Guilt and regret are part of the parenthood package. Along with the joy and the sweet memories of bringing home the baby from the hospital and baby's first steps comes the twinge of regret. Maybe I should have had a touch more patience when my son was struggling with Algebra. Maybe I should haven't said X when I was so angry. Maybe I should have spent more time playing board games with my daughter. Everybody has those thoughts.
At the same time, the world is not yet set up to allow two parents to work and to manage all the demands of the family without a certain amount of craziness. At the Y on Wednesday, the moms talked about how they were trying to remain employed, while managing their families. This group of moms were the parents of special needs kids, so the constraints were even larger. These moms, like all moms, wanted to work during the school hours. They needed a flexible schedule to attend parent-teacher conferences and to watch an ill child. They couldn't afford to take a job that paid less than the expenses for the babysitter and gas. Those jobs do not exist.
The parenthood package also involves boredom and sacrifice. Presumably if one decreases one's personal boredom and sacrifice, then one increases the guilt factor. If one decreases one's guilt factor, one increases the personal boredom and sacrifice factor. (The guilt factor is always there, BTW, if you work or you don't. I'm full of it. Of course, I'm a neurotic, so maybe don't go by me.)
Virginia Postel says that Hollywood still portrays women leaders as consumed with the first kind of guilt. They subscribe to the Anna Quindlen doctrine which is that family time is always more meaningful than any career. This Quindlen doctrine skews the Margaret Thatcher movie with
The problem, rather, is that grafted on to what could be an affecting story of greatness and decline is an invidious, and gratuitous, moral. Call it the Gospel According to Anna Quindlen, the writer and columnist who enshrined its maxims in a commencement speech she wrote in 1999 and eventually turned into the best-selling book “A Short Guide to a Happy Life.” “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office,” she instructed. “Don’t ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: ‘If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’”
I have no idea what I'll think on my death bed. My regrets might be that I didn't use enough sun screen in my teen years. Or that I ate too many Big Macs over the years. Or that I never bought those tickets to see Nirvana. I can't live my life trying to figure out what I'll be thinking years from now. I am just trying to make the most of the cards on my table at this moment.
But back to the Postel piece, I'm not sure that she's right. There are plenty of movies about successful, happy working women. Erin Brockovich comes to mind. But there must be more, right?
Apt. 11d 
Maybe no one wishes aloud that they’d spent more time at the office, but many people wish that they had, or had earned, more money. Well, guess how that (usually) happens.
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Well, guess how that (usually) happens.
You give $100,000 to a PAC and move 100 jobs to a deservedly empty town in the district of some guy on Appropriations. Then you can sell unneeded equipment to DoD.
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“Virginia Postel says that Hollywood still portrays women leaders as consumed with the first kind of guilt.”
Some years back (before deciding to do the job himself), my dad was interviewing a writer to put together his grandmother’s biography out of old family letters and photos and stories. Great-grandma had been a mountain guide from the 1920s and for nearly the next 50 years. Anyway, the writer explained that to sell the story to a female audience, he was mostly interested in talking about stuff like how great-grandma balanced work and family. My dad and I talked about this later and concluded that that thought (work/family balance) probably never crossed my great-grandma’s mind at all (she was probably at least a borderline Aspie). She’d go up into the mountains with her horses and tourists and leave the kids on the farm, where they’d do stuff like (once only, fortunately), experimenting with great-grandpa’s dynamite stash.
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I think people adapt to the lives they have. Very few women will admit to regretting having children (though a few do). There are a number of popular myths (sometimes true) in the media, and one of them is that great success in the world must come with a great cost. I think the myth exists because it’s comforting and those who did not achieve great public success can comfort themselves in the belief of a family they love and care for (which could be true).
It’s not clear to me that that’s not a theme of all great, heroic, public figures, men and women, (that they lost their families while they were paying attention to something else). I guess the difference is that when the hero is a man, the presumption is that there is a mother who is still focused on the family, while there’s no one when the woman is focused elsewhere (which should be a distress for both men and women).
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“No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office…”
But it’s not unlikely that many people wish they’d been able to finish just one more book.
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As for movies with successful, happy working women, you’ve got Working Girl (not including Sigourney Weaver), Tremors (the geology student), and Die Hard 2 (maybe).
