HAVING IT ALL IS A MYTH... OR IS IT? A MINDSET SHIFT FOR MOMS IN MIDLIFE | EP. 11
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 11.
Hello, friends. I was traveling this week. I spent a few days in Denver at a conference and then I flew to Austin for another conference.
It was a long week and I'm happy to be home. Over the past week, my husband shouldered the responsibility of shepherding our boys to school and keeping them fed and on task, managing our crazy schedule. I know I'm lucky to have a husband who's 100% on board with supporting my professional career and who's not at all reluctant to cover for me for an entire week away.
But it's funny that for the first few days, I found myself feeling a little guilty. The underlying thought was that I felt badly leaving him to deal with all of these responsibilities. It wasn't an overwhelming feeling, but it was there.
And I found myself wondering if he will feel guilty when he travels to Australia in the coming weeks. He'll also be gone for a little over a week. And while I have absolutely no doubt he's as invested in our family as I am, I don't actually think he'll feel guilty about leaving me to handle it on my own for a week.
So it begs the question, why would I feel guilty? Why is my subconscious mind thinking that I've abandoned my family when I travel for work for a week, when I leave my husband to manage the kids on his own? Why would I feel guilty when my husband travels fairly regularly and he's never expressed any thoughts of guilt, even when the kids were younger? Some might suggest that as women, we've been conditioned to think of ourselves as the caregivers at home, that this is our primary responsibility as mothers. Even mothers who do pursue full-time professional careers tend to feel the need to juggle the responsibilities of home and work life equally, in somewhat of a disproportional manner to their male partners. There's some evidence to suggest that that dynamic may be changing for millennials, but for those of us in our late 40s and 50s, it's more likely that we, as women, would decide to have our careers take a back seat to our responsibility as the primary caregiver at home.
I've always been someone who's thought of herself as ambitious. After college, I spent four years in investment banking and another three years in private equity, both highly competitive and highly compensated careers in finance. These industries at the time were heavily male-dominated.
In fact, they still are. I just looked up a statistic that says 72% of investment bankers were men in 2021, and that's only slightly lower than the percentage in the late 90s. So at the time I was working on Wall Street, and this may still be the case, women who persevered into leadership positions at these firms were definitely few and far between.
And as an ambitious woman rising in professional experience, both in banking and private equity, I looked at the women who had advanced to these high-level managing director or partnership positions, and I didn't want to be them. While I didn't have the opportunity to get to know these women personally, beyond our professional relationships at work, my perception was that these women were single, and in my mind, were alone. They seemed harsh in their mannerisms, and they weren't particularly approachable.
I don't remember one of them taking me under their wing and trying to mentor me. Now, investment banking is notoriously a career that requires ridiculously long hours, even at senior positions. At least this was true in the late 90s and early 2000s.
So both men and women at these firms invested 70 to 100 hours per week at the office, to the detriment of their family and personal lives. But while the few women in senior positions typically didn't have a family at home, with very few exceptions, every man in senior positions had a wife, and many of them had families at home. Interestingly, many of these men also had nannies at home, so whether their wives worked or not, they had the means to afford help in managing childcare responsibilities.
The women in senior positions also presumably had access to similar levels of income. We're making the choice to juggle a family and a career, yet none of them, well very few of them, had made the decision to be mothers. After 9-11, I made the choice to embark on a career shift, not feeling particularly fulfilled by my work in finance.
The events of 9-11 definitely served as a wake-up call for me. I had chosen the continental flight going from Newark to San Francisco that morning, so I felt somehow fate had allowed me to narrowly escape the fate of those 44 people on the American flight to San Francisco that crashed 15 minutes ahead of us in Pennsylvania. Our flight landed in Detroit, and I rented a car and drove home to my boyfriend living in Jersey City at the time.
As we looked at the smoldering remains of the Twin Towers over the following weeks, I decided it was time to make a change. In that moment, it felt like life was too short for me to be in a career where I wasn't fulfilled. So I quit my job and went back to school to get a Master's in Nonprofit Management.
And as I write this, I can't help but wonder if I had had a positive female role model in my previous positions if I might have stuck it out. The work I did was fascinating, and the people with whom I worked were exceptionally intelligent and creative. In those professions, I gained incredible skills that have served me in every professional or volunteer endeavor I've tackled since.
