Recently The Atlantic released an incredibly well articulated and thoughtful article that has exploded and gone viral entitled, “Why women still can’t have it all.” I really encourage you to read it, though it is lengthy. It’s been passed around quite a bit on 3DM’s team and discussed via email, text, facebook and face-to-face. Sally, my wife, had some great thoughts on this and while she normally posts on her own blog (which you can read by clicking here), I asked if she’d kindly post it on mine.

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“Can women have it all?”

In my mind, although I have been asked this question many times before, it can still be difficult to answers because there are so many other questions that come in front of, and surrounding, that one question. Such as:

+ Should we have it all ?
+ Why do we want to have it all ?
+ What does” all” mean?
+ Doesn’t ” having it all ” have an attitude of entitlement behind it.?
+ Is having it all always a good thing?

If you ask the “can women have it all ” question to a random group of women age 25+, all will quickly laugh and smile knowingly and say no it’s not possible. They instinctively know it but still want to believe the myths.

Women are still being been led to believe that they can and should have it all. It does not seem to be a question that I have ever heard men ask each other over a beer or while changing a diaper. Perhaps they already know that it is impossible and have moved on. Perhaps they are wired differently.

Some may say they never ask this question because they are so used to being in positions of power and having the women at home make having it “all” as a man possible. There are any number of things we could discuss about that. However, everyone, whether they are male or female, makes choices and live with the consequences of those choices and how they effect ourselves and those we love.

Women, however, have been told (and then have chosen to believe) a whole series of myths and lies. And this naturally changes their expectations and conversations. Listed below are just some of the most common ones.

MYTH #1
It’s the first few years of a child’s life that are the hardest on a woman emotionally and practically. Once you get through the first three years the following years will be easier and you can concentrate on your career again.

MYTH #2
We can separate our lives into compartments (eg there is a home section and a work section).

MYTH #3
Our careers have to look successful during our 20′s and 30 ‘s, which are the correspondingly prime ages for bearing children.

MYTH #4
It is possible to divide out chores and responsibilities between the woman and the man equally. We just need a better system or a better employer. This will make women feel better.

MYTH #5
We can raise our children successfully and stay happily married just by being a nuclear family.

Here are my thoughts on each myth:

RESPONSE to MYTH #1
“It’s the early years of a child’s life that are the hardest on a woman emotionally and practically. Once you get through the first three years of a child’s life the following years will be easier and you can concentrate on your career again.”

In my conversations with many women, they often say that they are genuinely surprised that it is in how much they are needed in the later years of a child’s life.They also didn’t realize how much they would also actually want/ need to be at home more with their children during the ages of 10+ rather than during their toddler years. They didn’t know that it would be harder to go to work after leaving a sulky angry teenager in bed rather than a screaming toddler with a nanny. I wonder if it’s because the consequences of not being there for the adolescent seem nearer and more dramatic. The stakes seem higher. The guilt greater. Parenting is definitely a marathon not a sprint.

RESPONSE to MYTH #2
“We can separate our lives into compartments (eg There is a home section and a work section).”

Can we as women truly separate our lives into compartments and be content?

Most mothers who have faced their fearful and tearful teenager over the breakfast table will think about them continually throughout the day and send numerous texts to check on them no matter whats going on at work .

If your twelve year old has a music concert or a play at school, it’s extremely painful for you not to be there; women feel either guilty or feel you have missed out.

We may now be able to pay for a tutor to help them with their math homework or for a place at a great school, but many mothers also want to be around more get to know their friends and to be the one who drives them to and back from their teenage parties.

We may be on a work trip but often women will have filled the freezer with food before you have left on the plane to make sure it’s not only McDonalds that’s eaten over the next week.

We have to live an integrated life. We only have one life. Separating it into compartments causes stress (just a clue: It’s like this for men too). If one area is in tension we do not fully enjoy the other bits of our lives. It’s hard to fully enjoy a promotion and significance at work if your family life is in chaos and tatters.

As people who co-lead an organization, my husband and I tend to only employ couples. This is a practical reflection of this principal. We fully include everyone’s children in our office and make it safe and fun place for them to be there.

