Women Can't Have it All. But We Can Talk About Some Things.

I'm riding on the caboose car of the train racing to respond to Anne Marie-Slaughter's essay, "Why Women Can't Have It All" in this month's The Atlantic. I know many of you have read it and already discussed it, but I just finally read the whole thing on vacation last week. I won't attempt to analyze the essay point for point, but I will encourage everyone who has a stake in preserving the American dream to read this essay. It is as comprehensive as it is thoughtful, and offers some very specific and (in my mind) achievable solutions to the problems with which women and families are dealing in the workplace and at home today. There is just one point that Slaughter raises that I want to share. Slaughter is an accomplished professional and a mother of two teenage boys.  She is a former dean at Princeton and senior level director in DC.  She says that for years she has taken very express measures to bring her children into the work conversation. That is, if she is running late for a meeting, she will not obliquely excuse herself. She will say it was because she had to drop off her son at practice, if that is the real reason. When she is introduced at professional conferences, she insists that the person introducing her mention that she is *also* a mother. She does not advocate gushing on about one's children while at work. But she does think that women will do each other a great service in refusing to be silent about that which matters most to them.

I agree what Slaughter's preaching, but I find it tremendously difficult to put into practice.

I have worked for some exceedingly anti-family organizations. Work and being present in the workplace was much celebrated; taking time off for family priorities was not. It was often surreptitiously used as a strike against a person's performance.

I am glad to no longer be serving said organizations.

Still, I find it hard to talk about my priorities in the workplace. I want to compartmentalize. I want to not appear un-serious about the work for which I am paid to do. I am fortunate to have female and male mentors who encourage faith first, family second, work third. It is still something with which I struggle.

And struggling is okay. I no longer try to find the balance in my work, but I am ever more encouraged by Slaughter's essay to live out my priorities, not only in deed, but in word. I don't want to deceive my students that they can have it all, because life is about choices and compromise. Some days you excel in one capacity, others you are walking on the treadmill while reading your work for tomorrow while texting with your husband and then you get home and the kids are all asleep and that is awful because you barely saw them, but wonderful because now you can get some grading done.

You can't have it all; no one can. Not even the richest most successful people in the world. Everyone is trying to be more present. Everyone is railing back against the you-have-a-smartphone-therefore-you-are-available-all-the-time song and dance. The song's music is catchy at first but the steps become increasingly more difficult as the multiple beats and multiple instruments syncopate....

I am choosing to live and tell the truth: Maintaining my priorities is a constant struggle, but it's certainly one for which I am willing to fight.

Bat Cave!

I'm always interested in slice-of-life vignettes. I love reading day-in-the-life accounts, I love watching raw footage of other people at work. There's something fond about imagining the neat and tidy way some folks live, orderly and rhythmic, even if no one really knows what he/she is going to be doing at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday morning. I've never been very good at ordering my week. I am practically bent on establishing order just so that I can go and bend every rule I just set. Most of my life's breaths are spent trying to quell the perpetual case of antsy pants into which I was born. I am a hyperactive vessel of nervous energy, pirouetting forever in a space that feels too small but which holds too much possibility not to try and change.

In short, I could never tell you what I do, how I spend my days. But mostly, it looks a lot like this:

And yes. That is my arm thrown up like a white flag of surrender behind Baby Girl's head.

My usual modus operandi.

But for the last few days, I can tell you very clearly how I lived and it was sublimely! Loverpants found us a gem of a craigslist getaway retreat kind of place in Bat Cave (!!!), North Carolina. It is down the road from Lake Lure where the late Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey immortalized The Lift.

If you'd like to go to the very place we stayed, where you can sit and read and grill pineapple and smell flowers and pet miniature horses, then I can give you more information.

It was one of the best trips Loverpants and I have ever taken together, and by far our most favorite trip as a FamiLee of four.

Loverpants did mad soduko out on the porch yo.

DuPont State Park.

Hendersonville, NC. Way cute main street.

Lake Lure

All Aboard the Hot Mess Express

There was a reason we were in the hobby shop. Part of the reason was because I am a twirtysomething female who had, heretofore, never visited a hobby shop! The crime! The other half of the reason is because there was a rockin' train table in the front of the hobby shop whereby my Little Man could play while I explored the aisles chock full o' Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia.

Of course the part about leaving the child to be babysat by Chuggington & Friends is patently false. I would never venture to the Dungeons and Dragons aisle! The! I was obviously trying to find the hardest puzzle that a hobby shop could offer. You figure this was a shop for hobbyists, you know they be having some Rhodes Scholars-caliber jigsaw action, am I right or am I right?

We're making fine time in the hobby shop, Little Man running all the trains on schedule, and I finding puzzles that would make NASA cry salty tears to solve.

But then, my organs decided to fail me.

I was perfectly poised for the pending pick-up of Baby Girl in 35 minutes.

I was standing in the middle of a retail establishment run by men who freelance as Pokemon at ComicCon.

So of course, my intestines start to combust.

I gather Little Man and we make a break for the restroom THANK YOU, PROVIDENCE, there was a restroom in the back of the hobby shop. But it was a one-top situation. There was just the singular crapper and the sink and then there was the door.

When you pry a 2 year-old away from train candy, he will thank you by giving you options:

1. 1. You can choose to leave him at the train table where after 0.2 seconds he will realize his abandonment and child protective services will be waiting for you with the cuffs when you get out. 2. You can bring him into the restroom with you where after 0.2 seconds he will reach up for the handle WAIT YOU CAN REACH THAT NOW?!? and expose his mother, sitting on the throne with her pants around her ankles, in front of Pokemon & Co. 3. You can hold him on your lap while your intestines Chernobyl and you can watch the unicorns jumping over rainbows as you soak in this sweet moment of motherhood.

***

35 minutes later and you are right on time for pick-up. Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! Pay no attention to the thrashing toddler in your arms, who is so hysterical from being wrenched from his beloved train table YOU HAVE A BETTER ONE AT HOME, KID, who does not fail to go for the jugular even in front of 500 of your closest churchies.

The most amazing part is that you are muttering all kinds of colorful things to yourself Why the flerkity flerk flerk is this shibblety shibble happening and then lo! Baby Girl OH HONEY, HOW WAS VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL?? TELL ME ABOUT THE MEMORY VERSE YOU LEARNED TODAY!!

Your son is convulsing so loudly now that this is not even about public restrooms or trains. It is just about humiliating you and making sure you know that you are NOT actually the conductor. You are still just along for the ride.

This train is bound for glory, y'all.