WRY BREAD: A Slice of My Life in Pursuit of Dough

Why Must We Still Choose Between Money and Motherhood?

By Gail Harlow

abies or the board room? Children or career? Those are the tough questions posed on the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine.  Inside, the magazine reports on what may be the two most difficult choices a woman has to make: whether—and when—to have children.  A generation ago, women who wanted careers knew that, to compete successfully with men, they might as well give up all thoughts of having children. Those who chose marriage and motherhood over career often struggled with the deep-seated feelings of frustration that Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” in her groundbreaking book, “The Feminine Mystique.”

             The daughters of those women grew up to believe that they could balance motherhood and career as effortlessly as a circus performer spinning plates and juggling balls at the same time. Many of them have climbed the corporate ladder while raising children, dropping only a few plates along the way. Now, in increasing numbers, these same women are leaving the Corp’rat race to return home to spend quality time with their families and start businesses of their own. They are the lucky few—the ones who have the luxury of choice that money can buy. In the low- and middle-income brackets, dual-income families and single-mother households are proliferating. Many women simply work at jobs to make ends meet—then come home, tired, to do the more important work of raising their kids.

            The juggling act isn’t easy, which is why so many women are postponing child-rearing. According to Census Bureau statistics, childlessness has doubled in the past 20 years, with one in five women between the ages 40 and 44 now without children. The price women pay when they have children, early or late, is a stiff one.  “The average college-educated woman will earn nearly a million dollars less than her male counterpart over a lifetime of work because of the wage gap and the time she takes off –an average of five years—to raise children,” says financial writer Susan E. Reed, who is working on a book about activism among women in the workforce.

Those who wait to get pregnant until their careers are established are finding, to their dismay, that they have to pay an added penalty—the possible loss of choice—as a new book,  “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” points out. In this book, which prompted the Time article, economist and author Sylvia Ann Hewlett details the awakening realization among women who have delayed pregnancy that they may have waited too long. Assuming that they had until their 40s to conceive, they are finding that, in fact, even with the latest medical reproductive techniques, the chances of becoming pregnant after the late 20s declines rapidly.

           Fiorina, the first woman to head a Dow 30 company, was declared "the most successful American woman of the decade” by the London Sunday Times after she took the top job at HP. (Her latest success is persuading shareholders to support her proposed $25 billion merger with Compaq.) At the opposite end of the baby-versus-board-room spectrum, sadly, is 37-year-old Andrea Yates, the Texas mother of five who was sentenced to life in prison for drowning her five children in the bathtub of her suburban Houston home. One chose motherhood over career, giving up a job she enjoyed as a post-op nurse to devote her life to raising and home schooling her children, until she cracked. The other, the mother of two stepchildren, is identified exclusively with her career.

What would drive a smart, attractive, loving mother to a place where she felt she had to end the lives of her five beautiful children? Psychiatric experts called to testify in Yates’ defense cited the powerful influence of postpartum psychosis. Yates, herself, has said that she felt she had to do it because she was not a success as a mother. Her husband, Rusty Yates, opined that Andrea had “lost her identity.” An analyst who treated her commented that “the patient's husband might be a little bit controlling." Reading between the lines, Yates’s story is, in part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing yourself in the process of nurturing others.

             Between those two extremes is where most of us live, doing our best to make the right choices and hold onto our dreams. In a commencement address at Stanford University last year, Carly Fiorina encouraged the graduates not to be afraid of making mistakes.  "Don't let your options paralyze you. Make a decision and then choose what happens next," she advised. The questions Fiorina asks herself when she has doubts about where she’s headed are: “Am I acting out a role, or am I living the truth? Am I still making choices, or have I simply stopped choosing? Am I in a place that engages my mind and captures my heart? Am I    stuck in the past, or am I defining my future? And what will I leave the planet?”

           Children aren’t the only gifts we can leave this planet. I am one of the growing minority of women who have chosen not to have children. My decision wasn’t based on wanting to earn more money. I simply didn’t feel a strong biological urge to have a child—and I didn’t think that I could give 100 percent to both career and motherhood. I’m not without regrets, but I know that I made the right choice for myself, given my personal circumstances and predilections. Unfortunately, career versus motherhood is a choice—or compromise—that our society still forces women to make. More corporate day-care centers, flex time, and paid maternity leave for husband or wife would go a long way toward making that choice seem like less of a compromise.

            Now, with my own mother gone and no children of my own, I find myself in the peculiar role of mothering myself. I look at photos of myself as a child and wonder, “How well have I nurtured that hopeful young girl whose future I am still shaping?” Whether we are mothers or not, perhaps that’s a question we all should ask ourselves on our birthdays—and regularly in between.

            How well are you mothering yourself?

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Gail Harlow is the Founding Editor of MAKING BREAD Magazine. E-mail your comments to gail@makingbreadmagazine.com.

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