There are three distinct stages of motherhood: the early years, the middle years (when children are ages 5-15), and the later teenage years. When the last child turns 16, something huge happens: The primary parent gets walloped with a colossal dose of time.
I’ve just hit the third stage.
With our daughter in college and our son now driving, the shift in my life is palpable. My son doesn’t need me for much anymore, save for food. He drives himself back and forth to school and has a part-time job. He also plays sports and occasionally goes to a gym. When he is home, he naturally gravitates toward his father for guidance, just as our daughter did with me when she was his age. All of which is to say: I’m feeling rather superfluous these days.
I’m probably exaggerating a bit, but one thing is clear: For the first time in 20 years, I don’t need to schedule my work life around the many needs of my children. I can safely shift the focus away from them and onto my career without so much as a blink. All is quiet on the home front.
For the past 20 years as a mother and as a writer, time has been my greatest enemy. As a result, I’ve never been “all in” with respect to my career. You might say I had my toe in the water but never my entire foot. That’s because my children have been my number-one priority. They got the bulk of my time and attention.
Any woman with children and a career will face a dilemma about how to get it all done. The answer is, there is no way to get it all done, not at one time. Life for women is a series of stages, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Work-family balance will always be elusive because raising children is a full-time job. No one, male or female, can successfully perform two full-time jobs at the same time. Something will always fall away.
That is not, of course, the message we hear from the culture. Instead, we’ve had to listen to the feminist charge that men (or more specifically, husbands and employers) are to blame for why women earn less than men, on average, throughout the course of their lives. It is men, Republican men in particular, who keep women from getting ahead in the marketplace. If they would just agree to get rid of the babies, via abortion on demand and round-the-clock government childcare, women could successfully do it all.
But husbands and employers are not to blame. On the contrary, both have bent over backwards to accommodate women’s demands. The real culprit is time.
Any parent, male or female, who tries to raise children, bring home a paycheck, pay the bills, mow the lawn, paint the shutters, fix the leaky faucet, cook the meals, clean the dishes, go to Target, do the laundry, pick up the dry cleaning, remember to take out the trash, go to Home Depot, shop for kids’ clothes and school supplies, go to the doctor, return emails, do the grocery shopping, go to the gym, drive the kids all over God’s creation, and create a happy, healthy home is going to be overloaded. There’s a reason it takes two parents get the job done.
Remove the biggest task on that list, raising children, and the scenario changes completely. Indeed, the real reason for gender “inequality,” or the fact that women earn less than men over the course of their lives, is children. “Our analysis highlights that the unexplained [pay] gap is largely due to children,” write the authors of a 2018 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
There are women who happily accept this trade-off and women who don’t. The women who don’t accept it blame men. That may make them feel better, but it doesn’t change the situation.
As I type this, I’m sitting in a new office not far from my home, where I’ve accomplished more in the week our son got his driver’s license than I have in the three months prior. I’ve officially entered stage three of motherhood: I’m wanted (I hope), but I’m not needed. Not in the same way. My work in this domain is largely done.
Now, it’s on to something else.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, speaker, and cultural critic known as “The Feminist Fixer.” She has authored several books to help women win with men in life and in love. Her most recent, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage, was published in February 2017. Suzanne’s website is www.suzannevenker.com.
