"Working Mom" or just plain "Mom"?

As I become older I have noticed that I am beginning to more seriously consider the larger aspects of adulthood such as marriage and raising a family (not to say that I am thinking of settling down anytime soon). However, as I consider myself to be a very self-sufficient, independent girl who is concerned with having a successful and fulfilling career in the future, I wonder if sometime down the road that career will take a back seat to my decision of having a family later.

As I picture both my husband and myself to have full-time careers by the time we have kids, I cannot help but think about who will be the one more willing to sacrifice time at work, or their job completely, to take care of our kids at home. I understand that I could be the “working mom” who writes up performance reports and sets up year-end meetings whilst making sacked lunches for her kids and attending parent-teacher conferences. However, I would not be too eager to become the “working mom” so soon after giving birth as I have heard how crucial it is for there to be a stay-at-home-parent during the first years of a child’s life and that the mother-child relationship may be adversely impacted by sending children to daycare too early. These findings force me to think of the repercussions of the particular absence of the mother figure and leave me with the sense that I would want to cultivate my personal relationship with my children by establishing a positive engagement with them in the early stages of their development. So maybe when the time comes to start raising my children, I might take it upon myself to ensure that there is that secure mother-child relationship before sending them off to daycare.

As I feel that this would most likely be my position on the matter regarding raising a family, I am reminded of a specific camp of women who are reluctant to put their careers on hold for such circumstances. These women adhere to feminist philosophies of breaking the stereotypical female figure whose sole purpose in life is to be a loving wife, keep a clean house, and to care for the children. To them, women who fulfill or happen to fit this image, which is dismantled by Julia Robert’s character Katherine Watson in Mona Lisa Smile and dramatized in the movie The Stepford Wives, diminish their attempt to be taken seriously in the professional world and undermine the demonstration of their capabilities outside of motherhood and being a wife.

Maybe I’m setting feminists back a few years by choosing to inconveniently "fulfill" this societal imposition on women to be nothing but wives and mothers. As I know my skills and talents, however, and the fact that I indeed can be successful if I chose to be so, I would have no problem coincidentally fitting these roles for a certain time as my choice to put my family before my personal ambitions communicates my little concern with how I would be perceived by others versus my greater concern with how my children would be brought up.

In Search of Inspiration

A little more than two years ago my friend attended school at the Academy of Art in San Francisco for graphic design. Although she was doing what she loved, that is learning about and using new practices for her future career, she was four hundred miles away from her friends and family, people in her classes were not very friendly or sociable, and she lived in the heart of a city where she was always cold and constantly dealt with catcalls and unwelcome glances from passersby. She was lonely in San Francisco and decided to move back to warm southern California where she supplemented her academic city experience with the online classes that her school offered.

I am no artist, but this particular artist friend of mine talks about how important it is for artists to be inspired by their surroundings/environment in order to produce quality and meaningful artwork. Now that she has been here for two years after coming back from San Francisco, she is contemplating going back because, as she claims, “[she is] not inspired here.” I guess I can attest to that seeing that we both feel that there is a lack of artistic passion, or maybe passion at all for that matter, amongst our social circle of friends and acquaintances. It seems as if none of these individuals have any strikingly noticeable interests or convey any sense of passion for a pastime or particular issue. We feel that we are always doing the same things, going to the same places, meeting the same kinds of people, and discussing the same issues day in and day out. My friend feels that she is in need of inspiration and that she isn’t necessarily getting this from spending her time here at home. As everything and everyone around us appears to be static and unchanging, we now associate a sort of circuitous, monotonous lifestyle with the term “the OC bubble” (as I believe we are justified to say as we are 22-year natives of Orange County. However, we may be wrong in our assessment as I am sure many other people consider their hometowns to be just as monotonous and boring.) Despite my friend’s difficult experience in San Francisco, she now feels that it is in her best interest to go back to “real school” as she wants to break free from her somewhat stagnant development here and as there are better job opportunities for a graphic design career as well as greater exposure to graphic and visual media in a large city such as San Francisco.

Although I am somewhat saddened by the news that my friend is most likely moving back to San Francisco, I understand her decision as I too believe that she will be more focused in an environment where she has maximum exposure to both her academic and career interests. This change in surroundings seems to be more beneficial to her personal, spiritual, and professional development and I know that this is what she wants for herself. But despite one’s initiative to help stimulate one’s personal growth, there are times when even family and friends are not supportive of one’s decision to move away from home. They find it unnecessary to leave behind everything that you’ve known all your life and to leave behind your loved ones who have been there for you since the beginning. I have found that this is especially true for close-knit, more traditional families where, in their culture, family is the most important social entity where compromising those ties by any means is a serious issue. As some may find that they must never leave their home towns in order to support their families and to avoid creating possible distance between them and their friends, they, in turn, cloister themselves from all other opportunities that are available to them outside of the communities in which they have lived for their entire lives.

