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| This is me moments after meeting my daughter for the first time, after 16 hours of labor and an emergency c-section... taking Amy Glass's "easy way out." |
At first, reading Amy
Glass’s article criticizing young women who chose to have a family made me want to laugh. Then I
wanted to get violent. And then I wanted
to cry, thinking about the world I have brought my daughter into, where it
seems the more absurd you are, the closer you come to something like fame or
notoriety. For days I thought about
my personal response to this nonsense, and I had to get it out.
For the record, I am thirty years old. I met my husband when I was 23 and was married
at 26. I have a bachelor’s degree and a
master’s degree. By some standards, I
have seen a lot of the world, by others, not very much. By some standards I had
a great start to my career, by others I was puttering around in the meaningless. I decided to leave my job when my daughter
was 4 months old to raise her full time.
Some would applaud that, others (Amy Glass, I am talking to you) would
need to try to hold back their vomit.
As the overwhelming majority would agree, Amy Glass is dead
wrong. Whether or not I fit into her
mold of “young mothers with husbands” she looks down upon, I take offense to
every single word she said. This is why.
It is people like her that led me into a rather productive
but abundantly meaningless life before I met my husband and had my
daughter. People like her that made me
think I needed to live my life like a story, packed full of accomplishments and
adventure. My husband was the first
person who cared about what the most honest parts of my heart had to say, not
the to-do list that had been written on my brain by every Amy Glass trying to
recruit women to close their legs and open their minds to all the world’s
ideas. My daughter was the first person
to look me in the eye and not wonder where I went to college or in what ways I
was challenging myself. Or what my ideas
and opinions are. She knew my smell and
my heartbeat, and that was enough to love me.
Amy Glass, you have it all backwards. Getting degrees, and promotions, and traveling,
and running half marathons are the things I used to do to make myself feel
worthy. I was blowing through that
“to-do list for women who want to feel like they have earned their place in the
world” like an unstoppable rebel force. I
have since realized that not one thing on that list said “be who you
are.” And what I have found in the past
five years is looking two people in the eyes, my husband and my daughter, who
want nothing more of me than that, has been the most difficult challenge of my
life until this point. It has forced me
to look myself more honestly than I ever have before. I began to learn something about all the achievements I was trying to collect. They will never have the
same impact that a person asking you to bare your soul will. They will not be there
to rub your back when you are sick. Or
wipe your tears when you cry. Or sit
with you at the end of your life and listen to you speak openly about your joys
and regrets. They will not remember you,
they will not love you. Your legacy will
not live on through the things you teach them.
They will not notice the small things you do. They will not honor you. They will not breathe life into you the way
that seeing your child take his or her first breath only can. You cannot love a husband or a child in the way you can
love a career or traveling. In a marriage and in motherhood,
you cannot play a part. You cannot hold your
family at arm’s length. You cannot
reveal only the best parts of yourself. For most of my life, this is how I was able to live. Now, every night I thank God for my husband and my daughter, who are
asking for all of me, so I can know what that is, too.
And to address the most laughable point: This is not the
easy way out. In times of stress I think
to myself, why didn’t I just go to law school? Or med school? Or move back to
London after I graduated? I have these
thoughts because they are my retreat. They would have been a more comfortable route for me, because I see them as very concrete and predictable. But I chose to live my life in real time, in
chaos, in truth. To let go of caring
what the Amy Glass’s of the world think of me. I have put down my to-do list,
and I am working on listening to what’s in my heart. Creating my own measures of worth. It has led to many tears and sleepless
nights, but it is an education unlike any other. Had I ever made it to the top of Kilimanjaro,
or the floor of Wall Street, or wherever else you find worthy females, I’m not
sure it would have even happened there.
The freedom isn't in becoming a lawyer or a CEO. Or backpacking solo across Asia. The freedom is in being exactly who you are, and that is the piece that challenges you and takes courage. THAT is the hard way. And for me, taking the hard way will bring me a level of success that is beyond anything I could have planned for. I am not sure what my next step will be, but the courage I have to chase my dreams with my daughter and husband beside me is infinitely larger than without them. The only thing in my life I can predict right now is that I will be happy.
And for the record, I love weddings and baby showers. Being a woman is hard enough and we should
get to indulge a little bit. If that
means my vagina is smaller than yours, so be it.
