flexibility. The mum I know with maybe the best work/life balance is my hairdresser, who has a four-metre commute and is 100% her own boss in scheduling terms. That’s worth a lot, if your priority is family but your family would struggle on one income. (Also worth bearing in mind that hairdressing is not very vulnerable to takeover by robots, and by definition can’t be outsourced to a country with lower labour costs.

There’s also nothing wrong with being a stay at home mum, obviously! Speaking for myself, in our family we’ve tried pretty much every configuration there is, from both of us full-time to me as stay-at-home mum, and I think it’s a mistake to make definitive claims about one being “better”. People’s circumstances vary so much and sometimes you just have to respond pragmatically to events, family health, domestic finances, and so on. That said, in my experience life is less stressful if at least one of you is working less than part-time, or else focusing entirely on family.

But despite this repeated finding in surveys, Freya reports feeling pressure in the other direction - even though she isn’t a SAHM yet:

Whenever I explain [wanting to be a SAHM] to friends or family members, they often get quite upset and suggest I am being too traditional and that I am "wasting my education" if my aspiration is to (at some point) be a SAHM. I'm made to feel crazy for expressing the desire to eventually have children and resisting "the corporate grind", as my friends say. I'm not usually one to second-guess myself, but am I being crazy? 

I write a lot about the mother-shaped blind spot in feminism, and the nagging sense many SAHMs feel that other women look at them askance for ‘letting the side down’ by not working. Every SAHM I’ve met knows the moment at parties when someone asks what you do, you say “I’m a mum” and instantly sense them looking around for someone more interesting to talk to. It sucks. This is supported by a public feminist conversation that focuses on “pay gaps” or numbers of female CEOs.

And yet the data suggests most mothers want balance, and most SAHMs are in that role by choice. In turn, this suggests that in reality those who treat family life solely as a burden or obstacle to professional self-realisation are a loud minority. But this loud minority clusters among college-educated women - so if that’s your social circle as well as you, then you may just have to accept being a bit counter-cultural.

But while it’s true that if you choose your occupation based on criteria other than pay grade, you’ll probably earn less, one misconception we should all challenge wherever we find it is that a woman who doesn’t prioritise pay grade is ‘wasting her education’. I’ve met a great many highly educated women who work part-time, or not at all, and one thing they are never doing is sitting around doing nothing.

If you’re smart, energetic, and well-educated, you won’t sit around. It simply doesn’t happen. Such women homeschool; they run community groups; they offer breastfeeding support; they start schools, organise charities. Many change the world, in large ways or small. The purpose of education is - or should be - far, far broader than earning a six-figure salary.

That, too, is a counter-cultural view. But sticking up for it is to defend not only life beyond the market, but the richness of culture and civilisation itself. So in support of this more expansive view of the many ways an educated woman can use her education, my last suggestion would be: when you do have kids, make active participation in your community a priority. Show up to stuff. This is how you build connections, and building connections is both how you head off loneliness, and also the seed-bed for so many of the ways women go about quietly changing the world for the better.

So to Freya: no, you’re not being crazy. Countercultural, yes, but not crazy. And you’re not alone, either. I wish you the best of luck and I’m sure other readers will too.

To my lovely readers: if you have any advice from experience, for Freya, on how to plan for the life she wants, please share in the comments.

Meanwhile, I’m off to Italy tomorrow for a couple of weeks with my own family. Enjoy the rest of the summer, and I’ll see you all again in September!