(As published on BabyPost.com)
Do You
Have it All?
Is it
just me or is back to school time where we begin to see more articles about
“Having it All”? Perhaps it’s the end of
summer vacations that causes our minds to re-evaluate our work, home, family,
life balance. Our North American
culture seems to have established a bar that working parents, in particular
women, are supposed to achieve or at least want to achieve. I was curious as to the origins of this cultural
phenomenon and it seems to go back to the early 80’s, from Cosmopolitan
magazine and its’ famous editor Helen Gurley Brown. Her book titled “Having It
All: Love, Success, Sex, Money . . . Even if You’re Starting With
Nothing,” seems to have breathed life into this phrase. Remarkably 30+ years later we are still
talking about it. Perhaps as a man I’m treading on dangerous ground discussing
this topic. But here goes…
The term
seems to go on the assumption that all women want to be rich, married, mothers,
romanced daily, and CEO’s of Multi-National corporations. This may well be the case for many… but
simple stereotypes are usually woefully inaccurate at describing 50% of the
population. I personally know women who
proclaim to be very content and feel they “have it all” by achieving one or 2
of the categories. Interestingly Gurley Brown didn’t even include having
children in her thesis. So are the
women who willingly opted out of the career race, are happily married with
kids, failures on the “having it all” scale? I have a friend who at 40 is very
successful at her career, about to get married & has no desire for kids…is
she a failure? I have a male friend that walked away from his teaching career
to raise his kids, drives a rusty 12 year old station wagon with 300k on the
odometer, and is remarkably content. Is he a failure at “having it all”? Who’s setting the parameters of this scale? Newsflash to Cosmopolitan, we don’t all have
the same goals in life, men and women included.
Are we failures doomed to be miserable if we don’t have the desire to be
the CEO of IBM? I’ve met some remarkably
happy people that would fail the Cosmo test.
I’ve also met some people that seem to have it all, materially…but are
consistently miserable. So just maybe
this is a far more personal or individual story…
Although
I am a born Canadian, my roots are from Europe, and my education was from the
era where we were taught to challenge…rather than accept the first suggestion
of what we should be or believe. I would
argue that the North American big business culture seems to want us all to
double down on making more money each day, and climbing to the top of the
corporate pyramid. Any obstructions to
the corporate goal should be dismissed…including family life. I’ve attended some conventions of major
corporations and felt afterward that it might be a little cultish. Strong Kool Aid being served… Evidence of this culture would be the fact
that the average American worker leaves 5 paid vacation days on the table
(unused) each year. By law each country
in the European Union must give 4 weeks paid vacation to its’ workers, in the
U.S. one in four workers receives no paid time off. And yet while the U.S. has the lowest
vacation and other worker benefits (Canada is 3rd from the bottom)
their productivity numbers are only marginally better than Germany. So have the Germans, Swedes and the Danes
done a better job of “Having it All”? Some
would say yes.
Obviously
this is a complex topic. It’s easy to blame others and institutions, but we all
have a hand in our destiny. Many of us
complain about the lack of family time, yet we increasingly demand more 24 hour
services, whether its grocery shopping, gasoline purchases, etc. We never look the person in the eye that is
working on Christmas Day at the airport. She may be a Mother that has missed her kids
opening their gifts. But we want to be in Florida, and heaven forbid we wait
for another day. We make choices, some affect us directly others indirectly.
I know
I’m not alone in regularly seeking to find a balance…how best to divide up the
pie? In the end it’s up to individuals
to decide for themselves if they feel they “have it all”. If not, what are we prepared to do about it?
