There’s no such thing as having it all

By Katie Roiphe

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent cover story in The Atlantic has electrified people on several continents with the tortured personal revelation that women can’t “have it all”. More specifically, she left her demanding and exciting job at the state department because she wanted to spend more time at home with her teenage sons.

The tone of the piece is odd in that Professor Slaughter seems authentically to feel that she has been tricked into an overly ambitious situation, as if someone very powerful and influential promised her there would be 50 hours in a day, and it turned out there were only 24.

It seems a strangely decadent bourgeois view that feminism, or the culture at large, or indeed anything outside of, say, a car commercial, had ever promised anyone they could have it all. Surely most of us, even in the most privileged, educated classes, know deep down that we can only have a little bit, or we can have this or that, or we can have it all only sometimes and sort of. We also know that in those brief precious moments when we do have it all, it can be taken away from us very swiftly and precipitously.

If anything, it is perhaps the illusion that we should have it all that is at fault, the constant, silly chasing or pursuit of something that does not exist, the impossible and probably flawed ideals of a perfect or healthy life, which makes people unhappier than they need to be. It could be argued that the costs and sacrifices and choices and juggling and impossibility are an important, vital, energy-giving part of one’s days.

Think of the inane language we slip into when this whole topic comes up. “Work-life balance”? Why is balance necessarily good? Isn’t part of the skill or joy of life in the imbalance, in the craziness, in the bizarre or implausible intensity, in the funny conversation you have at six in the morning, when you are hungover, exhausted and trying to get a little work done, and your almost-three-year-old suddenly wakes up and decides to keep you company? (My version of the conversation goes like this. Me: “How is Batman doing?” The almost-three-year-old: “I think he’s feeling a little trapped.”)

I am actually a huge believer in parenting in non-ideal conditions. I am a single mother, with essentially three jobs. My life is pretty chaotic but I have come to see that there is a kind of exhilaration or happiness in the chaos itself, in the impending crisis that is my average afternoon. Rather than expending lots of energy focusing on the various iterations of “it all” I could be having, I prefer to appreciate the bursts and flashes of greatness in the midst of what Winifred Holtby, a journalist in the 1920s, called “the rich unrest of family life”. I prefer to revel in the non-ideal conditions, to embrace the unconventional and to enjoy the freedom of it.

It is not an accident that in the middle of this obsessive public debate about “having it all”, there is simultaneously a critique in The New Yorker of “helicopter parenting”, of over-involvement, of too much time spent supervising and otherwise trying to engineer a perfect environment for children. This luxurious time Prof Slaughter fantasises about giving to kids, this lavishing of extra attention and monitoring may not be precisely what they need. Maybe the answer for a lot of parents is that their children actually need to “have a little less”.

Let’s take a look at the perfect life some of us seem to have in our heads: the organic chicken being grilled outside with heirloom tomatoes, the children imaginatively building cities with aesthetic and educational wooden blocks, the healthy eight hours of sleep, two parents home and hovering in the evening hours. Is this communal cliché, this battering ram of bourgeois normalcy, even worth having in our heads? Or is the perfect life something altogether more original, interesting, arduous, strange?

I think we need novelists to help us with these questions rather than earnest political types such as Prof Slaughter, because they can put us inside that perfect having-it-all scene. Is the husband slipping off in the middle of the grilling to text his lover? Is the wife fixing herself a cocktail to blur her unhappiness about her mother’s dementia? Is the child with the educational blocks wishing his exotic single aunt would fly in from Rome and tell him funny stories?

One of the reasons Prof Slaughter gives for leaving her fancy job is that her 14-year-old son is having problems at school and in life generally. But just as a thought experiment: does having his mother home baking muffins solve these problems or is it possible that the problems persist even with the smell of muffins and the mother in the kitchen downstairs?

Isn’t it possible that the human psyche is too complicated, too messy, too elusive, for problems to be solved by “balance”, by “healthy environments”, by the sheer stubborn fact of physical presence?

You can love your children with a rushed, crazy, passionate, exhausted love, or a calm, rested, balanced, yoga, stay-at-home love, and it will either help or not help.

Unhappiness, in other words, is extremely shrewd, wily and unruly, and takes many forms. It crops up in many and unexpected places, and it is very hard to protect your children from it, even if you do everything according to conventional rules and do not, for instance, take a hard job in another town.

Prof Slaughter, with her crisp political mind, thinks electing a woman president will help to solve the problems she raises, but I think what will help more is embracing the implausible, the complicated, the hectic, the imperfect, the unbalanced and the here and now. What will help is not chasing, desiring, measuring oneself against the tawdry, consumerist, boring, bourgeois fantasy of “having it all”.

The writer is a professor at New York University

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012