All the recent media-hype about Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In has got me thinking again. Thinking like I did last year when Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece
“Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” (Atlantic July/August 2012) hit the newsstands and the airwaves like an IED. Thinking like I did years ago when another, more senior, female partner tried to dissuade me from dropping to part-time status after the birth of my first child, arguing in part, “the men won’t like that.” Thinking again about my daughters, about their pasts when I put aside work to nurture them and their futures when they may or may not have a chance to lean in and have it all. Thinking again about the ultimate thing to think about: what it means in life to “have it all,” to be “successful” and to be a woman and a mother.
The cover of Time this week sports a fit, if not attractive – and ahem, much younger than I – Sandberg with the words, “DON’T HATE HER BECAUSE SHE’S SUCCESSFUL” emblazoned across her size six frame. I love the media; they sure know how to get you going, even if the place they are trying to take you is not where the person on the cover meant for you to go. I read that cover and suddenly all the thinking I had been doing over the past eighteen-plus years on this topic came together in my head and beseeched me to spill it out onto paper. So here goes. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
First, my reaction to the hoopla surrounding Slaughter’s piece – albeit a bit posthumously – is simple and straight forward: Thanks, but I really didn’t want to “have it all,” if having it all meant sitting in the courtroom before a serious looking federal judge, arguing an important federal matter, only to look down and discover that you were late to relieve your Nanny twenty minutes ago and the judge still hasn’t wrapped up the hearing, and you still need to drive home in rush hour traffic, and you can’t text your husband because texting hasn’t been invented yet, and even if it had you wouldn’t dare do that in front of a federal judge.
No, I didn’t want to have it all if it meant that I had to do lots of things, like practice law in a high-powered firm, and mother my children, and wife – whatever that is – my husband, and do them all just okay and certainly none of them great.
No, I didn’t want to have it all if it meant worrying my children were not getting the nurturing, the stimulation, the nutritional food, the whatever-of-the-week I thought they needed but which I, in my time-strapped situation, couldn’t seem to adequately give them if I was simultaneously also giving it my all at the office.
And as for Time’s suggestion that I should hate Sandberg because she is successful? Well, let’s just say 1) hate is a strong word and I don’t think women need a push toward the mean-girl camp if we are to move forward in our quest for success and equality and 2) I think there are many definitions of successful. Clearly, under one form of the definition she is spot on. She has a high-powered job, makes a lot of money, is ubervisible, is the mother of two children, is married to a successful man, and is attractive and slim. Oh, and young. One would be hard pressed to argue she is not successful. But what the media fails to remember – and what I want us as women to bear witness to at every turn of our lives – is that one size does not fit all. One woman’s success is not necessarily another woman’s. And, more importantly, there is nothing wrong with that.
Indeed, perhaps that is the point to having it all. That we as women, can – and should – define what our all – our success – is, not the media or the men.
It is what we say it is, whether it be stepping back to parent our children better during a difficult time in their lives (as Slaughter did) or leaning in as Sandberg does.
And as the mother of three girls, I don’t feel – as my mentor suggested years ago – I am doing a disservice to future generations of women, including my own daughters, by choosing a path more akin to Slaugther’s than Sandberg’s.
Slaughter, Sandberg, I and the mother-across-town are all paving the way for future generations of women. Paths that wind through the corridors of corporate headquarters and the hallowed halls of Washington. Paths that stroll through parks filled with baby-carriages and cramped kitchens over-run with play-groups. Paths that are filled with the foot-traffic of women with choices and those that have none, those that straddle both the work-world and the full-time parent world. Paths where spouses come along for the ride, or not. Paths where women bear babies early, or late or somewhere in between.
By heading down these many paths, and standing up to those who say that there is only one way to be successful, one way to have it all, we are in fact laying a much wider swath of roadway that they ever intended us to have. A roadway where we can lean in, lean out, lean all the way about. And even do the hokey pokey if we so chose.
I don’t know about you, but I like asking my daughters to join me on that roadway someday.