Having it all: Is it possible to have children and a high powered career if you are a woman?

In the year 2018,  many of us would have thought that the question of whether a woman could have a family and a career would have been sorted.  In the 1980's, the idea of being able to 'have it all' was highly promoted.

Mothers face disproportionately more difficulty in the workplace than fathers.  Many women who are trying to make the decision whether to have children or not are very aware of the struggles faced by mothers in the workplace.    For women who are in high commitment or high achieving careers which can be all consuming, the idea of adding to that the all consuming nature of having children can be  inconceivable.

A former client who reads my blog sent me a link to this article  Can women really have a career and a family? written by Cosmopolitan magazine editor Farrah Storr.  It's a personal story of how she felt she had to make a choice between a high flying career and having a family.   The irony of her situation was the Cosmopolitan promoted the idea of women being able to 'have it all but when she was offered the position, she felt that she had to close the door on motherhood.

I took the job. It was relentless. In the beginning, at least. The hours were long. The team, quite understandably, suspicious. On my first day, I got word that one of the longest-serving members of the team had resigned. (In protest? I wasn’t sure.) Three months later, almost 80 per cent of the team had followed suit. And so, with just six remaining members of staff I knuckled down, worked longer and harder than I had ever done in my entire career and tried to think: what did young women want today?  I never made the IVF appointment. Instead, I simply went home one evening and nervously addressed my husband. “I’m not sure I want this enough to risk everything else we have,” I said.

He looked at me, touched my hand and said simply, “I’m so glad you said that. Neither do I.”

And so, as I headed into my 37th year, we finally closed the window, pulled down the blinds and laid to rest any notions about a family and thus “having it all”. I could, I decided, be OK with having it all-ish.

For Farrah, there was a sense of acceptance that came with her decision which came with the realization it is OK to let go of the dream of 'having it all'.

It is possible for all women to combine a high flying career and having children and I work with clients to look at how they might make this work.  An important part of this is exploring how they can ensure male partners can be engaged to support them if they decide to go down the route of having children.  The role of men in this question is often not explored and it's something that I hope to address in an upcoming blog post.

Finally, we need to look at what it means to 'have it all.'   Is having it all merely a tick box list of things that we want to have or achieve?  Maybe we need to re-define the term to mean having all the love, acceptance and compassion for ourselves and others around us... a state of being rather than a prescribe list of things that we must have.