But after 9-11, I took a one-and-a-half-year detour to get a Master's, train for a marathon, and get married. My husband and I met while working together in investment banking, and he also eventually left to work for one of his clients. We've often remarked that if he had stayed in investment banking while raising kids, that he would have had a very different, less connected role in raising our boys.
We've both been incredibly fortunate in that our careers have been flexible enough to allow us both to remain involved in our boys' lives. But I have to wonder again, why is it that when a man makes a professional choice that might allow him to have more flexibility to be present for his family, we assume that he made that choice without any societal influence, whereas when women make a similar choice, we assume it's due to patriarchal influences that force them to make the choice to sacrifice their professional career for a family? I don't mean to suggest that patriarchal and sexist systems don't exist or have not existed. I guess I primarily want to differentiate from the societal beliefs or institutions that might have or might still exist that influence women's options and the individual decisions that we as women make in our lives based on these circumstances.
I was having dinner with a good friend and her husband recently. She's been very successful in her professional career and made the decision not to have children. For her, I don't believe it was a matter of sacrificing the opportunity to have kids for her career.
She simply didn't feel the need to have children of her own to have it all. In fact, recently sitting with both her and her husband over a beautiful dinner that her husband cooked for us in their home, I got a glimpse of what having it all without kids looked like, and it looked pretty amazing. Frequent travel, ultimate flexibility in career options because they can move anywhere they want.
They're not tied to a place because of where their kids go to school. They have income that's not spent on children, and kids are expensive. They love kids, but they have ample opportunity to engage with nieces and nephews, both those to whom they're related and also those they've inherited through close friendships.
So what does having it all even mean? Although we tend to think of it as having some perfect balance of career, family, love, friendship, and wellness, I think we have to be clear that having it all is in the eye of the beholder. There's absolutely no one way to pursue the game of life. What does success mean? What does it mean to be happy and fulfilled? Having it all is not a one-size-fits-all concept.
It means something entirely different for each of us. I was struck during my dinner with my friend that now that I'm on the brink of being an empty nester myself, our lives are converging. I found myself fascinated by her freedom and flexibility in planning her life without children at home.
And I realized that while many of us can tend to view this change in life as something that leaves a gaping hole that our children used to fill, that even this hole is in the eye of a beholder. My friend clearly doesn't feel that there's anything missing in her life without kids. Getting back to professional choices, I know many women my age in their 40s and 50s who recall the days when they were at the height of their professional career before they took a step back to raise their family.
I can't think of any one of them that regret the choice to have a family. In fact, women will often say that their children were the highest among their greatest accomplishments. But I do perceive that often we feel a bit of longing for what could have been the professional opportunity and advancement lost.
For some, this is even manifested as resentment as women watch their husbands continue to advance in their careers while these highly educated, accomplished professional women invest their skills in child rearing and managing their children's education in their household. I've personally known hundreds of women who've become highly involved in non-profit organizations, junior leagues, parents associations, school boards of educations, or town councils as a way to invest their professional skills productively. During the time when my children were very little, I also found volunteerism a valuable outlet to meet other engaged and ambitious women.
You'd often hear that this outlet offered an opportunity for these women to have something of their own outside of child rearing. While there are some women who make the long-term decision to stay at home, there are others of us who continue to work either due to financial necessity or because we're simply wired to work and seek an independent income. There are countless models of what this looks like.
Some women maintain highly demanding careers and send their children to daycare or have full-time help at home. There are even some husbands who elect to stay home if their wives are the breadwinners, although we still tend to think of these men as unicorns. No matter the specifics of the career, mothers who work often, not always, but often, bear the brunt of the responsibility of managing child care schedules and drop-offs.
Even if the husband bears an equal load in terms of pickups and drop-offs, I find it's often the mom, working or not, who manages the schedules and knows at all times who has to be where when, who needs to be picked up when, what's happening at school, the timing of the next event or the conference. As a mom, how often do the members of your family ask you where they need to be? Of course, all of this becomes quite a bit simpler once the last child goes to college. No more carpooling and worrying about schedules.
