Our Mother's Careers
When I started reading all the news about ABC World News Tonight anchor Elizabeth Vargas taking leave to deal with a tough pregnancy, I got to thinking about another piece on the lives of women over 100 in a recent issue of RealSimple, which lead me to thinking about how many of us Boomers (gad! I have trouble identifying with that) were told to go out and have careers, but how so few of us had any models for what a woman-with-a-career looked like.
We had women who were single, and had devoted themselves to teaching or other social causes. We also had women who had very interesting lives and did all kinds of things--sometimes married with kids. And there were always the women whose careers were their homes and families--who sometimes worked jobs, but no job was more important than raising her children and keeping her home...
It just got me thinking that, perhaps, women don't really have the right role models to sustain us when it comes to the whole career thing...or at least, even now, we don't have all that many who can show us how to have a career.
Early on, my role models were Gloria Steinem and Judy Chicago. I admired how these women had amazing lives--and I remember seeing Steinem and her husband David Bale (who was 61 and she 66 at the time of their marriage) walking on the Smith campus...
It was such an odd feeling to see them--myself having turned 39 that year, and trying to figure out where I would go with my life...seeing this woman I so admired when I was young, and literally crossing her path...
that was the same year Judy Chicago spoke at Commencement
and how that memory came back last night when, after I got done telling my friend Cathy about life in the blogosphere, she said "Did you ever really think you'd be doing *that* as a career..."
Career? What career? Maybe I'm just doing all sorts of Wonderful and Interesting Things that come to be the hallmarks of some of women's lives.
What I always thought of as a career seemed to be The Thing That Would Trap Me. If there's one thing that I never wanted was to be trapped--anywhere.
The careers I saw were really just jobs. Some were high-level jobs, some were jobs people stayed with for 10, 15, even 20 years...
So, I look at what I'm doing, and I wonder "is this a career?" Or is it really the embryo of a carrer? did I have embrionic careers before? Is it that I've never stuck with anything long enough more for it to be a passing fancy and a hobby?
I could, on some level, be just a really great hobbyist...I'm definitley interested in an infinite number of lifestyles and things...
When I look again at my CV, I see a series of fascinating projects that I've been involved in--things that punctuated long stretches of repetitive day-to-day tasks...
And I think, have I evolved into an Experience Junkie? Is it that I hate the confines of an office, and responsibility, and the stuff that lays the foundation for the Big Experiences? Am I now, in some odd way, chasing one Experience after another, learning, and learning and learning all sorts of great stuff....
I'm a Giant Aggregator.
But then I think that all the aggregation is, perhaps, like sitting in an office and pushing paper. Maybe all this stuff I experience is the stuff that forms the foundation of a Really Fascinating Career that few people have...
Because my role models, those two women that I admired as a kid, and even as an adult, also had Really Fascinating Careers that few people have...
I think that maybe the life experiences that women have sometimes lay the foundation of careers. We're not like men. We're not all that linear in our thinking (and I'm reminded how Steady Eddie, even though he hates his job, really enjoys being an engineer. he'd just like to be an engineer in another place.) Maybe women, who aren't linear thinkers in general, just keep trying stuff until they hit on the thing, or things, that they can forge into a career.
Maybe it isn't about observing our mothers and then, according to their pattern, making that huge declaration of "This is what I want to be when I grow up!" Maybe it's about doing a whole bunch of stuff---sometimes stuff completely unrelated to anything our mothers wanted for themselves or ourselves-- and going "wow! so this is who I'm supposed to be when I grow up..."
then again, maybe it isn't even really about growing up...but growing into...a life...
We had women who were single, and had devoted themselves to teaching or other social causes. We also had women who had very interesting lives and did all kinds of things--sometimes married with kids. And there were always the women whose careers were their homes and families--who sometimes worked jobs, but no job was more important than raising her children and keeping her home...
It just got me thinking that, perhaps, women don't really have the right role models to sustain us when it comes to the whole career thing...or at least, even now, we don't have all that many who can show us how to have a career.
Early on, my role models were Gloria Steinem and Judy Chicago. I admired how these women had amazing lives--and I remember seeing Steinem and her husband David Bale (who was 61 and she 66 at the time of their marriage) walking on the Smith campus...
It was such an odd feeling to see them--myself having turned 39 that year, and trying to figure out where I would go with my life...seeing this woman I so admired when I was young, and literally crossing her path...
that was the same year Judy Chicago spoke at Commencement
and how that memory came back last night when, after I got done telling my friend Cathy about life in the blogosphere, she said "Did you ever really think you'd be doing *that* as a career..."
Career? What career? Maybe I'm just doing all sorts of Wonderful and Interesting Things that come to be the hallmarks of some of women's lives.
What I always thought of as a career seemed to be The Thing That Would Trap Me. If there's one thing that I never wanted was to be trapped--anywhere.
The careers I saw were really just jobs. Some were high-level jobs, some were jobs people stayed with for 10, 15, even 20 years...
So, I look at what I'm doing, and I wonder "is this a career?" Or is it really the embryo of a carrer? did I have embrionic careers before? Is it that I've never stuck with anything long enough more for it to be a passing fancy and a hobby?
I could, on some level, be just a really great hobbyist...I'm definitley interested in an infinite number of lifestyles and things...
When I look again at my CV, I see a series of fascinating projects that I've been involved in--things that punctuated long stretches of repetitive day-to-day tasks...
And I think, have I evolved into an Experience Junkie? Is it that I hate the confines of an office, and responsibility, and the stuff that lays the foundation for the Big Experiences? Am I now, in some odd way, chasing one Experience after another, learning, and learning and learning all sorts of great stuff....
I'm a Giant Aggregator.
But then I think that all the aggregation is, perhaps, like sitting in an office and pushing paper. Maybe all this stuff I experience is the stuff that forms the foundation of a Really Fascinating Career that few people have...
Because my role models, those two women that I admired as a kid, and even as an adult, also had Really Fascinating Careers that few people have...
I think that maybe the life experiences that women have sometimes lay the foundation of careers. We're not like men. We're not all that linear in our thinking (and I'm reminded how Steady Eddie, even though he hates his job, really enjoys being an engineer. he'd just like to be an engineer in another place.) Maybe women, who aren't linear thinkers in general, just keep trying stuff until they hit on the thing, or things, that they can forge into a career.
Maybe it isn't about observing our mothers and then, according to their pattern, making that huge declaration of "This is what I want to be when I grow up!" Maybe it's about doing a whole bunch of stuff---sometimes stuff completely unrelated to anything our mothers wanted for themselves or ourselves-- and going "wow! so this is who I'm supposed to be when I grow up..."
then again, maybe it isn't even really about growing up...but growing into...a life...
posted by Tish Grier at 5:24 PM
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