"My single friends are traveling to Sweden on a whim to learn new languages [BORING], attending conferences on the other side of the Atlantic [TEDIOUS], and going to the gym at 6am one day [DEAR GOD], 10pm the next, just because they [LACK DISCIPLINE AND ARE HUNGOVER]can."
This is a lovely essay, and I can say the idea of parenthood closing doors while opening others applies to fathers as well. I find myself in a similar moment in life to Beatrice. Dreams of an academic career have been shelved in order to prioritize living in a place that best serves the needs of my young family. I am currently in the process of working instead to become a fireman, a career I would have looked down my nose at a few years ago, but one that in parts of the US offers both sufficient financial security and a flexible schedule that will allow me to be actively involved in homeschooling my children. And ultimately, perhaps this better serves my community as well. Does the world need one more academic waffling on about something or other? I find myself energize by the prospect of having a real and tangible positive impact on my community in a way that a career in academia wouldn’t have allowed.
I gave up a software engineering career that I loved (and a lot of income) to be a stay at home mother. If I may brag for a minute, at a performance review, my tech lead said I was one of the most talented junior devs he’s ever met. So maybe I’m not off the mark saying I could have achieved something in this field and that some real potential was given up. I’m not ruling out ever going back, but it’s hard to even contemplate when I’m about to have 3 under 3 and I don’t know if I still CAN even think like a software engineer. And to me at least, I can’t fathom letting them be in someone else’s care. I know on my deathbed I would never think about SWE.
I see having had children and cared for them the best I can, like having been to the gym. Maybe it can be hard in the moment, but you wouldn’t change anything for the world. (Funnily enough, it’s also what Heather Heying said to Louise Perry on her podcast a few days back. How she never felt the baby crazy. Just the feeling that in the long run, she would want to have had children)
This resonates, but perhaps in a roundabout (opposite?) way. I actually don't resonate with the high-achieving early 20's gal — I was adventurous, yes — but did not have many professional goals and ambitions to speak of. More just trying new things, somewhat adrift, and deep down wishing to be a wife and mother. Maybe I'm just a late bloomer, but it's only been DURING these early years of motherhood (with 4, 3, and 1 year olds) that personal desires and ambitions, or at least a willingness to consider things for the future, has come about. So, I think this blooming into a new kind of person with new priorities can happen for both the professionally ambitious & the more motherhood-and-family oriented pre-children women. We can always adapt, course-correct and try new things as we grow into this role, and I think that's beautiful and a lot more exciting!
I got pregnant with my first son during the last semester of an MA in Applied Linguistics. I was accepted to a PhD program for that fall, but deferred. When I started, the next fall, I became pregnant again and found that the two things, academia and raising and having small children, just weren't compatible. I gave up the program, a long-held dream of mine, but it didn't bother me. The option will always be there and I won't say that later I won't go back. But for now, I'm content with my choices and know it was the right one.
Yes, I did. I was a reasonably successful freelance journalist and had my first baby in 2001. Immediately the women's magazines I'd been working for cast judgement nineties feminism style, especially if you dared to enjoy motherhood or worse, were interested in childbirth, which I was. followed what was igniting my curiosity, trained as an active birth teacher, became a doula, in time an activist and wrote two birth books which have been far more people reaching and life altering than anything I'd ever written as a journalist. My most creative, productive years have been SINCE having children
What a lovely post Béatrice. As a mother and now grandmother I want to encourage you. The days are long but the years will truly fly. As we held our first son, 31 years ago, an older gentleman told us, “enjoy every minute, you only get 18 summers.” We tried to remember this at every stage and tried to neither rush the stages or dread the future ones. I feel we never really discussed our dreams per se but my husband worked hard at every job he’s had while I sought to work at times around our 3 kids and what they needed at each stage. I had and still have hobbies that I love and my dear husband and I try to cultivate hobbies together now that we are empty nesters. I feel your generation has been sold the lie that you can have it all. Yet we see the fall out in so many ways. There are only 24 hours in everyone’s day and the only sure things in life are death and taxes.🤪 So I’m happy you’ve recognized the tension between your littles and your dreams and are choosing your littles in this season. Cultivating a slower pace will also help your physical body as you age and modeling this truth to your dear children will prayerfully impact future generations of your family. Enjoy the moments my dear, the sleep will get better. ❤️
I really feel this. I got pregnant before I had any semblance of a “career” which left me feeling incredibly vulnerable and trapped. Having my baby cracked me open creatively, socially, courageously. I felt more alive and inspired and whole after having my daughter. My time and energy is more precious. I always say that if I hadn’t had a surprise pregnancy I probably would’ve never felt “ready” to do it, and I’m so glad it happened. We make plans and god laughs, as they say.