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I can say right now (and don’t need to wait until I’m on my deathbed) that if I can’t ever get back into a career, I will regret not working more. With two kids in elementary, and a 3 year-old who will be in Kindergarten in a year and a half, I am far more terrified of not ever resuming a career (been home for 7.5 years) than I would ever have been of not being home every minute the kids are home. My kids are loved, they are lucky to have everything they need in life. Though it’s hard to know, I just don’t think it would have made much of a difference if they’d had more childcare. As I search for an agent for my novel (my now 5th attempt at selling a book) I can’t think of anything more terrifying than not selling it and not having any career to fall back on.
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Fargo?
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Fargo is probably a better example than Die Hard 2.
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Yes, I think there are people who will certainly believe on their deathbed that they should have worked more, because they might have been able to do important work. The “Quindlen doctrine” (and, more specifically the book) is trite blather, and Quindlen should be ashamed of the greeting card sentiments and style of the book. She probably won’t regret it on her deathbed, though, people bought it and that meant she could buy things. The one star reviews on Amazon are funny (things like should be titled a “Short Guide to a Quick Buck.” Some even suggest that she couldn’t possibly have written the book, ’cause actually she’s a pretty good writer. Does the existence of the book make her a rat?
I think the question of regretting goals not met (like publishing a book, or publishing a successful book, or a job you didn’t do) is different than making the choices that might have been required to reach those goals. Now it seems to me that writing a successful novel is enough of a lottery that any particular choice made (i.e when and how many children you had, who you married, where you moved with them, . . . .) is unlikely to have had a significant change on your outcome.
In academia, there are often choices to be made (most often about location) that do indeed change, significantly, one’s opportunity to obtain a particular goal (like being a tenured professor). One can regret that the world wasn’t set up to make the choices you were willing to make result in the outcome you desired. But that’s not the same as saying you’d make different choices. And, it’s not even a reasonable question to ask whether one would trade one’s family for being the president (or prime minister) or a published author or a nobel laureate, because we would be different people if we had made the choices that might lead to that path rather than another.
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Happy stories don’t sell. Dramatic stories need, ah, drama.
Also, professional women show little tendency to dress themselves in unprofessional ways. Business suits, not bikinis. Casual Friday is, alas, not THAT casual.
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“Now it seems to me that writing a successful novel is enough of a lottery that any particular choice made (i.e when and how many children you had, who you married, where you moved with them, . . . .) is unlikely to have had a significant change on your outcome.”
A lot of famous writers (male and female) have been loners and raging monomaniacs, barely able to take care of themselves or so much as a goldfish. That is why that long-suffering creature, the artist’s wife, was invented (see Vera Nabokov, Countess Tolstoy, etc.).
Here’s are some quotes from Florence King (another of the species and quite single and childless) from a review of Margaret Foster’s “Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller” (Du Maurier wrote Rebecca).
Du Maurier said, “…the effort of talking…I don’t know how people stand it.”
“The nurturing side of Daphne was almost non-existent,” writes Forster, “and it horrified her to have any kind of care demanded of her.”
“Catering to [her husband’s] sensitive digestions was not her bag. With a fine English scorn for finickiness, her idea of dinner was mopping up skillet grease with bread–never mind putting it on a plate–so that she could get back to her typewriter. (I love this woman.)”
“Blessed with an astonishing capacity for concentration and self-absorption, she wrote till all hours in the solitude of her isolated country house, unmindful of the rats that scurried across the beds of her sleeping children–motherhood was not to her tastes either.”
“…she had an awesome ability to buckle down and write fast, producing as much as 45,000 words in two weeks of six-hour days–children, rats, “me tum” [her husband’s], and all.”
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“Happy stories don’t sell. Dramatic stories need, ah, drama.”
Definitely true. But I guess the thing is that women don’t have work-related stories. We don’t see the drama of, say, Hurt Locker as how Jeremy Renner’s character needs to work in the bomb squad instead of be home with his family. But that’s definitely part of the story, at least at the end. We see his work as inherently more dramatic than his need to go back and work and leave his family behind. That’s authorial choice and reader response.
Interesting issue.
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“Dramatic stories need, ah, drama.”
And also, the dramas of professional life are kind of inaccessible. I have conflicts and successes and defeats at work, involving how particular deals get structured or the like, but they would be incomprehensible except to another real estate finance lawyer. I’m sure a lot of the political drama of Thatcher’s life would be similarly incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t a professional politician. In contrast, family drama is readily comprehensible.
