Women's Work

As you know, my mother was a teacher when she went to Germany for this big adventure.  In fact, you could say that my mother had 3 "careers", back in the days before changing careers was popular.  Her first career was teaching.  She taught mostly first grade, although I think she taught second grade one year.  But first grade was her favorite.  She never intended to work after she got married.  She did tell me that she asked Daddy if he wanted her to work and that he said no.  I feel very confident that she wanted to run off by herself and jump up and down like a child with glee!

Her second "career" was as a wife and mother.  I know she didn't enjoy the housewife aspect of this job, but all she really ever wanted to be was a wife and mother and she did only that for a very long time.

Her third career was working in the cafeteria at Stone Mountain High School with her best friend and neighbor Dolly Snyder.  She started as one of the ladies that collected the money and worked her way up to being Mrs. Snyder's assistant.  I don't know that we needed the money, but as my brothers and I got older I think it gave her something to do with her day.  And after Daddy died, I think it became a bit of a lifeline for her.  A place to go and something to do that kept her from sitting home grieving.

I always wanted to be somebody.  I spent my life wanting to “be” somebody.  Somebody that made money, somebody that was important.  I remember wanting to be a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist.  I think part of it was that I always saw myself escaping where I was in life.

I can remember when I was a little girl and I would lay in bed thinking maybe I would wake up the next morning and be someone else, be someplace else.  And when I would wake up in the morning I would lay there with my eyes still closed thinking today would be the day when I would wake up in a different house, with different parents, as an only child, in a mansion, with everything my heart desired.  But when I opened my eyes I was still in the same room I’d gone to sleep in the night before, in the same house I had lived in for years, with the same family that disappointed some very deep place in my soul.

What I had was never enough.  There was always such a yearning inside me for more, even as a young child.  I used to write when I was young.  It was never good stuff.  It was always some take off on some TV show I liked or some other story that enchanted me.  I always put myself in it, never as myself, but as who I wanted to be.  Someone pretty, well-loved, smart, funny, accomplished.  I was always the romantic female lead even when I was too young and inexperienced to know what that meant.  The handsomest man was always in love with me.  I was the center of the story.  Always.

So when my mother would talk to me about what I was going to be when I grew up, I was always disappointed in the direction those conversations took.  She wanted me to be a teacher, like her.  The appeal, for her, was that “the children always love you” and “you have the same schedule as the children”, meaning summers off and the same holidays they got.  But I didn’t really want to be a teacher.  I didn’t want to be my mother, was really what that was about.  But even back then, long before “women’s lib”, I knew that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a “woman’s job”.  I wanted to be able to do anything.  And back in those days I thought I could.

When I wanted to be a doctor or dentist, my mother tried to talk me into being a nurse.  Another of those women’s jobs.  The funny thing was that I was always squeamish about blood; not really conducive to being a nurse or a doctor.  When she saw me writing, she even suggested being a journalist.  Another career path I dismissed as not paying enough or having the right level of prestige.

Really and truly, I think my mother was hoping I’d pick some job or career that would give me something to do until I got married and started a family.  Because that was what she really wanted for me.  She didn’t believe that women who were married and had children should work; they should stay at home.  We had many a bitter argument over that.  I couldn’t see myself being a stay at home wife and mother.  I knew I needed more than that in my life.  In her mind, anything I did with my life after college was just “until you get married”.  She didn’t think I needed to move out of the house until I got married.  I didn’t need to buy furniture until I got married.  I asked her once “what if I don’t get married?”  She thought that was just silly talk.  I wasn’t so sure, in those days.  But that’s what she had done.  She lived at home, except for the year she was in Germany, until she got married.  She didn’t buy furniture until she got married.  Everything was just a place holder until she got married.  That truly was her goal in life, whereas mine was to be successful in my career, to have as much fun as was legal, and to party all the time.

When I went off to college I still wanted to be a doctor.  But when I heard about the course work during orientation – lots of science and math – I knew that wasn’t for me.  So I changed majors to business, mainly because I believed that was a major that would lead to an actual job.  And then struggled with just what my actual direction would be.  At first it was accounting, then marketing, and finally management.  I think my mother was still hoping I’d come to my senses and choose some marriage and child friendly job, but in those days I wasn’t thinking as much about getting married or having children.  I always appreciated that my father told me I could be anything I wanted to be.  Period.  My mother seemed to always want to add “as long as it’s teaching or nursing”.

I actually allowed my father to pick what I would major in.  When I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, he was the one that suggested Human Resources.  Actually it was “Personnel” back then.  But that was what he had majored in and he thought I would like it.  So that was what I did.  And I was fortunate to be able to get into “Personnel” within 6 months of graduating from college.  I had gone to work in a management training program at a retailer and, since I wasn’t well suited for merchandising, I was fortunate that there was a store Personnel Manager position open for me.  Now, to be fair, there are aspects of HR that I like and that I do pretty well.  But I really don’t like dealing with the people.  I really don’t like dealing with the people issues.  I’d rather create a compensation plan or design a benefits strategy.  And now I feel kind of stuck in a career and in a role that isn’t where I really should be.

I always thought of my mother as not being very ambitious.  She never really aspired to much.  She was content being a first grade teacher, which I thought was horribly boring.  And she loved being a wife and mother.  I think what it really boiled down to was that I didn’t want to grow up to be my mother.  So I rejected out of hand all the things she held dear.

When I look back on this from my current perspective, I feel like I shortchanged myself.  I still wouldn’t have wanted to be a teacher or a nurse, but I do feel like I went down a career path that, while I could do it well, wasn’t really where my path should have led me at all.  And because I didn’t choose well when it came to relationships, I didn’t end up as a wife either, at least not long term.  And I never became a mother.

To have ended up more like my mother actually wouldn’t have been as bad as I had once imagined.  My mother had a job for a number of years that she loved.  She got to combine it with the adventure of a lifetime when she went to Germany for a year.  And she met and married the love of her life and had an incredibly happy marriage and raised four children.  Which was really all she wanted to do. 

For many years I thought that was the biggest waste of a life.  But here I am, not really fulfilled, not married, no children, not pursuing my passion.  And not totally sure what that passion is.  But I do know for sure that what my mother had and the life she lived was worth pursuing.  She had a great life.  She was loved, as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter and sister, and as a friend.  She cared about other people and she was kind and giving.  She lived the life she always imagined for herself.  She and my father weren’t rich, but they were comfortable.  And it was enough for her.  She didn’t aspire for more than she had, because she had the things that really mattered.

I wonder what would have happened if I’d set my sights just a little lower.  If I hadn’t cared so much about material things and money.  What if I had pursued that love of writing years ago?  I still don’t think I would have wanted to be a journalist, but maybe I would have tried a writing career back when I was young enough to have been really successful at it.  I think that would have made me happy.  And fulfilled.  And then maybe I would have had the life my mother did – filled with love and acceptance.  I was wrong not to have listened more to her.  I was wrong to have thought that she was the antithesis of me.  Although we were different women in many ways, deep down I really wanted what she had – I wish that I had been open enough to have learned from her.