I’m grateful to be able to be home with her but being a stay at home mom was not my dream or plan, and I’m constantly looking outward towards other dreams and also feeling the “ biological clock” nagging me to have another child. I don’t want to go back to work full time but I don’t want to be home full time but I love being a mother and being home with her too. It’s all the things all at once. I appreciate the nuance and honesty here, as this topic is often discussed in such a black and white way.
Wonderful article. Thank you, Beatrice, for writing it, and thank you, Mary, for sharing it. The experience of motherhood has these ambivalences, and it's great to know how to recognize them and live with peace with them. Also, to live with a lot of inner freedom, being aware of the greatness of our freedom to be able to commit to projects that may seem so crazy to many today, such as a lifelong commitment (marriage) and having children.
About dreams: it's true that children help us dream more and better. They open windows that we hadn't considered before. Personally, having children has also driven me to make much better use of time and overcome mental barriers and excuses I had for not writing more.
Also, I think that many dreams don't necessarily get left behind... Sometimes we just put them on pause, or we walk towards them at a slower pace than expected... Society sells us the idea that by 30 you should have achieved success, but at 30 you still have your whole life ahead to continue dreaming and fulfilling dreams, and to be surprised by dreams you never imagined.
I would love to hear from other mothers about the particulars of a surprise career or side gig discovered/continued after becoming a mother. Do you do it because you have to or because you want to? If it’s a choice, what does the work offer you that you don’t find simply from motherhood? What do you do for childcare when you’re writing, etc.? How much time do you feel is ok to be away from your kids? How do you protect time with your kids if your work is done around the edges?
In short, if you feel you need to write, design, teach, study, etc., is it best to pause those desires during the early years of your child’s life or learn to integrate them to be a healthy you? And if the latter, how exactly are you doing that? NOT asking for a friend :) asking for myself.
The fact that the author’s grandmother was taken out of school to work at the age of ten is the most horrifying indictment of the past imaginable. The appalling waste of that woman’s mind, done so that some inbred twit with rich parents could attend Eton and spend his twenties drinking himself into liver failure. That kind of thing makes me understand the people who invented the guillotine.
More directly, why don’t we try to create a world where fewer of the kind of tradeoffs the author and her husband had to make are necessary? It’s actually BAD that most people have to have jobs instead of careers! If the world makes people miserable, we need to change it, not melt ourselves down to fit into it.
This is probably not the right time to interject this topic, but I am at the end of my journey as a mother and the mother writing this essay is at the beginning.
Could Dr. Winnicott now tells us what to do with our adult children who have attached themselves to Cluster B individuals who are cutting our children off from us? I know I am not alone.
While acknowledging our human frailties, my husband and I did everything in our power as working class individuals to give our children a healthy start. If I were to tell you our story, there would be similarities to this writer and her husband, including a PhD aspect.
Dr. Winnicott’s description of children, as failing to recognize the parents as individuals with their own needs, fits these adult Cluster B individuals perfectly. If one took Iain McGilchrist’s theory and played with it, you might say their left brains reached adulthood and their rights brain did not. These people have the cognitive skills to torture us emotionally and psychologically, using our children to do it, but no right brain to feel empathy.
I guess I am frustrated that even when you get to the end, the consolation for doing it is not there.
Enjoyed the article. I took a different path in that I’ve worked in a career that is fairly compatible with being a mother. (I should not make it sound like I planned my life. I had no clue what I was doing in my 20s, but I guess my instincts were fairly sound and somehow individual decisions led me to a good place.)
I have something in common with the author in that we were both English majors. I bailed on academia after my undergrad degree though. Probably the smartest thing I ever did. Everything I’ve observed since makes it look like a very negative environment.
