Not Quite Betty Crocker

Martha Beck grouped Dr. Laura with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, noting that certain public personalities want only agreement, not real discussion.

I listen to Dr. Laura because she’s on talk radio during lunch hours and that’s when I’m usually in my car.  I’d prefer Dave Ramsey, but he’s not on, and I can’t handle music sometimes.  I think that’s the most dangerous kind of influence, actually – the kind that surrounds your consciousness rather than being invited in.

I listen to Dr. Laura but admire Martha Beck, so I had some soul-searching to do.

~~~

Over the past couple years, every assumption I had about my life and role as a wife has been tested.  My husband is not like my previous lovers – he was raised by a stay at home mom, grew up in the generally conservative South, had always been the primary earner and decider in his relationships.  And I’m not like his – I’m the primary earner in my life, have lived in big cities, alone, and have always made all my own decisions.  I was raised by a divorced mom and involved dad, never felt particularly maternal myself, and was only sure that I never wanted to be left without options.

I never ever for one moment considered being a stay-at-home-mom.  Not even once.  In fact, I was pretty convinced I’d fail, hating every minute and resenting my kids for trapping me in an endless cycle of tasks I hate.  My ex-husband declared early on that he’d love to be a stay-at-home-dad; our path was set.

Then I got divorced and married a Southern man.  He never explicitly said he thought I should stay at home to raise our kids, but he mentioned he always thought his wife would.  Once.  In the first six months we were dating.  But it stuck with me and I began to imagine he wanted me to be that kind of wife, whatever “that” was.  I never specifically decided to consider the option, but between my assumptions about his wishes and regular doses of Dr. Laura, I started to wonder.

~~~

Wondering is good.  Options are good.  Assuming your path is set for whatever is reason isn’t.  So I started to consider the benefits of staying home with my children, paying attention to the choices made by other women, looking again at my childhood and my mother’s choices. 

But more importantly, I got a better sense of myself.

When I first moved away from the home I’d shared with my ex-husband, I was surprised to learn new things about myself.  It was like getting to know myself all over again. I discovered that I liked to cook, couldn’t stand elaborate patterns, preferred blank walls to mismatched paintings.  Who knew?

Similarly, I was surprised to find that I liked the idea of staying home with my kids, at least for a little while.  I was bewilderingly unable to consider leaving my husband to parent alone, even for a week, and not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t imagine it.  And the stuff that made me whimper in fear related to house-management, not child-raising.

Learning is good.  Paying attention is good.

~~~

I had a cushy stay-at-home job for the past few years, one where I decided what I worked on and how much progress I made on any given day.  I hated it.  Without external and somewhat objective evidence of my worth (both to my company and on a personal level), I floundered into self-consciousness and doubt.  Despite the best efforts of my husband, best friend, and even (the horror) my boss, I continued to feel useless and unnecessary.  I obsessed over paint colors and fireplaces and wedding plans because at least those tasks seemed clearly defined.

This was me, minus the large team:

And the more responsibility I had for running a large team, trying to hit many goals at once, the less work I did. Honestly, I just didn’t know what to do. I was outside my core strength.

And I know this:  the first sign that you are outside of your strengths is when you can’t make yourself do the work you need to do.

So I changed jobs.  Sort of. {Meaning I will be changing jobs if HR gets it together and gets me an offer, but I’m doing it already anyway.}

And now this is me:

I am great in that phase of a business–thinking, philosophizing, finding holes in markets, finding holes in ideas. I never give up. I always have another idea, and I don’t mind feeling lost day after day, week after week.

In any office, employees gravitate to the job each should be doing, no matter what the titles are. Sometimes we gravitate to a job and it’s not available, and we go nuts doing something we shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes we gravitate to that job and it’s such a good fit for us that we do it even without a title.

A lot of people say they should be doing a job they do not have the authority to do. Here’s some news, though: You’d be doing it already if you were great at it. Ryan Healy is now Chief Operating Officer at Brazen Careerist because he’s already shown he can do the job. That’s how you get serious promotions:  doing the job first, in an outstanding way.

And now I’m back to the me I knew – the kindly ass-kicking, embarrassingly confident, unflinchingly capable me – and I’m scared.  My husband only knew the cushy-job me and has already remarked on how different I seem when I come home from a work trip.

I knew this was going to happen.

Because I am different.  When I know what I’m doing, I know it – and I love it. 

~~~

My first semester in college, I took macro-economics with a professor known for chewing up and spitting out freshmen.  At the end of the semester, just before the final exam, I dropped by her office to find out my exam scores… for the entire semester.

“I’m here to find out my exam scores for the semester, please,” I said.

She sneered a bit, pulled up my paper file (1997, people!) and suddenly, her demeanor changed.

“Oh!  I didn’t expect this.  Most people who don’t know how they did are failing.  You got a 100, 100, and 98.  Why didn’t you know that?”

I didn’t know that because the only thing that happened during the 8:30 am class following an exam was that you got your test back. I preferred to sleep in, confident I’d done well.

~~~

I have this new job and I love it, but I don’t want to tank my relationship again.  I’m trying to be cognizant that other people don’t care as much about my job as I do, that my husband doesn’t yet recognize that my bluster is to counteract my worries, that I have to learn to leave work at work for the sake of home.

And I’m a little bit overwhelmed to be reminded how my preferences affect so many futures.  It’s the same sense of responsibility I feel when I hear the phrase, “Happy wife happy life,” - like, wait a minute, now my happiness has to carry the weight of everyone else’s?  Are you kidding me?

But I’m grown up now, or on my way there, so I remind myself that nothing is black and white.  I can want to stay home with my kids for a few years and still go back to work.  I can NOT want to stay home with my kids and still have a great relationship with them.  I can define my future however I want.

Or, to be more accurate, we can define our future however we want.  My husband and I had a chat about accepting each other’s influence, and contrary to our public personas, I seem to take too much influence and he might take too little.

I won’t be the wife he thought he would have, but neither is he the husband I thought I would have – nobody is.  We all discover somewhere along the way that reality isn’t quite like we’d expected…

… and that’s okay. 

~~~

So my next step is to challenge my assumptions about my husband.  Somewhere along the way I defined myself as the “keeper of all things household,” so I worried about hiring a housecleaner and dog walker and making freezer meals when my travel schedule got crazy.  I had this idea that things would fall apart because I’d be too busy to deal with them.

Turns out I didn’t “deal” as much as I “pondered,” so there wasn’t much left undone and my husband stepped in and took over what was.  We’re both happier that way, actually, because he’s much more the Doer and I’m much more the Stress Out and Worry While Not Doing-er.  (My truck insurance finally got moved and my tags are getting renewed and the dog’s medicines are all refilled.  In a week.)

And now I’m thinking about life with kids in a city far, far from my company’s headquarters.  We don’t want to move, so what does that mean for me, my career, my family, my husband, our children? 

What if I lived somewhere else for one week a month, leaving my husband to care for an infant full-time?  Why not? {His family is local so they could pitch in, and yet, I feel weird about that, even though I wouldn’t bat an eye if the situation was reversed.} What if we all lived somewhere else for half the month, packing up and moving cross-country every few weeks?  Why not? {Not sustainable past infancy, but in the short-term, maybe.}  What if we moved? {We like this area, my husband is starting a four-year degree program in the fall, and waaaaa, I don’t wanna!}

What if, what if, what if?

~~~

The best part about being a grown-up is seeing life clearly and still thinking it’s fantastically exciting.