I believe that parents, family, and friends fear that when people move away to “find themselves” or to pursue better opportunities for school or their career, they fear that they will become so involved with their new life that they will forget all about “home” and will never come back. Although this is possible, I hope that loved ones, as well as the individual considering moving away, will recognize how extremely beneficial it is for people to explore areas outside of what they are already familiar with so as to experience new people, places, and situations that will help them learn more about themselves, their interactions with others, and the other people and issues which exist in the world outside of their home town, while still being faithful to where they came from.

Sometimes we must learn how to go outside our comfort zones and let go of that which we fear might never return to us in order to do what is not necessarily best but what may be better for us or our loved ones. And when we do depart from home and from our family and friends we must never neglect or dismiss where we grew up and the people that helped us become who we are today.

"Tell me what you don’t like about yourself"

If there are any Nip/Tuck fans out there, you’ll recognize this inquiry as what plastic surgeons Dr. Troy and Dr. McNamara use to initiate their client consultations. The popular television show Nip/Tuck dramatizes the lives of both Dr. Troy and McNamara, their families, and their plastic surgery clients by means of sexual trysts, blackmail, incest, murder, and other twisted plot development schemes. The program, while undermining the veneer of aesthetic refinement by scrutinizing the dark side of plastic surgery, comments upon the American conception of beauty and how society today has the ever increasing ability to construct this ideal at a negotiable cost.

I myself have considered plastic surgery on several occasions and I have wondered if such physical enhancement would distort what others thought about me. I worried if my friends and family would be disappointed in my decision to resort to such drastic, artificial beautification most likely brought on by societal and media pressures to achieve the American image of what is beautiful. Then I wondered if their initial alarm and objections would be overcome by the sheer normality and commonness of plastic surgery itself. Aside from others' reactions to my hypothetical decision, I wondered if by going through with any kind of plastic surgery if I would be subjecting myself to the public exploitation of my, and hundreds of other young men and women’s, way of gaining greater self-esteem as I would become a product of a billion dollar industry which profits off of, and possibly manipulates, people’s insecurities. Thereafter, I would belong to a not so select group of “plastic happy” consumers who look to going under the knife or a facial injection of poisonous substance for a quick pick-me-up. Or worse, I would be classified as every other California girl who wanted a little extra so that she could compete with the other beautiful women and their identical lips, breasts, noses, stomachs, and asses.

There’s only one solution to this problem: either be happy with what you have or find a doctor skilled enough to make everything look amazingly real. Then move to another country, change your name, and erase your memory like how they did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because let's face it, once you go under the knife for reasons of pure vanity you will be forever branded as partly or even altogether fake.

"I’ve learned how to drop friends"

I know. It sounds pretty harsh right. That’s what I first thought when I heard my co-worker mention this to my other co-worker the other day. Our co-worker, and for the sake of anonymity lets call her Megan, had come to my other co-worker, lets call her Christine, and I for advice regarding her current friend situation. Megan began to realize that her circle of friends was increasingly excluding her from social activities, ignoring her attempts to spend time with them, keeping secrets from her, putting her down for spending too much time working/studying/being on board for her club, and basically was shutting her out of their group. What Megan wanted to gather from us was whether or not she should finish college a year early because of what had happened to her and her friends.

I of course being a very strong supporter of the make-the-best-
out-of-college-because-they-very-likely-are-the-best-years-of-
your-life-and-why-are-you-in-a-rush-to-leave-school-because-
once-you-enter-the-working-world-you-will-miss-college-terribly
mindset, I told Megan that she should not finish school or be swayed to consider leaving college early simply because she had chosen the wrong group of friends. What Christine and I had laid out in black and white for Megan was that her friends were not even friends to begin with. We told her that if these so-called friends of hers couldn’t appreciate her for who she was and didn’t have the decency to be honest and upfront about any qualms they might have had with her, then she should either: 1) find a new group of friends or 2) learn how to devote a smaller amount of time to these people.