This is a lovely post and I'm so glad it was shared here! You are doing well. You are doing the right thing. You have no idea the wonderful places your children will take you.
Ms. Scudeler bemoans the fact that her husband, in the here & now, is not ensconced in his particular 'dream job. 'And I'm not doing,' she wails, 'at all what I dreamed I'd do!'
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"
And yes indeed, you may weep...
But this, of course, is life, that 'letting the days go down' that happens while we dream.
But dreams are just dreams, aren't they? Imaginary, ephemeral things that live, briefly, in vague consciousness and vanish with the sun...unanchored in reality...unfounded, and typically without intent or purpose: the flotsam & jetsam of a restless mind? Should we be surprised that these dreams of our increasingly extended adolescence do indeed transmogrify when exposed to the harsher winds of the world beyond the Hothouse?
She declares, "My generation has been brought up to think that comfort and pleasure and self-fulfillment are the greatest joys life can give." And for Toddlers & other young children, this is quite definitely true. Unhappiness is an empty belly; happiness, a full one. Snuggled in our Mama's arms: we sleep; we wake; we eat..and when we make a mess it's cleaned and our lovable, squeezable, 'smells like fresh-baked-bread' selves are snuggled once again. Hard to beat comfort & pleasure like that.
As for self-fulfillment? First we must ask: What the heck is it?
What it distinctly isn't is the nominal achievement of the superficial fantasies held by our mewling, minimally maturing selves, still convinced that a life of same-o / same-o copy-paste academics focused on 18th century poetics, or critical gender theory would be oh-so 'fulfilling'....or that putting together a densely unreadable exegisis detailing the warp & weft of some Salieri's well-forgotten works was in some way a fullest-possible realization of one's most human capacities. (What?!)
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
And so we wake.
"I’m no longer embarrassed to say that my life revolves around my children."
Indeed, we're no longer embarrassed to say our lives revolve around Life...for what else is there? And when we think about 'carrying to fruition our deepest capacities', is is that.
"My single friends are traveling to Sweden on a whim to learn new languages [BORING], attending conferences on the other side of the Atlantic [TEDIOUS], and going to the gym at 6am one day [DEAR GOD], 10pm the next, just because they [LACK DISCIPLINE AND ARE HUNGOVER]can."
There, fixed it for you : )
This is a lovely essay, and I can say the idea of parenthood closing doors while opening others applies to fathers as well. I find myself in a similar moment in life to Beatrice. Dreams of an academic career have been shelved in order to prioritize living in a place that best serves the needs of my young family. I am currently in the process of working instead to become a fireman, a career I would have looked down my nose at a few years ago, but one that in parts of the US offers both sufficient financial security and a flexible schedule that will allow me to be actively involved in homeschooling my children. And ultimately, perhaps this better serves my community as well. Does the world need one more academic waffling on about something or other? I find myself energize by the prospect of having a real and tangible positive impact on my community in a way that a career in academia wouldn’t have allowed.
I gave up a software engineering career that I loved (and a lot of income) to be a stay at home mother. If I may brag for a minute, at a performance review, my tech lead said I was one of the most talented junior devs he’s ever met. So maybe I’m not off the mark saying I could have achieved something in this field and that some real potential was given up. I’m not ruling out ever going back, but it’s hard to even contemplate when I’m about to have 3 under 3 and I don’t know if I still CAN even think like a software engineer. And to me at least, I can’t fathom letting them be in someone else’s care. I know on my deathbed I would never think about SWE.
I see having had children and cared for them the best I can, like having been to the gym. Maybe it can be hard in the moment, but you wouldn’t change anything for the world. (Funnily enough, it’s also what Heather Heying said to Louise Perry on her podcast a few days back. How she never felt the baby crazy. Just the feeling that in the long run, she would want to have had children)
This resonates, but perhaps in a roundabout (opposite?) way. I actually don't resonate with the high-achieving early 20's gal — I was adventurous, yes — but did not have many professional goals and ambitions to speak of. More just trying new things, somewhat adrift, and deep down wishing to be a wife and mother. Maybe I'm just a late bloomer, but it's only been DURING these early years of motherhood (with 4, 3, and 1 year olds) that personal desires and ambitions, or at least a willingness to consider things for the future, has come about. So, I think this blooming into a new kind of person with new priorities can happen for both the professionally ambitious & the more motherhood-and-family oriented pre-children women. We can always adapt, course-correct and try new things as we grow into this role, and I think that's beautiful and a lot more exciting!
