Note: Yeah, I forgot to blog last week. My partner and I spent the better part of five days driving all over the state to spend time with our families, and with gloriously limited access to the internet, I dropped the ball.
It’s no secret that egging women on to try to “have it all” is, like, everyone’s favorite activity. Second wave women’s lib icons have all done the whole “why can’t we have it all?” bit time and again, but they rarely reveal their secrets.
Here’s why, at least as far as I can tell: there is no secret. You just do it. Usually because we have no other choice.
My mom would say, “Well, Lex, it isn’t that simple.”
And she’d be right, I guess, because she’s had experiences I haven’t and is much wiser than I am. But the advantage I have over her is the kind of stupid, blind ambition and faith that universities throw in with a liberal arts degree.
To be fair, I haven’t always felt this way, and it’s not as if I feel stupid and brave all the time. Starting around junior year of high school I fell deeply in love with The Bell Jar, particularly the fig tree metaphor. And I still love it, so much so that when I turned eighteen, I got a fig tree tattooed on my ankle, the closest I could get to my Achilles tendon (spoiler: this is all a big metaphor for weakness!). Here’s the passage for those of you who aren’t familiar:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
That single paragraph struck me immediately the first time I read it, and more and more each time after that. I wanted to have a family and I wanted to hook up with a bunch of hot foreign guys and I wanted to get famous writing angsty YA fiction and I wanted to be the editor of a cool magazine.
It was a feeling I had grappled with and tried to articulate for years; I thought it was a rarity and that everyone else had one concrete idea of what their life would look like when they grew up. How had Sylvia Plath gotten it so right? (It was probably the depression.)
I think it’s because this is the struggle of every woman: to want everything within one lifetime and being forced to make a decision one way or another, forever wondering “what if?”
Unfortunately for Plath, the journey of having it all—or even choosing to settle on a few of the figs—felt impossible. And while I thought the same for more time than I care to admit, I think now, more than any other time in history, it’s doable, or at least feels like there’s less to lose.
Something I think about a lot is my future in the context of sociopolitical upheaval and climate change. I worry that, though I want to have a family and a career I love, maybe I’ll only get to have a career because it’s unconscionable to have children and give them this planet to inherit.
I’ve always wanted to have children. In high school when I was especially depressed, I went through a phase where I thought, If I don’t even want to live on this planet, why should I make my kids do it? Bleak, I know. But it was—and in many ways still is—a real concern for me.
In addition to a genetic goldmine of mental health issues, children I have can expect to fear gun violence in their schools, food scarcity, unchecked pollution and destruction of biodiversity, unstable job markets, and astronomical higher education expenses.
Do I have my kids in a hospital like my mom did, or do I go to a birthing center, with a midwife and limited drugs? Do I circumcise my sons? Do I let my kids discover their identities all on their own or conform, at least loosely and initially, to the gender binary to avoid confusion and conflict? Do I let them use my iPhone to watch Baby Shark on repeat or let them only play with primitive wooden toys?
There are multitudinous parenting philosophies, but do any of them even touch the concerns we have at this exact cultural moment? I think I asked a lot of these questions in a linguistics course in college and my professor told me I should chill out. But I can’t!
If my partner and I decide to go for it and start a family, I want to do it right, but I constantly worry that maybe what we think is right could be damaging for our kids. I know that we are both loving and kind and open and so I hope we would make great parents, but doesn’t everyone? Haven’t we all seen our fair share of shitty parents? Don’t most of them think they’re doing just fine?
Does any of it matter if the planet is collapsing at the hands of capitalists anyway? In the infinitely wise words of 90’s punk band Sum 41, “I don’t wanna waste my time becoming another casualty of society / I’m never gonna fall in line, become another victim of uniformity.” And I don’t want my kids to, either.
I saw a tweet about this distinct anxiety the other day that hit the nail on the head:
“@Imani_Barbarin: Hey people dumping on millennials, It’s not about avocado toast, or coffee drinks or little trips. It’s about a lack of confidence in the future which makes us believe that saving for it is a waste of time.”
And should we decide to have kids, what if we can’t? I’ve always had this horrible fear that I’m infertile and won’t be able to have kids. That fear notwithstanding, I’ve seen the way reproductive healthcare is going. When Trump was elected, internet circles I follow were recommending people with uteruses look into long-term birth control, such as an IUD, which would prevent unwanted pregnancies for four-plus years and could not be easily taken away.
When I told my doctor on campus—a true-blue hippie who I loved and trusted—I was considering this course of action, she told me she thought we should “wait and see.” At the time, I reasoned that it made sense to think on a decision like that, but when I told my big sister, she said, “What the fuck?” and that made sense to me, too.
But kind of like the good faith to eventually have kids and hope things will turn out alright, I didn’t look into IUDs any further, although I still think about it a lot. Getting birth control has always been a pain in the ass, for me at least, so pursuing a long-term option makes sense. I guess maybe I’m just subconsciously clinging to the notion that things won’t get that bad. But with Trump threatening more than just eight years, what the fuck do I know? Everything feels outrageous and surreal.
I’ve read and watched Handmaid’s Tale, though, and I don’t think Atwood and the producers are very far off track of what’s at stake and what’s possible. This question of what motherhood and parenthood look like in the future is one that, for me, is built on what-ifs rooted in fear. If I were in June’s place, would I just end it? I like to think I’m tough and brave, but I don’t know that I could bear all that. I hope I don’t ever have to think on it harder than that. I hope I don’t have daughters who see it all unfolding like Margaret Atwood predicted thirty years ago.
Last year during the Kavanaugh hearings I felt like I was reliving the aftermath of my assault over and over again every day, and I was miserable especially because I knew nearly every other woman in this country was feeling the same way.
I even shared an essay I’d written in college about my assault in a desperate attempt to explain to my family why I was in so much pain. You can read that here if you haven’t already and would like to.
On one particularly tough day in the fall I expressed the desire to drown my sorrows, so my partner grabbed his keys and said, “Alright, let’s go get a chocolate shake.”
As we drove through downtown in our relatively new home, we noticed a small cluster of folks on a street corner holding signs in protest of Kavanaugh’s appointment, smiling and waving to passing cars. I nearly cried.
I know there are people in the world, and in positions of power, who are doing what they can to undo violence against women and people of color and other minorities. I know there are everyday people actively practicing kindness and generosity to narrow the divide Donald Trump has very purposefully cleaved in this country. I know I am doing my best to do the same. But sometimes it feels like it isn’t nearly enough, that the bad guys win this one, and that we don’t get a happy ending. It’s not a great feeling.
So I guess when I try to define “having it all” things have become a little muddy. The glass ceiling is fogged with pollution and the smeared, desperate fingertips of the rapist in the Oval Office and all his cronies. The prospect of having a fulfilling career is muddled by the fear that someone might not like the work I’m doing and bring a gun to my office to punish me and my colleagues.
Although I know better, it feels as though things have gone off the rails very quickly. As I come of age and into adulthood, my once-chemical anxieties have taken root in reality. With a new job, I feel like my life is starting to take shape, but that victory has merely made room for more real worries—when before I was racked by depression at being unfulfilled, I now work someplace meaningful and can redirect my idle time to worrying about the Great Big Ugly Future. Our parents didn’t worry about shit like this, did they?
In solidarity, always, no matter how anxious,
Lexie
Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Being a Young Woman in 2019”:
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color ed. Cherrie L. Moraga
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