Oh, Pioneers!

Growing up, my mother worked. In fact, from the very start, her full-time career as a psychologist framed my childhood.

Her water broke eight weeks early, and she spent the subsequent two weeks lying in a hospital bed, risking an infection that could kill us both and waiting for my lungs to develop. Yet, she returned to work six weeks after my birth, right on schedule. (Ironically, this was also right around the time I was just supposed to be making my way out of the safe cocoon of her belly.) To her employer and colleagues alike, it was as if she’d experienced nothing more than having her tonsils out or the inconvenience of an appendectomy.

For most of my life, even into adulthood, I believed that such feats were the mere realities of her time, her generation – the one history has described as the first cadre of women to aim to “have it all” and through sheer force of will have achieved it.

You can imagine my surprise to learn recently that of all the women to graduate college between 1966 and 1976, only 17% have actually made it to midlife with both children and a career in tact.

During the past year, my first as a mother, I have discovered two important truths: 1) My birthday should have been a celebration of my mother and the magic wonder of her ability to give me life. (This year, I did manage to call her and say “thanks” and apologize that it had taken me twenty-eight years to come to this realization.) 2) That I have never really given her enough credit for what she has achieved, as a feminist pioneer, sewing together the all too disparate pieces of work and family life with what I have only ever perceived as grace and acumen.

This is not to deny her the myriad of challenges. Yet, I’ve never thought of myself as a child who was parked in daycare, forty-plus hours a week. (An image that is strange in and of itself as it relies on the faulty notion that a toddler will stay put.) Interestingly, this is also the fate that mothers of my generation seem to fear the most for our children whenever we talk about what it means for mothers to work.

As a kid, having a mother who worked full-time meant:

• Extra opportunities to make friends: I attended full day kindergarten – public in the morning with every other kid on my block and private in the afternoon with a set of kids from the other side of town.
• Developing culinary prowess: I took over cooking dinner for us both in the forth grade so that my mother could work a few extra hours in the home office, while Total Eclipse of the Heart blared out from the living room stereo, the spatula in my hand a makeshift microphone.
• Privacy: Hopping off the bus with a key around my neck on a neon shoelace meant that I had a whole two hours every afternoon with which to curl up on a sun-soaked spot of carpet with a book.

Only in becoming a mother myself have I come to realize that her choices were so ringed by sacrifice – the moments of miraculous, unscheduled afternoons when I discovered for the first time that my body casts a shadow were the moments she was forced to miss.

At my core, I live in awe of what she has achieved through stubbornness and tenacity. Despite the odds, as one of the first women to graduate from her PhD program she has made good on both the promise she made on graduation day to the dean from whom she collected her diploma, walking across a stage amidst a sea of male faces, and the promises she made to me on the day of my birth.

As a mother, striving to follow in her footsteps, I have many advantages that my own mother did not – twelve weeks of federally mandated maternity leave, a 60% schedule with flex-time hours I get to work from home, a wonderfully supportive boss, colleagues who will bear a presentation with my daughter dangling from her front pack, an electronic breast pump.

Yet, I find each day a tremendous struggle that begins and ends with consoling myself with the fantasy that someday I will quit.

I cannot tell you what the future holds for me or for my generation of mothers. I can only hope that my daughter feels as happy and proud of the choices, the promises I have yet to make or break.