"I'm too intelligent to have a child".
I am positive that at some point in my 30 years of wandering often aimlessly around this rock, I would have said this. I was an outspoken child who was quite impetuous when it came to dealing out my strong opinions. Some people might argue that nothing has changed, but I would like to think I have been around long enough to have learnt some tact and diplomacy.
At the very least, I know that I have thought it. And if I am being honest, there are times when I still think it.
I've grown up as part of a generation of women who are told that they can do and be anything they want to. The women who came before us fought hard for the rights we were born with. There were women who said no to the norm. Women who wanted careers and to follow their dreams. Women with gumption and a clear sense of purpose in their lives. Women who I have looked up to my entire life.
I have been lucky enough to be born at a time when I can choose a career over a family OR a career and a family.
But somewhere along the line the notion of having anything turned into having everything. Instead of saying to ourselves 'I can have anything I want', we seem to be conveying this unrealistic concept of having everything that everyone else wants.
If you look for examples of women who have families and executive level positions, you will of course find them. Some have the money to pay for a nanny to mind the children, clean the house and cook the evening meal while they are working. Others have a particularly helpful family networks to support them. Then there are the progressive households where the husband either works from home and/or is the primary caregiver. There does exist women who can do everything and enjoy doing it.
Kudos to these women. When my husband leaves for work in the morning, I am usually found still in bed, snuggled up to my cat, trying to gather the energy just to get up and make an espresso. Granted he does leave early, but the point is that while I am a procrastinating mess who spends 45 minutes researching how to make my own healthier chocolate instead of writing her thesis, these women are running multi-million dollar companies all the while being protectors and defenders of some tiny people.
(For those interested in how to make their own healthier chocolate, I am going to be trying this recipe over the weekend, and I'll post the results to Sundry Sunday).
Do I believe these women deserve more praise than a mother who stays at home to look after her children and doesn't work? Not necessarily.
I won't lie. I am impressed by the women I meet who do it all. Earlier this week, I attended a postgraduate university event on how to complete your research (I will be posting a Stressed Student Saturday article on this later in the week). At the start of workshop, we were asked to say a little bit about ourselves and why we were there. My response went something along the lines of:
"My name is Ebonnie and I am here because I achieved nothing last week. I have been working full time in a demanding position and writing my thesis in the evenings to the detriment of all other things. This was stressful and slow, working full time and trying to hit my deadline were just not playing nice together. So I quit my $100k a year job. In my first week as a full time student, all I did was spend a week staring at my laptop screen, intermittently breaking to do numerous other things that were not my thesis (see Procrastination and the Research Student). So I am here to get tips on how to be organised and focused".
A reasonable and mature response. I had admitted my faults and defeat. I had accepted that I probably needed help if I was to progress my research. After all, I have no idea what being a full time student without a job feels like, since I managed to bubble my way through an undergraduate degree, an honours degree, a postgraduate certificate and half of my MSc while working full time. I felt good about that answer. I was shaking from having to speak to the group (social phobia), but I was confident that the content of my introduction was acceptable.
But within four more introductions, as we went around the room, I felt mediocre again. One of the girls explained that since starting her PhD (ironically on mothers who do it all) she has had two children and also has a part-time position at the university. Here was a living, breathing example of someone who is not doing it all, but is arguably highly intelligent.
A glaring contradiction to the attitude I fostered for so long as a child: if you are intelligent, you can not also be a mother.
Of course you can. 12 year-old me was a bit of an asshole.
My university is full of intelligent, accomplished and dedicated women who happen to also have children. So maybe my assertion that I am too intelligent to have a child is less to do with face value and more to do with common misconceptions that mothers are stupid/unmotivated/boring. Could it be that I'm concerned that I will no longer be perceived as the intellectual one? Will the label of mother outrank all of my accomplishments in life? No longer would I be the singer/songwriter with a Masters degree. Instead, I'd be a mother who used to sing once upon a time. I am sure people who met me in my role as mother would be surprised to hear that I had any degrees let alone multiple.
But are women pushing themselves to do more than we want to in order to satisfy other people? I genuinely believe there are lots of professional women who want to excel at work and have a family. And I don't think this should be condemned. They are no less than inspiring. But I can not help but wonder if there are professional women who have changed their mind, decided that they want to do something else and have a family, and who are pushing themselves too hard in order to avoid being thought of as simply 'a mother'.
A recent study by Satoshi Kanazawa found that for every 15 point increase in a woman's IQ, her likeliness of having children decreases by 21-25%. The Daily Mail published The Women Who Think They're Too Clever To Have Babies, which features sentiments akin to my youthful views on motherhood. In the article Louise states that she doesn't believe you can have it all and that 'To reach your full intellectual potential you need to be childless'. I disagree with this. Neither having nor not having children guarantees success or happiness.
Being childless is obviously the best thing for Louise, but a one size fits all approach to aspirations in life is uninspired at best. Pushing your ideals as the only standard is, in my opinion, immature. We all want varying things out of life. Some people are focused on money. Others are focused on career achievement. And then there are those whose primary goal is to be happy.
There are countless other reasons for our ambitions and the choices we make in life, and it is not someone else's responsibility or right to tell us what is right for us. That is our decision to make and our cross to bear once we make it.
I could probably write an entire post criticising Louise for her flippant and insidious remarks, but I should point out that I do agree with Louise on some of her points including:
"A child would get in my way".
It is off-topic but I think it is important to note that a child can get in the way for a man too. My husband and I have so many hobbies and we really do enjoy spending time together when we get it. It is inevitable that a child would take us away from our hobbies, impede our opportunities at work and limit the amount of time we have for each other.
It does appear that university educated women are less likely to have children. But correlation does not imply causation. Just because many intelligent women do not have children does not mean that women with children are unintelligent.
I often wonder what would happen to my social circle if I was to have a child. Would my friends with whom I have haughtily judged others' procreation with over glasses of wine, cheerfully bonding over our hatred of children and total lack of maternal drive, suddenly decide that despite being an intelligent woman with postgraduate degrees to back that up, I am no longer worthy of their company? Maybe they would feel that I had betrayed them.
Would I abruptly become just another mother?
My husband and I have been getting harassed about producing an heir to our inconsequential and metaphorical throne for some time, and we have only been married for 4 months. This was not unexpected for me, because when I was growing up I learned quickly that the female purpose in life is inexplicably tied to not our biological capacity to have children, but our desire. People feel sorry for the old lady that couldn't have children, but they judge, and often not silently, the woman who just didn't want to have any.
I will definitely be writing about the incessant nagging that other parents do to encourage us to breed, but I will also be writing about something I had not anticipated - childless women, who do not want and/or like children, who judge you for considering the possibility that you may potentially change your mind. In my opinion, the extremist players on both sides of the debate are as bad as each other.
With women like Louise perpetuating the fallacy that having a child is akin to a catastrophic failure at life, it is not surprising that women like me are consumed less by being condemned for not having children, and more by the potential impact the decision to have a child has on your self-esteem and self-image.