When we explained to Megan that she was wasting her time on them, Christine stated that Megan had simply outgrew [her] friends." I had never heard that statement before and, until that moment, I had never considered the fact that some people really do outgrow one another at certain junctions in their lives. It’s funny how the people with whom you once felt the most profound connections and who you embraced wholeheartedly because they spoke the same language as you, because they shared the same beliefs and perspectives regarding people and life, because they would never think any less of you if you did or said something wrong, because you could go to them for anything since you never had to worry about whether or not they were judging you or your motives…it’s funny how you can suddenly feel distant and all-together different from the people who you have come to consider and claim as your best friends. This distance, however, sometimes brews over time and may be reinforced by individuals’ change in goals or values, disapproval of a particular lifestyle, or awareness to attitudes and behaviors which you have outgrown and with which you no longer wish to associate yourself. In Megan’s case, it seems that she had outgrown her friends’ more frivolous concerns as she conducted herself in a more mature manner than her acquaintances.

Christine had explained to us how she had “learned how to drop friends” as she had, many times, purposefully separated herself from old friends who she felt were not motivating her to move forward with her life and were not helping her to become a better person. Christine’s reasoning helped me see that in order to better yourself it may be necessary to remove the negative influences in your life that hinder your goals for success or keep you from achieving a more productive, healthier, happier, etc. lifestyle which you have set out for yourself. And, unfortunately, if the people with which you surround yourself do not support you in the things that you do and do not help bolster your personal development, then you may have to walk away from those familiar faces and, instead, associate yourself more closely with others whose influence helps to lead you in the direction which you want.

The question of loyalty, however, comes to mind especially when you consider distancing yourself from friends of many years. In the “Importance of Friends” study from the Journal of Adolescent Research, it mentions how friends offer encouragement when we experience self-doubt and difficulties in school... so it’s not easy to forget all the good times and dismiss those who have helped you throughout adolescence, divorces, break-ups, illness, and accidents, despite your now different interests and concerns. Some say that people are defined by whom they associate themselves with. I share the opinion that people are, more so, defined by their actions. And some may find that cutting all ties to friends is a drastic and selfish means of bettering yourself as a person. Whether or not you decide that it is necessary to sacrifice your friendships in order to be where you want in life later, you should determine whether losing those friendships is a large or small price to pay for personal growth.

“Never let anyone change who you are”

I heard Donald Trump say this to a live audience on “The Millionaire Inside” the other day. Although he gave this advice within the context of how to be successful and how to achieve one’s goals, it reminded me a lot of how I used to think about people in general. Before, my belief was that people should always accept others for who they are and that people should never change themselves to please others. Although I held on very strongly to this frame of mind, I’ve recently started to consider how the individual, regardless, either intentionally or unintentionally changes himself as a result of complaints from those closest to him who are more directly affected by his behavior or tendencies, to gain approval from certain people or from his peers, to create a persona which he believes will better contribute to society or those around him, to genuinely better himself, to relieve some sort of dissatisfaction in his life, or other various reasons.

I think its easy for people who are very confident and sure of themselves to adhere to this mentality of “never let anyone change who you are.” Its interesting, however, how this mindset can be drastically challenged when you encounter people who shatter all which you once held to be true about yourself and you begin to ponder whether or not the brutally honest criticisms which you are being bombarded with really do apply to you. If you choose to refute these criticisms you remain in a state of control, and possibly denial, rather than self-doubt. You can continue to keep your head up and not let anyone get the best of you. However, if you choose to accept these criticisms as valid and true you may experience a self-awareness to your flaws and may suddenly feel the need to “improve” yourself due to the fear of possibly being a tragically flawed, malicious human being. At times you may have to make the decision of whether or not to own up to your mistakes and personal habits. You can refuse to accept the truth about yourself and retain your convenient self-perception and esteem, or you can recognize your faults and possibly leave yourself vulnerable to further scrutiny and a loss of sense of self. This vulnerability is undoubtedly painful but can be extremely rewarding later as it will allow you to recognize the areas in which you can improve and will help you better understand the meaning of humility and open-mindedness.

But coming back to my earlier point, when that choice of leaving yourself vulnerable leads to the foundation of your person being considerably diminished, that is when you begin to doubt yourself and your actions and you struggle with the idea of whether the change that you choose to initiate for yourself is changing for the better or simply changing for someone else. But then again, who said we have to change ourselves to begin with? And what are our reasons for doing so?

At times change is inevitable but I think it is important that we make the distinction between improving upon our personal faults while coming to accept these flaws as apart of who we are versus changing ourselves entirely to fit others’ preferences and, consequently, abandoning the person who we have come to be.

Introlude

I decided to entitle my blog after Robert Frost’s poem as it embodies the notion of choice and how the individual, at times, makes decisions of which he or she is not entirely certain. Sometimes we don’t know where the choices we make will lead us but sometimes venturing into the unknown and putting oneself in uncomfortable situations is the only way to self-discovery and personal growth. This blog will discuss various issues of change, resistance to and intentions for change and the related topics of identity and self-definition. Stayed tuned.