I got pregnant with my first son during the last semester of an MA in Applied Linguistics. I was accepted to a PhD program for that fall, but deferred. When I started, the next fall, I became pregnant again and found that the two things, academia and raising and having small children, just weren't compatible. I gave up the program, a long-held dream of mine, but it didn't bother me. The option will always be there and I won't say that later I won't go back. But for now, I'm content with my choices and know it was the right one.
Yes, I did. I was a reasonably successful freelance journalist and had my first baby in 2001. Immediately the women's magazines I'd been working for cast judgement nineties feminism style, especially if you dared to enjoy motherhood or worse, were interested in childbirth, which I was. followed what was igniting my curiosity, trained as an active birth teacher, became a doula, in time an activist and wrote two birth books which have been far more people reaching and life altering than anything I'd ever written as a journalist. My most creative, productive years have been SINCE having children
What a lovely post Béatrice. As a mother and now grandmother I want to encourage you. The days are long but the years will truly fly. As we held our first son, 31 years ago, an older gentleman told us, “enjoy every minute, you only get 18 summers.” We tried to remember this at every stage and tried to neither rush the stages or dread the future ones. I feel we never really discussed our dreams per se but my husband worked hard at every job he’s had while I sought to work at times around our 3 kids and what they needed at each stage. I had and still have hobbies that I love and my dear husband and I try to cultivate hobbies together now that we are empty nesters. I feel your generation has been sold the lie that you can have it all. Yet we see the fall out in so many ways. There are only 24 hours in everyone’s day and the only sure things in life are death and taxes.🤪 So I’m happy you’ve recognized the tension between your littles and your dreams and are choosing your littles in this season. Cultivating a slower pace will also help your physical body as you age and modeling this truth to your dear children will prayerfully impact future generations of your family. Enjoy the moments my dear, the sleep will get better. ❤️
I really feel this. I got pregnant before I had any semblance of a “career” which left me feeling incredibly vulnerable and trapped. Having my baby cracked me open creatively, socially, courageously. I felt more alive and inspired and whole after having my daughter. My time and energy is more precious. I always say that if I hadn’t had a surprise pregnancy I probably would’ve never felt “ready” to do it, and I’m so glad it happened. We make plans and god laughs, as they say.
I’m grateful to be able to be home with her but being a stay at home mom was not my dream or plan, and I’m constantly looking outward towards other dreams and also feeling the “ biological clock” nagging me to have another child. I don’t want to go back to work full time but I don’t want to be home full time but I love being a mother and being home with her too. It’s all the things all at once. I appreciate the nuance and honesty here, as this topic is often discussed in such a black and white way.
Wonderful article. Thank you, Beatrice, for writing it, and thank you, Mary, for sharing it. The experience of motherhood has these ambivalences, and it's great to know how to recognize them and live with peace with them. Also, to live with a lot of inner freedom, being aware of the greatness of our freedom to be able to commit to projects that may seem so crazy to many today, such as a lifelong commitment (marriage) and having children.
About dreams: it's true that children help us dream more and better. They open windows that we hadn't considered before. Personally, having children has also driven me to make much better use of time and overcome mental barriers and excuses I had for not writing more.
Also, I think that many dreams don't necessarily get left behind... Sometimes we just put them on pause, or we walk towards them at a slower pace than expected... Society sells us the idea that by 30 you should have achieved success, but at 30 you still have your whole life ahead to continue dreaming and fulfilling dreams, and to be surprised by dreams you never imagined.
I would love to hear from other mothers about the particulars of a surprise career or side gig discovered/continued after becoming a mother. Do you do it because you have to or because you want to? If it’s a choice, what does the work offer you that you don’t find simply from motherhood? What do you do for childcare when you’re writing, etc.? How much time do you feel is ok to be away from your kids? How do you protect time with your kids if your work is done around the edges?
