Sometime in the last 10 years, I stopped being accused of ‘having it all’ – or, perhaps worse, ‘trying to have it all’.
‘Having it all’ is something of which only mothers are guilty. If a father has a job, even with good money and high status, he is not ‘having it all’. He is likely to be praised for both the paid work and whatever care he finds time to give to his children. You can’t have it all, people used to say to me as I worked for promotion, as if it was greedy to aim for a fulfilling career alongside motherhood; as if women – only women – were living in a zero-sum game where ambition came at the cost of motherly love.
I found the phrase odd, with its implication that there is only a certain amount – of what? – to be had, and that I was taking more than my share, taking up too much space, taking more resources than a mother was allowed.
Women in low-paid or low-status work were not ‘having it all’, so it wasn’t the fact of earning money, or leaving the kids to work, that made a mother guilty. It wasn’t spending too much time at work, because if you were working two or three jobs to make ends meet, you were striving for your family, not having it all in the way that I was, with my long but flexible hours in academia. Having it all seemed to pertain only to mothers who found status or recognition in professional life; mothers who were suspected of working from choice as well as necessity.
Patriarchal divide-and-rule worked as well as it usually does. Mothers became defensive and judgmental about each other’s situations, which were all differently inflected by wealth, the shapes of families and relationships, character and career. I found myself on easier terms with women who were also maintaining professional careers than women at home by necessity or preference. There were intertribal friendships, which I valued greatly – we were, after all, all raising kids in the same time and place, all trying to make the best decisions for our families – but there were also cliques and distrust.
[ ‘Parenting and work takes up every minute I have. I’m losing myself’Opens in new window ]
And then the kids moved up to secondary school and the whole issue disappeared. The mothers of teenagers were less visible, the objects of less anger and judgment, than the mothers of younger children; perhaps this was because most teenagers can be relied on to keep their parents well supplied with anger and judgment without the support of wider society, but I doubt it. The phrase ‘having it all’ vanished from my life, along with the last rumblings of breast versus bottle feeding, co-sleeping versus controlled crying.
There were still differences in parenting of course – some teens had more freedoms earlier than others, some were kept under closer surveillance than others – but the nature and duration of mothers’ work stopped being moralised. Almost everyone had some form of paid work, almost everyone also did unpaid domestic work, and the ratios varied depending on families’ different and dynamic needs for money and care.
[ Your boss is not your parentOpens in new window ]
I look back now, my kids adult, my own life entering a new phase, and I wonder why those differences seemed so important. We were all getting our families and ourselves through the days to the best of our capacities, and we had many important interests in common. I was able to combine work I found rewarding with parenting I enjoyed, rarely obliged to endure boredom or frustration for very long. Lucky me. I was usually tired but generally fulfilled. Was that ‘having it all’? What was ‘it’ of which I had all?
It’s always worth asking who benefits from unresolved conflict, because the answer is never the participants. While I was defending my position at the school gates, white men doing the same job were being paid about 30 per cent more than I was. Some of them, I’m sure, would have liked to be at the school gates, because patriarchy is crap for everyone, stopping men caring as well as women earning. Maybe we should just share it out, whatever it is, and try out the idea that neither love nor work are zero-sum endeavours.