MountainMornings

It’s another beautiful Blue Ridge morning. A crisp north wind has banished the humidity and rabbits are hopping all over my sun-drenched lawn. But hearing the news about Nora Ephron gave me chills and made me pause to listen to her incredible voice. http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-nora-ephron-20120627,0,4888846.story She was about a generation ahead of mine; she was our trailblazer. She helped to define my tribe of women, she coaxed us along and prodded us to laugh at ourselves. And somehow I wasn’t surprised to find out that when she was fresh out of Wellesley College and looking for work in NYC, Newsweek told her “Women don’t write here.” Maybe going to an all female college helped her to just accept that fact and start off in the mailroom? My very first job fresh out of college was with the ironically named Manpower. Refusing for years to learn how to type or ever consider being in a secretarial pool, at least I could test other’s typing skills.

In July the Bride will be starting her first job in her EM field, well technically. She certainly worked summers and years before in other medically related fields. But the years of residency training have all led up to the day she will walk into a new ER, baby bump first. And part of her reasoning in choosing this career was the work-life-balance thing. Recently, an Atlantic article has been getting a lot of buzz about this very issue – one I had fought and thought was pretty much over and done with. Titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-8217-t-have-it-all/9020/

I know I know, Adele is singing about a bad boy, but didn’t we raise our daughters to think they really could have it all? Slaughter had her dream job in DC, she left academia at Princeton to mingle with the super powers of foreign policy planning
as the very first woman director of public policy at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. She left her teenage boys during the week and only returned home to NJ on the weekends and she talks about the toll that decision had on her family.”I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.”

One of the hardest things Slaughter found to write in this story was that she actually wanted to be home. So have we sold our daughters a feminist myth? Certainly the life of an academic, and a Dean, is conducive to balancing a family because the hours are flexible. But one wonders why women are not equally represented in board rooms and legislative offices all over our country. Certainly other countries value parents more by allowing for more flexible schedules and longer child care leave and most importantly, providing excellent early childhood day care. In Canada, women have paid leave for up to a year after their babies are born. My daughter will be returning to work 8 weeks after she gives birth. Her husband is an excellent photographer, and captured the new Doctor with her Grandmother Doctor! Ada received her doctorate in marriage counseling at the age of 65.

So do men even think about the work-life-balance today? Do they truly want to share in the raising of their children? I can only hope we have raised a generation of young men who do consider these things. My generation ushered in the pill and free love with its kissing cousin, the ability to file for a divorce because of “irreconcilable differences.” We wanted what they were having; we wanted it all for our daughters. So I’ll leave you with another classic Ephron quote: “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/the-d-word_1_b_779626.html?ref=topbar

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