My Formerly Hot Life (19 page)

When the girls were four, I hit a wall and saw that I had to give up at least some of it to make my life more manageable. Everyone exhibits different symptoms of Having It All syndrome, and here are a few of mine, aside from the aforementioned urge to punch old people.

• You look like crap.
  

• You feel even worse.
  

• You do most of your food shopping at convenience stores—mmm, mini rice cakes and Kraft Singles for dinner!—because you can’t get to the supermarket before it closes.
  

• You are irked when you receive a wedding invitation, because weddings take, like, all damn day! If you’re asked to be in a wedding, you feel that the bride is genuinely inconsiderate.
  

• When a friend suggests that you take some time for yourself, you laugh ruefully. How naïve can one woman be?
  

• You say diva-esque things that would normally never come out of your mouth, like “In what universe would I have time for this?!” and “I’m sorry, but that’s unacceptable,” to members of your own family.
  

• You fall asleep while playing Sleeping Beauty with your kids and they grow hysterical because their magical kiss of true love fails to awaken you.
  

• You break down in tears because the icing on the carrot cake that you ordered for dessert on the one date night you and your husband have in four months is butter-, not cream cheese–based. “It’s like, I. Just. Wanted. Cream cheese. Frosting. Why is that so hard? Is that so much to ask? SOB!”
  

• You become livid when your husband suggests that maybe it’s not about the frosting.
  

• You hate your husband.
  

• You have aphasia for common words, including your beloved children’s names.
  

• It doesn’t matter, because you kind of hate them, too.
  

• But not as much as you hate their babysitter, who gets to spend way more time with your kids than you do.
  

• You’re sort of glad your office has no window so you won’t see that it’s nice out.
  

You can see why I quit my very intense job and took another that was three days a week so I could order bits and pieces of it “All” à la carte, instead of trying to force down the Have It All deluxe platter. Friends at work said I was “brave” for “choosing” to scale back, after I’d achieved so much and may not be able to resume my career at the same level if I someday wanted to. I didn’t feel brave, and I didn’t feel as if I’d had a choice. I felt like I was losing my shit.

It was an adjustment. Adrenaline continued to course through my veins at the same breakneck speed as it had when I needed it to propel me through my day, even though my days were considerably less demanding. At first I didn’t know what to do with the extra electric energy. The first evening after I left my new office and headed to the train, by habit I began mentally plotting the route home and the errands I could knock off along the way—what did I need at the drugstore by the subway, the supermarket on our corner, did we have anything at the dry cleaners, takeout for dinner?—before I realized that I didn’t
have
to do anything but go home and see my girls. For once, there was nothing that couldn’t wait a day or two, because my life now included time in which nothing was scheduled. It was a strange feeling, not simply going from chore to event to obligation, and it made me a little anxious, but at the same time it was nice. I knew I’d done the right thing.

After a couple of months of decompressing, success for me began to include the luxury of being able to finish a thought, watching my girls in ballet class without thinking of the messages I had to return and remembering why I married my husband. I could also sleep at night, and I became a better friend, because I wasn’t surreptitiously ordering groceries from an online food delivery service while on the phone, supposedly helping them process their deepest anxieties. It was only then that I realized I didn’t even want it “All.”

It was hard giving up a huge, important job, though, with the title and the money that came with it. I loved the job that I quit, and I missed being in charge of people who might actually listen to me, as opposed to my kids, who took their orders from SpongeBob. I missed being able to sum up my identity on a business card and slide it across the table, and I missed having the recipient automatically understand that I was someone to take seriously. All those things left a huge career-gal-shaped hole where they used to be. It was difficult to will myself not to care too much about what went down at my new, part-time job, because as a consultant, it was no longer my place to do so. I had to remind myself that I chose this new way of doing things, and that being a less important person in the work world didn’t mean I was in fact a less important human being.

