‘I choose to be a mum, not a career woman’

LANA doesn’t want to be on the corporate ladder and miss out on watching her son grow up. She says you can’t have it all.

I ONCE toyed with the idea of a career. I was seduced by career women (mostly) insisting that it’s what I really wanted, that I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t look after my career, that I would look back at all the years I ‘squandered’ out of the work force and with my child as a waste.

Granted I was ‘allowed’ a short break off for birthing and say three months of at home baby-rearing but then, I was told, I had to fulfil my career dreams.

I came really close at one point, during the three years I worked as managing editor for Mamamia. I loved the job, but the idea of a full-on career and working long days — not so much.

It turns out I didn’t have career dreams. I wanted to work, I just didn’t want to pursue a career that kept me from doing the other things I wanted to do. It took me while to realise that this doesn’t make me less of a feminist, it doesn’t mean I’m not a contributing member of society and it certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t work to pay the bills, it just meant that while having a job and earning money is important, it isn’t what defines me.

Hospice nurse Bronnie Ware famously wrote a book entitled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Working in palliative care with people close to death she had heard first hand the regrets of the dying and listed as number two “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” preceded by “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”.

Clearly I’m drawn to that because it legitimises me putting my life before my career but I can’t begin to imagine a life where I would regret not getting that corner office or having my name in lights.

As hideously anti-feminist as it sounds (and it’s not because feminism isn’t all about choices), I want to be able to feed my family with meals that I have prepared in a house that I have made a home. I can do that while I work, I couldn’t do it while I pursued the career dream.

I want to be there when my friends, my family, my sisters and my husband’s siblings need me. I want to be available to my parents and parents-in-law as they age and their time becomes increasingly precious. But they don’t always need me after 6pm, the time that my brief career deemed appropriate to tend to ‘other things’.

But most importantly I want to be part of my son’s life as he grows up, I want to watch him play sport, oversee homework and listen to him tell me about his days as I cart him from school to taekwondo and from there to a mate’s house.

I want to know his friends, I want to be able to be there when he needs me to pick him up from that party and I want to be the one that says “have the party at our house”.
I want to work to achieve all that and then be there to see him enjoy it. I don’t want to be so absorbed by chasing a career that I turn around and find him gone.

It’s clear to me as he grows older and enters the pointy end of the teen years that it’s not going to change just because he’s no longer a small child. A recent study of 1,600 young people by the University of Toronto published in the Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that it is during the teen years rather than at any other time of development that quantity of time spent with the parents is more important than quality.

The study claims that in adolescence more than any other time, “time spent engaged with both parents was associated with fewer behavioural problems, better performance in math, less substance use, and less delinquent behaviour”.

But no study is needed to tell you that it’s not just babies who need their mums. In fact as my son grows older and needs more guidance than formula top ups, more of a springboard than a play mate, more of a presence than a push on the swing, I realise how much more important it is for me and him that I am here and not on a corporate ladder.

More importantly than career progression I want my son to know that he is loved and that I am here for him — literally. I fully respect women with kids and demanding careers, I respect them but I don’t know how they do it.

Success can be measured in more ways than one and I will always consider that I have been a success as a mum. And at the end of the day that is what I chose as my career, and I don’t regret it for a second.

Lana Hirschowitz is a blogger, writer and reforming toast lover. You can follow her on Facebook.