There I was at transition point in my life, trying to make thoughtful choices about my future that would be driven by my true goals and desires, and digging out of a long stretch of intense anxiety and constant feelings of inadequacy, punctuated by having been denied tenure. Though there was a part of my ego or some part of me that lived in my brain and my sense of self-importance and my sense of pleasing others and meeting the judgement of others that felt tenure denial as a blow, the underlying undercurrent that I could absolutely feel deeply, bodily, was relief. I finally had permission to leave this role that had been the source of so much anxiety, conflict of values, and strife in my heart. On the other hand, here I was being forced out of a post that had defined so much of me- my time, my effort, my sense of self- for so many years.
During the early part of the new year 2021, I picked up Martha Beck’s book, the Joy Diet, looking for some practical wisdom on how to start clawing back some joy from the stress and anxiety strewn landscape it felt like my life had become. Don’t get me wrong, time with my kids was and always has been utterly joyful; as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been so incredibly fortunate that however I’m wired, I have been able to shut out work demands and truly be present and joyful when I am with my kids. However, the rest of the time, the “work” time, I am a ball of anxiety struggling to get it all done without losing time with my family, struggling with how to finish this grant proposal so my kids are only spending 8.5, not 9.5 hours, away from me, at daycare today.
One of the first few steps in the book is to really get honest with one’s self about your real desires. With a sense of humor and a very clear aptitude for understanding, distilling, and excavating through human foibles, she points out that a desire might pop into your mind, and even if it seems silly or superficial (e.g., “I really want a cheeseburger”), that if it comes up consistently or prominently, it’s worth picking up that shiny pebble and seeing where it might lead. For me, in the fall of 2020, I had this persistent desire for one of the lovely necklaces that have become popular recently, that feature coin-shaped pendant embossed with a particular goddess, or archetypal, famous female figure of history. I am decidedly not someone who wears much jewelry (I have 2 pre-school aged boys who use me as a jungle gym, thus all hanging adornment is an injury waiting to happen). I am also decidedly not someone who enjoys shopping or buying things, or even browsing in online shopping spaces. It always seems a waste of time. So it was bizarre and inexplicable that I kept finding myself perusing the website full of these necklaces featuring goddesses. Moreover, it was bizarre that I found myself having this absurd inner battle over which goddess necklace to buy. There was Athena, the patron goddess of heroic endeavor who was a fighter, an icon of wisdom, of the fierce and well-educated. Then there was Artemis, a goddess who represented care for wild nature, protection of the young, an icon of nurturing and motherhood.
Thanks to Beck’s prompts in the chapter on desires, I picked up this pebble to see where it led, because it was just such a weird looking pebble, out of the ordinary in my life. It didn’t take long for it to dawn on me. Seriously? An 10 yr old playing pretend psychoanalyst could’ve sorted this one out quicker, it was so obvious and so weird that this was how my subconscious desires and conflict were desperately trying to get my attention. I had spent years feeling like 2 different people, one in the workplace and one at home. At home, I found myself a natural at motherhood (Note: this does not mean perfect! This just means I loved every stinky, sleepy, stressful minute of it). As someone who long thought I did not want to be a mom, I found it came instinctively and with so much pleasure once I got past the postpartum anxiety, a topic for another post. I enjoyed spending time, caring for, planning the details of caring for my then infants, now toddlers/preschoolers. Yet in my workplace, there seemed to be no room for being that person and the smart, educated professional. Instead my experience was that I had to keep that under wraps, it seemed unacceptable to appear to be anything other than a fiercely competitive uber intellectual raking in the grant dollars and cranking out the prestigious publications no matter the cost, in time, in attention, to family. Somehow, I got the message that I couldn’t be both of these things, not at the same time. I somehow got the message that they were mutually exclusive. That if I was one, I could not be the other. That if I was one, I had to hide the other part of me that I knew was in there, to pretend it wasn’t there. All this pretending, all this jockeying over identity, was driving this ridiculous obsessive indecision about a necklace. I think my true self wanted to show itself to the world, to be authentically myself, but yet somehow I felt that I got the message that I couldn’t be all of these things and more and so I couldn’t figure out which “woman” I was.
I don’t know why I thought this. Maybe it’s just me, but I have more than a sneaking suspicion it’s not. I can’t point to a moment when someone told me I could only be x OR y. Maybe in part it come from my own inner struggles. But I do think that at least in part it came from message and pressures from the outside. From culture. From my workplace. From the way we describe and label women. From the way we talk to and about women, at least in some professions and cultures. I wonder how pervasive this sort of identity crisis is among women. I wonder if men struggle with this nearly as much as I sense women might.
I have spent the last few months trying to reconcile, to integrate, the various aspects of who I am that may cross and span and encircle and veer from these archetypes. This is what inspired the blog name- we all contain multitudes, we should all feel open and entitled to contain multitudes, but my sense is that women and especially women who become mothers, may struggle to hold on to these multitudes inside them as they navigate family and career.