At the same time, though, I felt more relaxed and able to meet the new expectations I’d set for myself, and because of that I did not feel any less successful in life. In fact,
I felt more so. In my case, not being able to have it “All” simply meant that there were too many good things for me to choose from, and I had to be selective for the sake of my sanity. I didn’t see it as a failure, although I know some do.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards!” It cracked me up, because I live and die by that motto at home. If I can’t get the nail out of the wall without making the hole bigger, I hang a picture over the nail and call it a job well done. Resisting the “having it all” mind-set, I found, can’t be seen as settling for less. I think that’s more about being freethinking enough to decide what success means to you, and not buying in to the easiest, quickest definition, the only one that presented itself to me when I was young. Just as there is more than one definition of “hot,” but you don’t find that out until you no longer fit the most obvious one, there is more than one definition of “success,” which you can only appreciate when you’ve lived long enough to have tried a few things on for size.

Success to me for now means thriving in my little niche of the work world, raising kids who are smart and kind and finding a way to laugh several times a day, rather than being a big name high on a masthead. My definition of “success” wouldn’t do it for everyone, of course. It all depends where you started. Strangely, even as well as I did at work, I was never particularly ambitious. I was driven more by the need for a pat on the head than fame or money. I would think that
achieving career success might be harder if you have the kind of concrete hopes and dreams that you are led to believe should be attainable in a linear progression. If you do X, Y and Z, and you want it badly enough, you can be what you want to be. That was never the way I thought, and it is very often not the case, which can be a blow if you’re a Formerly who has done everything right.

The other day I ran into an old friend, Karen, who mentioned a guy she’d set me up with when I was around 25. John was gorgeous—tall, thin, with high, planar cheekbones and long, dark, potential rock-star hair. He was, in fact, a potential rock star, hoping, strategizing and even
planning
on how his life would be different once he broke through. I’d never heard him play, but in terms of the look, he was good to go. I thought he was incredibly hot, and found his dreams for the future charming, if a bit impractical.

The spark got snuffed out over Italian food, when he asked me what my dreams were. “I don’t know … I’d definitely like to get a raise or a better-paying job so I can get a place of my own,” I replied. I was freelancing at a tabloid newspaper at the time, and doing little pieces here and there in magazines. He wasn’t buying it, and pressed me for what he felt sure was my
real
dream, the one that would presumably provide insight into my true self. “Come on,” I remember him saying. “You must have something you really, really want to do.” I told him I didn’t have a gigantic, sparkly, long-term dream like his, that I was more of a follow-the-happiness, day-to-day kind of gal. As I said it, it sounded
unromantic even to me, but it was the truth. I worked at magazines and newspapers, and really wanted to do well, but had no ambitions to run one. I worked with words, but didn’t think of myself as an artist. Such ideas and definitions would occasionally shoot through me, but they never seemed to take hold. They all felt grandiose.

He shook his head in a mixture of disbelief and resignation. “You have to have a dream, Stephanie. You need to dream bigger.”

Wow, did I ever feel like a big old loser at that moment. At 25, part of me thought he was right, that there was something wrong with me for having such low expectations of life. Didn’t everyone have some lofty aspiration? If I didn’t, how would I ever fulfill my potential, whatever that was?

At 42, it’s a question I still ask, but am too busy to spend much time pondering. I have a remarkable husband and two scary-smart little girls who awe me every day with how their little lawyer minds work. I have a job with people I like and respect, an outlet in my blog and other projects, and make enough money to buy my girls the Hannah Montana microphones they crave, because their dream du jour is to be rock stars. (More like Pink than Hannah Montana, Sasha assures me.) I have friends who are extensions of my family. With the exception of an overwhelming baby jones in my early 30s, which felt more physical than anything, none of these things were particular goals of mine.

Still, they make me happy, just as I’d imagine they would
had I set them as benchmarks and then achieved them. Perhaps because I don’t have pie-in-the-sky dreams, or any kind of a bucket list, I’m delighted when things go well. That’s why finding success in smaller things is possible for me.