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Oh, I wanted to tell another story. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a prolific writer and mother to several children. If you wonder how she did it, 1. she had excellent household help (i.e., a third adult/nanny/etc.) and 2. thankfully, the medical experts of the time determined that women became exhausted by things like childbirth, so they made it possible for women like HBS to say “Hey, I need to go to that quiet mountain cottage alone and rest from my latest childbirth experience,” so she would go off and then come back with a book written.
(Note: vast oversimplification of HBS’s life, but you get the idea.)
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And also, the dramas of professional life are kind of inaccessible.
Yes. You don’t need to explain why everybody runs from the giant, underground monsters or why the monsters will eat people. You don’t even need to show the monster very often.
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“We don’t see the drama of, say, Hurt Locker as how Jeremy Renner’s character needs to work in the bomb squad instead of be home with his family.”
I believe there’s a growing Christian-interest film genre of macho-guy-needs-to-save-marriage. I haven’t seen any myself, but two examples come to mind:
Here’s the IMDB on Fireproof (2008):
“Captain Caleb Holt (Kirk Cameron) is a firefighter in Albany, Georgia and firmly keeps the cardinal rule of all firemen, “Never leave your partner behind”. But Caleb’s home life is an altogether different story; his seven-year marriage to his wife Catherine (Erin Bethea) is on the verge of implosion.”
I’m thinking there’s a similar new one with police, but I can’t seem to find it.
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“And also, the dramas of professional life are kind of inaccessible.”
I guess unless you work in a fictional bomb squad, and then you get to dramatize the 15 minutes of sheer terror and not the nine million minutes of sheer boredom. But, I think that it is true that it’s really hard to make a good story out of the nity gritty of politics. It’s kind of depressing that the chatter on the Thatcher movie seems to indicate that they didn’t even try, and instead made a story about universal “truths” of family (though I’m basing the impression solely on the review and the talk here, so I might be completely off base). It’s harder to write a good story about politics, but great writers manage (for example, the Dance of Legislation about the passage of the rural health care bill in the 70’s is a quite good book and might make a decent movie).
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I found the police movie. It’s “Courageous” (2011) and it’s by the same people as “Fireproof”–the tag line under the title is “honor starts at home.”
http://www.courageousthemovie.com/
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(Kirk Cameron)
Maybe I’ll wait until it hits basic cable.
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There’s a lot of potential for cheesiness for these special-interest movies, but I keep seeing people recommending Fireproof to husbands who are bewildered by marriage problems.
Oh, and how can we be forgetting Spielberg and daddy issues? (I actually don’t know the Spielberg oeuvre that well, but daddy issues are allegedly one of the marks of a Spielberg film.)
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“I think the question of regretting goals not met (like publishing a book, or publishing a successful book, or a job you didn’t do) is different than making the choices that might have been required to reach those goals. Now it seems to me that writing a successful novel is enough of a lottery that any particular choice made (i.e when and how many children you had, who you married, where you moved with them, . . . .) is unlikely to have had a significant change on your outcome.”
All good points, bj. But I suppose if I find I can’t ever publish a book, I still may very well regret not keeping up my law career in the meantime. Or not getting an MFA (when people were still able to get teaching jobs with an MFA). Regardless, my definition of what kids really need has changed greatly over the years, and I’m worried that someday when I’m facing an empty nest and decades of unemployment, I’ll really wish I had a little less family time and a little more office time.
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I gotta tell you, I stayed home for 12 years and I’ve worked for the last 8. I love both. I wouldn’t want to go back to staying home now, and I don’t wish I would’ve worked when my children were small. I think it takes a lot of different things to have a fulfilled life. There are different answers for different people, and different answers for different times.
I’m a lucky person, I’ve never had a job that I couldn’t find some sort of personal meaning or fulfillment. I will probably never make big money, I work for non-profits. Still I feel amazingly lucky to have the career opportunities I’ve had.
I can mother and work. It’s not an either/or in my mind.
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I agree that what kids need, what they might want, and what other people tell us they need are all different standards, and their needs are much different than their wants.