As mothers, we tend to be so invested in the management of our children's and families' lives that even though we may not love every second of driving back and forth to sports practices and school, when this responsibility disappears, it can feel like a big part of our purpose in life has evaporated into thin air. So clearly, there are seasons to our lives as women. We might have spent our early careers aspiring professionally as equals with men, considering ourselves as entitled to early opportunities as they were.
Then each of us made our own individual, highly personal decisions, children or no children, whether to seek employment or volunteer, how to juggle the responsibility of family, whether to hire help or send our children to daycare, whether to stay in our marriages. I've noticed that for many women, even if they've stayed in the workplace, they still view their opportunities as more limited than those of men in the workplace. In addition to being a life coach, I work in education, a field that one might presume has a higher degree of opportunity for women in leadership.
And even in this arena, women tend to assume that their voices matter less, are heard less. I'm the most senior woman where I work, a C-level executive, and still, women in my institution will tell me that they do not believe there are equal opportunities for leadership for them as women as there are for the men. In all of this, I'm fascinated to observe how many of us, as women, make very personal, individual decisions about our lives, and yet we're often convinced that a large number of these decisions were out of our control, meaning either that the circumstances limited our opportunity or the number of choices that we had at the time we made the decision, or that our decision was forced or influenced by another person, group of people, institution, or even by society.
I had lunch with a group of successful life coaches and we had a fascinating conversation about patriarchy and sexism, and specifically whether it's a circumstance in our lives over which we have no control or whether it's an individual mindset that holds us back as women. It's a tricky conversation and you likely have your own strong opinions, but I want to offer that it's both a circumstance in our lives, meaning there may very well be factual circumstances that have impacted the range of decisions available to you as a woman throughout your life, but then we tend to perpetuate these limitations and constraints in the way we pursue our lives and make decisions from a framework of limited opportunity. Let me illustrate this with some examples of circumstances over which we may not have control in the short term that limit our opportunity.
If you're single and you don't receive support from the father of your children, unless you have a trust fund or some significant degree of savings, you probably don't have the luxury of not working to support your children. Some of us may have had husbands who explicitly required us to stay home, and while I would hope that this dynamic is changing, I acknowledge that some of us are in relationships that have limited our options as long as we have chosen to stay in those partnerships. Some of us have had bosses that have sexually harassed us.
In some cases, we've been passed over for job opportunities or promotions, and while it may be difficult to prove that it was because we were women, I acknowledge this happens. We could argue that there are many other circumstances, but what I want to acknowledge with these examples is that there are situations in which we could all probably agree that you have to get a job, or that our husbands have definitely limited us, or our bosses have been total assholes. These circumstances exist, and we as women may not have the ability to rise above these circumstances in the moment.
While the single mom technically has the option of not working and allowing her children to go hungry, we all understand that 99.9 times out of 100 she's not going to make that choice. And while the woman whose husband tells her she's not allowed to work technically has the option to leave, to divorce her husband, we can all identify with the reasons why she may decide to stay home and not work. We know there are men who are laches.
Not all men. They are the exception rather than the rule, but some men view women as sexual objects, and some men still would much prefer to promote a man over a woman. While we have made progress, these circumstances absolutely exist.
But I want to ask you, so what? And I don't ask that because I don't agree that sexism and harassment of women should change. It should. But my point is, what's the upside of believing that our options as women are limited? What's the point of keeping ourselves and our opportunities small because we buy into the idea that it's other people's fault, it's the institution's fault, or it's just the way it is? I know that so many of us can look back on our lives and identify a crossroads when we made a decision because we thought that was the only choice, that that was what was expected of us.
What is that decision for you? Was it quitting your job to raise your kids or taking a different job because you didn't think your old career would be feasible when managing your home and family? Maybe it was leaving your husband. When you think back on the twists and turns of your life, how many of the decisions do you believe were fully in your control versus those that were directed by others, influenced by societal expectations? So often, without us even realizing, we give away our power by assuming it's the institution, society, our husbands, expectations of others, that all of these factors have put us in a box, limited our options, made it so this is how it is. When you're considering the various factors, I want you to ask yourself, what's the upside in believing this? What's the upside in telling yourself that the institution doesn't promote women or that your husband doesn't want you to work or that your circumstances meant this is the only job you could take for which you were qualified? Again, I acknowledge that in some instances, there may be a very fine line between the circumstances that truly keep us limited in our choices and the mindset with which we approach every decision.