RESPONSE to MYTH #3
“Our careers have to look successful during our 20′s and 30′s which are the correspondingly prime ages for bearing children.”

I think it would be better for all women if we could look at our lives over the long distance. Not as snapshots of success. In the last 30 years, there were times when I worked and times when I didn’t. Sometimes it seemed off and on, as if it was a constant sputter.

I am now in my 50′s and there have been many moments during motherhood I have felt a failure. My children have challenged me and changed me. I am now a grandmother and seeing my daughter with her sweet son, and how amazing she is with him, erases any memories of doubt I once had about my mothering. But it’s been a long road. But it makes the hundreds of hours spent with this same daughter, driving her to horse riding or encouraging her to find compensating techniques for her dyslexia or checking on who she was spending her Saturday’s with, all worthwhile.

The choices we made as parents were not all the right ones but we got enough right to grow 3 children into healthy secure adults. The sacrifices and choices that my husband and I both made to enable this to happen seem distant now. But it’s a long road.The career I once dreamed about seems very much in the past when I look at my actual life now. It is so much better and fuller and wider than the one I could have expected back then when I was in my late teens heading into my twenties. I even think about career far differently than I did in my 20′s and 30′s. I would define it differently. Yet sometimes I feel like we are forced to define it as a universal reality for everyone, regardless of situation and calling.

RESPONSE to MYTH #4
“It is actually possible to divide out chores and responsibilities between the woman and the man equally and this will make us feel better.”

I don’t think it is possible to live our lives making sure everything is fair and equal.We often believe it’s our right to have certain things, rather than being thankful for the choices we do have.I think the same about husband and wives. No one can really measure a man or a woman’s sacrifice or how much Grace has been freely given. If we try to live our lives under laws and rules, they easily run us straight towards rebellion.The common quote that ” comparison is the thief of joy ” is fundamentally true. It is only women who carry and give birth to babies. It is impossible to equalize out this biological fact.

What Mike and I have found is that as we both try to serve the other, sacrifice for the other, love and respect the other, put the other’s needs in front of our own, we lose the need to make sure everything is equal. Furthermore, if we were to look in hindsight, I think we’d see seasons where one of us was taking on a disproportionate amount of responsibility.

RESPONSE to MYTH #5.
“We can raise our children successfully and easily just being a nuclear family.”

There is a kind of ignorance and arrogance that comes with believing we can raise our children by ourselves. The nuclear family is a failed experiment. The statistics are now in and it’s not good. It is even harder if you parent alone.

If you observe other cultures and study history you can see that families were really designed to be extended and multi generational, so many of the tensions we experience in our lives today, I believe, could be eliminated by growing and pursuing an extended family. It truly does take a village to raise a child.I would go as far as to say it takes a village to stay happily married. And I don’t just mean blood relations. We recreate the extended family with blood and non-blood relations.

Some of the tensions around career and children would be eased if we knew there were others in our children’s lives who would be there shouting on the sidelines to encourage our children for the long haul too. If there were grandmother-and-grandfathers-types around to teach our children life lessons and skills. How wonderful would that be, if there were also several young adults eating meals with us, ready and available to take our teenagers to the latest cool movie? You can’t tell me that wouldn’t help!

We all need a “family” we can ring up when our plane is delayed and we miss our child’s birthday party.

We may be conflicted about career and children now, but I think we will be equally conflicted when our parents are aged and ill and require lots of our time and energy, or if our spouse suffers a sudden disability and is long term unemployed. We will need the support and help of an extended family then too.

My reflection, therefore, is that I definitely agree that there could be big improvements in how employers treat and view women in the workplace, especially in terms of flexible hour, extended maternity leave and career breaks. But equally know that we are responsible for bringing about some significant changes in how we, as women, think of ourselves and our lives and families. It is only when older women such as myself are able to look back on our lives within the frame work of grace, forgiveness and redemption that can we decide if the question was ever worth asking in the first place and what wisdom we want to hand back towards the younger generation of women just arriving on the horizon .

This fall we are doing a training event specifically for women to tackle many of the challenges mentioned above, while also equipping them to be leaders in the Kingdom. Click here to register or get more details.