Family, work, and feminism

I recently finished reading Anna Quindlen's Lots of Candles and Plenty of Cake. It's, you guessed it, another book from the biography section. Except this book is more of a reflection on her generation, particularly its women.

Anna Quindlen is a baby boomer and a writer who was able to manage both a successful career and motherhood (she has three children, all now grown).

That said, something she put in there struck me:

All the times I've been asked on college campuses about balancing work and family, I've never been asked the question by a young man. Young women, even with their own mothers' successes, wonder how they will manage job and kids; young men still figure they'll manage it by marrying.

It's so true, isn't it? I've been thinking about it all week.

One reason I like the business I am starting, Stories from the Hearth, is that it will someday allow me to be a mother while also working at something I enjoy. It is a work-from-home job; when I need to interview people, I can foreseeably bring children with me. It will be hard, but it seems possible.

My husband has a goal of owning his own research and development company someday. He has never mentioned how he will be a father at the same time.

So I asked him about what he thought of this quote from the book, and he said he thinks it's because women think about being mothers someday, and men don't think about being fathers. While many girls are excitedly planning their weddings years in advance, the expectation for men is that they'll just show up and it will be grand. Those same girls have also been playing with dolls and playing house since they were tiny. Generally speaking, they have always been thinking about someday being mothers. Men, not so much.

A good friend of mine directed me to read this article by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Slaughter discusses work-life balance for successful women in government, particularly, and notes that men do not have the same problems with it. While women are more likely to quit their jobs to spend more time with children they think could benefit from their time, she says, men are likely to look at their jobs as a way of supporting their family, and thus think the best thing they could possibly do is work harder.

I was reminded of another book, one my in-laws read and told me about. It's called Outliers: The Story of Success, and it's by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell talks about the reasons why certain people are successful and others aren't. Apparently, one key to success is that someone else has sacrificed so you have the time or skills to succeed. Someone takes on all the necessary tasks so that the other person can chase their dreams and do amazing things.

Case in point, the woman raises the children and takes care of the home so that the man can have a rewarding career. In Slaughter's case, though, it was the other way around. Her husband held down the fort so she could work as the director of the federal government's policy planning department for two years.

I am the current breadwinner of my two-person family. My husband is still attending school and has a back injury he is trying to heal from. He was working this summer, but as time wore on he was in too much pain to continue. Now he is working from home as much as he can.

This means I wake up, go for a run (hopefully), get ready for my day, go to work, work, get home, make dinner, do laundry (not every day), massage my poor husband and work on one of my numerous side jobs: starting my business, writing this blog, teaching my sister to play the piano, writing a column for the Idaho Press-Tribune. Hopefully I get to relax sometime.

I am sincerely hoping this is not an eternal situation ... and that I'm not setting a trend for me doing all the work and my husband sitting around for life. That would not be okay. If I'm going to be doing the lion's share of the work at home, he better be out there being amazing.

For me, then, I suppose this issue is less your typical feminist problem and more of a marriage problem: How do you balance all the tasks associated with home and family? This, of course, is solved differently in each marriage.

In marriage and home, it should all be equal, with any superiority thrown out the door. That was another quote in Quindlen's book that I liked:

True friendship assumes a level playing field -- no one is up, no one is down, no one the queen bee or the drone.

Replace "friendship" with "marriage," and I think that about sums it up.