But have you ever really asked yourself to understand what that line is for you? If you're dissatisfied with where you are in your life, if you think that you can't have it all, what is it specifically that's holding you back from having it all? I've been focusing quite a bit on career, but this could apply equally to any area where you feel a deficit. If you feel your life is full, but you can't find a partner, why? What's holding you back? If you think that the circumstances of your life don't allow you to pursue personal wellness, whether that be fitness and weight loss or just finding mental well-being and peace, how much of what's a deficit in your life is created by the circumstances of your life versus your mindset about it? What does having it all mean to you? Maybe it's not about something specific you want that you don't have, but more about the way you feel. It's not uncommon for us to have all of the boxes checked, family check, home check, money check, but that we feel there's still something missing from our lives.
Love, happiness, personal fulfillment, peace. One of the most powerful things that a coach can help you do is separate the circumstances of your life from your mindset about it. I notice in life we often look for validation of how we feel.
One of my sons will often say to me, can't you just acknowledge that this is how I feel? Look, yes, we all get to feel how we feel. There's no right way to go about life. There's not a right way to feel.
But often when we're looking for validation about the way we're feeling, we're asking the other person to validate our belief that there are circumstances out of our control that are making us feel a certain way. What we really want is for the person to agree with us, have empathy for us. We can't change it.
Yes, he was a jerk. Yes, sexism exists in the workplace. Yes, there are fewer leadership opportunities for women.
Yes, having children means you can't have it all. But what we're really doing when we seek validation for our mindset about how it's other people's fault is that we're asking for validation around our powerlessness. I have no power to change what's missing in my life.
As a life coach, I work with my clients to differentiate between the facts, those circumstances that are truly out of their control, and the way that they're thinking about these circumstances or interpreting the situation that directly influences how they feel, and therefore how they show up, how they react, whether they take ownership and action, or just stay stuck. When I was 25, I worked at a firm where there was a managing director who would show up at my apartment in the middle of the night after he'd been drinking, and he would call up from downstairs and demand I let him into the building. Needless to say, I never buzzed him in.
And fortunately, he never got farther than the main door to the building. But this happened enough that I went to the HR department of my firm to complain. At the time, again this was the late 90s, it was clear that the minute I lodged my complaint that the legal team of the firm was gearing up to protect the firm, not me.
They weren't interested in protecting me, a young woman at the firm who was being harassed after hours by a senior member of the firm. They wanted to protect their own interests, avoid a scandal or a large lawsuit. I made the decision at the time not to pursue it.
I let it go. Fortunately, the harassment never went further than some late night ringing at my apartment. I do seem to remember it died down after I approached HR.
And as I write this, I have to give thanks to the many women who were bolder than me, who did move forward with their complaints, who risked being discredited or fired, or who faced alone the intimidating legal machine to fight for a woman's right to advance and work without being sexually harassed. As I said, I know this exists. The recent Me Too movement confirms how many of us suffered sexual harassment because it was just part of the job.
I hope and truly believe that the openness of women today and the bravery of women today has shed light on these practices and not only made it easier for women to stand up for themselves, but made the workplace a less sexual, oppressive environment for women. I sincerely hope that the circumstances today's women in their 20s face are less sexist, less sexually exploitative. But here we are in our 40s and 50s, and we're left with the legacy of our choices in the face of this progress today.
We can't go back and rewrite our own story just because women in their 20s today might not feel as constrained. I hope they don't feel as constrained in their choices. So in your life today, how are you still constraining your own choices? What's holding you back from having it all? While some would vehemently argue that it's impossible to have it all because we have limited time and resources, is even that true? Yes, there are only so many hours in the day, but how do you invest your time? That's a choice over which you have power.
Limited resources? What's stopping you from changing that? What does having it all mean to you, and why can't you have it? I want to invite you to get on a call with me to explore this question, because I believe you can have your own version of having it all. What's stopping you? Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast.
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