Not so easy for have-it-all generation

A GENERATION of Australian women is about to turn 40 and it is not any old generation. This is the generation that comprises those women, born either just before or slightly after 1970, who were told that they could have it all.

These are the daughters of the Whitlam-era feminists, born to women who had to quit their public service jobs the instant they gotmarried; and to women who had far lesscontrol over their fertility, unless you count abortion.

Their mothers - women now in their 60s - guided this generation toward a different future, one in which opportunities were limitless. They have been able to study, work and travel in the way generations of Australian girls could not. This was the first generation of women able to take out mortgages in their own names.

Then, too, they have had the freedom to enjoy their sexual life (and, yes, it can indeed be a dubious pleasure, and should come with these instructions: be careful with your choices and know that you, too, will be dumped. When it happens, lap it up, for it's an important part of your sentimental education.)

But back to the girls who are now women, approaching the age of reason. They aren't yet done with their adventures, but they are beginning to tell their stories and it's only proper that among the first to so do is Mia Freedman, who helped set the tone of her lively, ambitious generation.

Freedman was an editor at Cleo

(famous for its nude centrefolds of men) and, from the age of 24, of Cosmopolitan. Her memoir, MamaMia, is out this week.

Like many young women of her era, Mia started on the bottom rung and because she was smart and confident, it didn't take long for her to get to the top. She had a strong work ethic, and she wasn't afraid to try new ideas, and nor was she frightened of a woman's desire for more than a life at home.

Some of her generation decided not to have children, or else they didn't meet the right guy in time, but like Mia, most decided they could have children and work too, and were knocked over by the love that flooded their hearts when their babies arrived.

Mia's book is in part about the juggle: pumping breast milk in the corporate bathroom, all the while planning a seminar for 58 other Cosmopolitan editors; or else flying pregnant to New York for a promotion of some kind. And as a reader, you're well into the fantastic busyness of it, and you're enjoying reading about Mia as she settles back to see the ultrasound of her second baby, when you suddenly hear her say: "Is there a heartbeat?" And the girl with the ultrasound probe says: "No, Mia. There's no heartbeat."

The chapter that follows is almost unbearable to read: there is Mia, looking down at her swollen belly, and looking at the light that should be flickering on the screen. It isn't flickering, and the words are pounding around the room: No heartbeat. No heartbeat. No heartbeat.

The doctor says she'll have to carry the baby for a week before she can be delivered. Mia says she doesn't want to know whether the baby is a boy or a girl, but then decides she must know, so calls back and is told it's a girl, and the grief comes rolling over her, a second wave, for it's now not just a baby, but her little baby girl that's gone.

Two days after the birth, Mia is in the shower, running hands over her empty womb, and her milk comes in. Her body knows that the baby has been born, but not that she has died.

The loss drove Mia and her husband apart; and there was a long road to walk, much of it in agony, before they found their way back to each other. Two more children have since been born; and so has Mia's new career, as a writer.

Freedman concludes the book by saying, in so many words, that she is stronger not only for what she has so far learned, but what she's lost. In the process, she reveals the emotional depth of the generation of women who were assured that they could have it all, and only over time learned that nothing worth having comes easy.

If you had to summarise Freedman's message - and we should, for girls like my niece, Ruby, who yesterday turned 16 and got her first pair of heels for the road ahead - it would be this: life is hard, but not so hard as to not be joyous. Don't be daunted.

You can follow Caroline at www.twitter.com/overingtonc