All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior Read Free Book Online Page B

by. “See?” she looks up at me, waiting for me to notice what she’s noticing. I give her a look indicating that I don’t. “I keep telling myself, I just want to edit this set I have open in Photoshop, and then I’ll get William. ” She points upstairs. It’s dead quiet. What she’s noticed is an absence. We were both so absorbed in the photographs that we didn’t realize William had stopped crying.
    missing out?
    Jessie could defer her professional dreams until her children are older. It’s a trade-off plenty of women make. She could forgo the money, forgo the satisfaction. In so doing, she could at least find relief in consolidating her time and energy into one main project—her kids—and focus on that alone, rather than feel dogged all the time by a sense of guilt.
    Or Jessie could make a different choice: she could scale up her business and get out of the house entirely. If she’s going to contribute to the family economy and realize her full professional capabilities, she may as well go all out, right? Then, during work hours, she’s doing work. Not rewinding Barney, not mopping yogurt off the dining room table. Of course, it’s a costly proposition and may simply not be feasible: she’d have to take out a loan to make her business bigger. But it would afford her a better chance to experience flow. She’d be a photographer at work and a mother at home. Sure, the smart phone would still chirp and the inbox would still brim. But at least she’d have a formal division in place.
    Jessie has instead chosen the hardest path. She’s trying to do both, improvising all day long as she juggles her dual responsibilities, never knowing when her kids will require attention or when a work deadline will crop up.
    It’s a heady question, how women balance these concerns. Recently, the question has found its way back to the center of a contentious and very emotional debate. If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants. If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for The Atlantic in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required.
    There’s truth to both arguments. They’re hardly mutually exclusive. Yet this question tends to get framed, rather tiresomely, as one of how and whether women can “have it all,” when the fact of the matter is that most women—and men, for that matter—are simply trying to keep body and soul together. The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.
     
    JUST A FEW GENERATIONS ago, most people didn’t wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest. Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper—these kinds of freedoms were not, until very recently, built into our private universes of anticipation. It’s important to remember that. If most of us don’t know what to do with our abundant choices and the pressures we feel to make the most