I wondered about John, though, especially when Karen said the music thing didn’t really work out. We didn’t have time to do a full debriefing, so I don’t know what became of him. I hope that he, too, has learned to appreciate a broader-based version of success. I’ll bet he has—otherwise he’d be a miserable aging rock-star wannabe, and I can’t see him doing that for very long. People tend to upend themselves after a fall, even from a lofty height. A few decades on this planet makes you realize that a diversified success portfolio means that if one aspect of your life is in the shitter, you’re not a total washout.

Like many graduating college seniors, I had little clue what I wanted to do with my oh-so-practical liberal arts degree. I wound up in magazines because it was the best steady paycheck I could envision that didn’t require me to wear panty hose in order to earn. Magazines felt tangible to me, unlike the investment banks and large accounting firms that reached out to college seniors back in 1989 to recruit them. (Note to younger readers: Once upon a time, there were lots of investment banks, and they magically all made money.) I didn’t feel as if the world was my oyster so much as there were only a handful of things I might be good at, and writing was one of them. And ever since that turned out to be
the case, I have become addicted to feeling competent, in a way I never realized could be so gratifying.

Which is probably why it took me only about six days into my maternity leave to know that I didn’t have what it took to be a stay-at-home mom, not that it was a real option for my family, for financial reasons. Granted, I had twins, and that was exponentially harder than I imagine it would be to have one. Still, there was no question that I could not be with the kids all day every day, at least not happily. The lack of structure combined with sheer tedium was grueling, especially on no sleep and with leaky boobs. I tried yoga to get in the live-in-the-moment mind-set, but there were no Mommy/Baby/Baby classes. Meditation was not an option; I’d fall asleep, I was so tired, only to be awoken by one or another crying infant. Xanax would have helped, but I was nursing and so thought better of it. Feeling as if I was a good mom would have required me to give up any semblance of agency and just roll with what the day brought us—the exact opposite skills that had made me so successful at work.

When I went back to work after three months, I was overjoyed to be at my desk with a coffee I could drink to the bottom while it was still hot, and full of admiration for women who could do what I couldn’t. I raced home to see my babies every night (pumped milk in Baggies in a cooler), and appreciated them all the more because I had gone to work. Even now that the girls are older, parenting requires a calm and a divestment from any specific outcome, which
doesn’t come to me easily. I have learned to feel competent as a mom, in my own way, but I still have that “thank God it’s Monday” moment when I drop them off at school. And because I’m older, and have more than one thing in my life that makes me feel successful, I feel less guilty about my need—my desire—to work.

Working-mom guilt is huge for nearly every working mom I know, of course. But while I still have some (like when one of my daughters desperately wants me to chaperone her class trip to the organic farm “like all the other mothers,” and I have to say no), it’s not as crippling as I imagine it would be if I were younger. All the overhyped Mommy Wars silliness feels to me more of a young woman’s battle, one that’s more about identity and feeling useful and successful in the world than about whether there’s a “right” choice or a “right” way to raise children. I’m positive that if I’d had the girls when I was younger, and circumstances permitted me to stay home with them, I would have taken up the banner of Stay at Home Mother and used that same banner to impale anyone who sought to belittle my identity or my contribution to society as such. But as an older mom, with that diversified success portfolio, I don’t feel as though I need to pick a lane. That’s a delicious freedom that makes being a mom much easier.

All of this circumspection doesn’t mean that women my age always feel hunky-dory about all their choices. It seems as though we’re fated to fret, at least a little. My family and I spent one weekend this past summer with my friend Olivia
and her crew, and once the kids were (finally) down, we got to drinking and philosophizing about life. About half a bottle of wine in, Olivia got to musing, in a big-picture kind of way: “I sometimes wonder, could I have been doing something these past years that’s worthy of a couple of column inches in the
Times
when I die? I love what I do, but I’m not changing the world. I always assumed I would when I was younger, but now I think, is it going to happen on my clock?” she said. “Tick-tock, take stock.”