Say, for example, I consider rat-free beds to be a bona fide need for my children. To stay home because they chase after my car yelling “Don’t go mommy” when I run off to join parliament, well, not a need. And, we all know that you could spend 24/7 with a particular child for years and they’ll still run after your car shouting when you go off to have gall bladder surgery.
I’m enough like Daphne that my standard has always been to make sure that I don’t let the equivalents of rats run into my children’s beds (though, of course, my relative privilege means that we’re talking about metaphorical rats). Society, on the other hand, does encourage a “giving tree” version of motherhood that suggests that a mother who isn’t putting her children first at every moment and for every need is failing. To the extent that I can, I try to counsel younger mothers that the world is not falling apart when your kid cries for two hours in day care when you’ve left them, that a longer term expression of unhappiness is a reasonable standard for quitting your job and giving up your dreams.
At the risk of sounding like a self-help coach, I do not believe a well-educated woman will face decades of empty nest and unemployment unless that’s the choice they make over others available. There will still be opportunities, though they make require re-setting goal posts. It’s not like giving up the ballet career that you’re not going to have another shot at.
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I blew my chance to be a professor and there are days and times when I wish I could go kick my 28-year old self in the ass and tell her to finish the dissertation already. But who knows? It’s not like the world was panting for more historians, and maybe I would have done five years of adjuncting and ended up where I am now (working to become a school librarian) no matter what.
I have no idea what people regret on their deathbeds, or even how many of us are blessed to be lucid for them. I guess I hope that my regrets, if I’m lucky enough to be granted the time to formulate them, are of recent vintage, and not too heavy. But I’m guessing that everyone has some regrets; isn’t that part of life? It seems to me that one mark of humanity is that we make choices, then deeply discount the benefits those choices brought, and fret away at the things we might have had if only we’d chosen differently.
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Oh, and to answer the actual question, no, Hollywood doesn’t tend to present carefree working women. Especially not when children are involved. There’s a hallowed tradition of Hollywood movies about working women who acquire unexpected babies and learn that they were wrong to put work first after all.
Come on. How do we think the patriarchy replicates itself?
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“I do not believe a well-educated woman will face decades of empty nest and unemployment unless that’s the choice they make over others available. There will still be opportunities, though they make require re-setting goal posts. It’s not like giving up the ballet career that you’re not going to have another shot at.”
Indeed. One of my relatives was left by her husband at around 50 (a few years after he talked her into quitting a job that would have given her a pension in three more years). Within about ten years after he left, she had co-authored and self-published two books, done innumerable presentations on the books, sold lots of them (netting $10 on each copy sold), started boarding several foreign students at a time ($500 a head per month), landed a full-time administrative job at her community community college, edited a couple more books by other people, continued adjuncting at her cc, and started paying off a couple of rental houses. Within a few years, she may well be in a more favorable financial position than her ex-husband, who has never been able to live within his excellent income. It makes me tired just thinking of her schedule, but if you’ve got that sort of energy and your health holds, your fifties and sixties can be very interesting and productive.
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We were at a party tonight and on the way back, my husband told me a story of a near-death experience by one of the grad students that he heard at the party.
In his early 20s, the grad student fell off an 80+ foot tall cliff (not a sheer cliff) and survived. On the way down the cliff, his whole life passed before his eyes and one of his last thoughts before hitting the bottom was, it would have been nice to finish a PhD.
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I’m a tenure track professor and last year I finished the book I need for tenure. Somewhere along the way my high school student failed math. She might have failed anyway, and my husband feels no guilt, but I do wonder if maybe I should have been more clued in to what was happening with school. I wonder if my following my dreams has affected her ability to pursue hers.
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“(Kirk Cameron)
“Maybe I’ll wait until it hits basic cable.”
Or indeed until my next life.
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If you already have a PhD and fall from a cliff, an episode of Growing Pains flashes before your eyes.
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Up All Night is a new (hilarious) comedy about raising an infant that has a stay-at-home-dad who just is. No relentless Mr. Mom jokes, no guilt on the part of the working mother, it’s just the way they’ve situated their life and it’s rarely referenced. In the seventh or eighth episode, they did a “how we came to this decision” ep, but it didn’t focus on the mother’s guilt, instead the father’s very strong desire to stay home with his baby girl.
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“If you already have a PhD and fall from a cliff, an episode of Growing Pains flashes before your eyes.”
???
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Just free associating among recent comments.
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