Having it all

(Warning: the following is a real rant, not a funny one)

Growing up with a successful career woman mother, who had successful career women friends and successful career women sisters, I always thought I could have it all.

Oh wait, no I didn’t. Because no actual career woman would make such a stupid promise.

I find myself baffled by Round 2,038 of online articles on whether women can Have It All. When did “have it all” become the standard to aspire to? What parents have been sitting down with their daughters and saying, “Little Susie, when you grow up, you can do every single thing you want in life, all at the same time?”

More importantly, what colleges have been training women for high-profile careers while completely failing to teach them there are not infinity hours in a day, meaning choices will need to be made?

And by the way, this is coming from someone whose monthly to-do lists include things like “learn Russian” and “write a book.” If I’m calling your expectations unrealistic, you’ve clearly crossed into the realm of the absurd.

If I were slightly more cynical, I might think the “women can’t have it all” crowd was deliberately misrepresenting feminism. Or maybe it’s not lack of cynicism, and more that I just can’t think what they would get out of doing that.

In an attempt to understand all this, I googled around to figure out who started the latest round of beating this particular dead horse. The “women can’t have it all” crowd are saying Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) argued that career women can have families, too. Which means she thinks we can have it all.

But when I googled Sandberg, all I found – beyond a Radio Islam article on how Jews control the internet – was a woman who says things like “there’s no such thing as work-life balance,” encourages women to leave work in time for dinner with the family, and suggests same-sex marriage when possible (really! Real quote: "The most important thing -- and I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it a hundred times -- if you marry a man, marry the right one," she said. "If you can marry a woman, that's better because the split between two women in the home is pretty even, the data shows." (Which goes to show the level of nerdiness we’re dealing with here – measuring the benefits of gay marriage in terms of statistical likelihood of shared housework, rather than, say, in terms of actual attraction to people of the same sex. I love it.))

I don’t see anything there suggesting that it’s easy to be a woman with both kids and a demanding career, or that both of those things can be done perfectly at the same time.

Maybe this is just one of those non-debate “debates” that has to spring up once every year or so even though nobody understands why. Like seasonal flus. Who knows who was first infected, or how so many people got it so quickly. It’s just a fact of winter.

Once a year, we must talk about whether or not women can Have It All, even though it’s been discussed to death, even though it’s a ridiculous premise that was never part of feminist ideology, even though real feminist philosophy in its various incarnations has far, far more interesting ideas to offer. It’s just a fact of slow news seasons in the days of 24/7 new networks.

Personally, my response will be a quiet thankfulness that my parents never suggested I could have everything, or even that I could have any one thing (“Little Susie, you can be anything you choose to be!”). Among my childhood memories is a conversation with my father when I was roughly 8 years old in which he explained that I couldn’t be a professional jockey, because jockeys are short (now why couldn’t I believe him so easily when he said there were no shape-shifting demons capable of mangling a human body in a single instant lurking in my closet?).

So thanks, mom and dad, for the realistic expectations.

As for you, internet, if we must have debates over things nobody said, can we at least have new ones?