In short, if you feel you need to write, design, teach, study, etc., is it best to pause those desires during the early years of your child’s life or learn to integrate them to be a healthy you? And if the latter, how exactly are you doing that? NOT asking for a friend :) asking for myself.
The fact that the author’s grandmother was taken out of school to work at the age of ten is the most horrifying indictment of the past imaginable. The appalling waste of that woman’s mind, done so that some inbred twit with rich parents could attend Eton and spend his twenties drinking himself into liver failure. That kind of thing makes me understand the people who invented the guillotine.
More directly, why don’t we try to create a world where fewer of the kind of tradeoffs the author and her husband had to make are necessary? It’s actually BAD that most people have to have jobs instead of careers! If the world makes people miserable, we need to change it, not melt ourselves down to fit into it.
This is probably not the right time to interject this topic, but I am at the end of my journey as a mother and the mother writing this essay is at the beginning.
Could Dr. Winnicott now tells us what to do with our adult children who have attached themselves to Cluster B individuals who are cutting our children off from us? I know I am not alone.
While acknowledging our human frailties, my husband and I did everything in our power as working class individuals to give our children a healthy start. If I were to tell you our story, there would be similarities to this writer and her husband, including a PhD aspect.
Dr. Winnicott’s description of children, as failing to recognize the parents as individuals with their own needs, fits these adult Cluster B individuals perfectly. If one took Iain McGilchrist’s theory and played with it, you might say their left brains reached adulthood and their rights brain did not. These people have the cognitive skills to torture us emotionally and psychologically, using our children to do it, but no right brain to feel empathy.
I guess I am frustrated that even when you get to the end, the consolation for doing it is not there.
Oh, very well, then...
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/30-and-pregnant
Enjoyed the article. I took a different path in that I’ve worked in a career that is fairly compatible with being a mother. (I should not make it sound like I planned my life. I had no clue what I was doing in my 20s, but I guess my instincts were fairly sound and somehow individual decisions led me to a good place.)
I have something in common with the author in that we were both English majors. I bailed on academia after my undergrad degree though. Probably the smartest thing I ever did. Everything I’ve observed since makes it look like a very negative environment.
This is a lovely post and I'm so glad it was shared here! You are doing well. You are doing the right thing. You have no idea the wonderful places your children will take you.
Ms. Scudeler bemoans the fact that her husband, in the here & now, is not ensconced in his particular 'dream job. 'And I'm not doing,' she wails, 'at all what I dreamed I'd do!'
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"
And yes indeed, you may weep...
But this, of course, is life, that 'letting the days go down' that happens while we dream.
But dreams are just dreams, aren't they? Imaginary, ephemeral things that live, briefly, in vague consciousness and vanish with the sun...unanchored in reality...unfounded, and typically without intent or purpose: the flotsam & jetsam of a restless mind? Should we be surprised that these dreams of our increasingly extended adolescence do indeed transmogrify when exposed to the harsher winds of the world beyond the Hothouse?
She declares, "My generation has been brought up to think that comfort and pleasure and self-fulfillment are the greatest joys life can give." And for Toddlers & other young children, this is quite definitely true. Unhappiness is an empty belly; happiness, a full one. Snuggled in our Mama's arms: we sleep; we wake; we eat..and when we make a mess it's cleaned and our lovable, squeezable, 'smells like fresh-baked-bread' selves are snuggled once again. Hard to beat comfort & pleasure like that.
As for self-fulfillment? First we must ask: What the heck is it?
What it distinctly isn't is the nominal achievement of the superficial fantasies held by our mewling, minimally maturing selves, still convinced that a life of same-o / same-o copy-paste academics focused on 18th century poetics, or critical gender theory would be oh-so 'fulfilling'....or that putting together a densely unreadable exegisis detailing the warp & weft of some Salieri's well-forgotten works was in some way a fullest-possible realization of one's most human capacities. (What?!)
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
And so we wake.
"I’m no longer embarrassed to say that my life revolves around my children."
Indeed, we're no longer embarrassed to say our lives revolve around Life...for what else is there? And when we think about 'carrying to fruition our deepest capacities', is is that.