"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.