Wife and I are talking about the nature of "career women" and the way it always seems to end. I've had a few anecdotal encounters recently that I'd like to share, and some thoughts from our conversation on the matter. 🧵
First of all, we dodged this ourselves. My wife was a woman with a career. A military officer with a masters, both of us left active duty for the guard and met each other there. She had a hard time finding and keeping a job tiered to her education.
We moved out to Texas a decade ago when she got an oil job, my civilian line of work is one where I can pack up and find a job or work anywhere. She had a good run there for a year or two, and the oil crash happened and she got cut.
Her prior job experience with the military really only lended itself to undesirable work. Living overseas as a contractor, traveling constantly, or getting a government job in Virginia or DC, which neither of us wanted.
Our first child was born not long after she lost her job.
Our first child was born not long after she lost her job.
I had asked for a raise at the place I was working and got shot down, and we had a mortgage and a baby on the way, and a lifestyle configured for a dual income. I was sweating bullets. I quit my job and took an IT contracting job, deferring my taxes so we could stay afloat.
My wife found a full time National Guard job in Sacramento, and we didn't really have any other options. We tried selling our house, market was bad at the time. Ultimately rented it out for the year which would be a blessing in disguise.
I hit the ground running and was working in a new job I'd used networking to get before she even started hers. We had an overpriced apartment in a suburb of Sac, and a 3 month old that we were forced to put in daycare. The rent at the TX house barely covered the mortgage.
I'll spare the details but the job my wife was able to take, she was able to take because it was terrible. The workplace was in shambles and full of some pretty shitty people. Bad leadership, corruption, illegality, etc. This year was a huge strain on our marriage.
Because I was very happy with my work, my boss was an old friend of mine, I'm good at what I do and was an asset in an area that suffers massive silicon valley brain drain for tech workers. Meanwhile my wife hated her job and we had an infant.
Wife and I made about the same, but obviously she did more housework, more child rearing, we weren't really balanced in how much load we were carrying. Our infant son suffered for it, he was way too young for daycare. Got scratched up a few times by other kids, etc.
By the end of that year, I could see what this state of affairs was doing to her health. I resolved that hell or high water, I was going to get us out of there. We didn't renew the lease with our renters (who were terrible, being a landlord sucks) and I got a job back in TX.
We've been way happier in the years since. She's never gone back to work besides the national guard, once a month. Though she still feels all this social pressure to go out and work and I nip it when she brings it up. Our 2nd child makes it uneconomical anyway.
But beyond that, I've seen this "girlboss burnout" in both my friends wife, and the wife of a family member recently. Both are therapists. Once they had children, these women couldn't slow down when they needed to. Their marriages were burning the wick at both ends.
One of the husbands has a high powered job and makes drastically more money while the other has a lower end job than his wife. The latter just got up one day and decided it was over after their second child and years of struggle. He told her he didn't love her anymore.
In my opinion he felt emasculated, he didn't make the money for it to be viable for her to stop working, not that she would have anyway. For the first man, his wife just started diving all the way into work and neglecting the family despite them having plenty of money.
Ultimately in both of their cases, these women developed breast cancer. It is my suspicion that this massive stress played a role, trying to maintain the girlboss schedule while mother to two children.
And what I notice is that the girlboss instinct sort of assumes that husbands are interchangeable in doing all the same work a home maker would do when most men are not wired that way. Housework and parenting is *rarely* an even 50/50, it's just the way people work.
The husbands essentially became the shit magnet for this stress. Children have a lot of needs, they need a household. Running a household is a full time job in itself if you're doing it right. And fathers as a general rule aren't wired to do more than fill in temporarily.
In both cases, the cancer was something of a wakeup call. Both women are in full remission. Both of them wrote an article describing the experience. The one with the husband who makes more, describes how it was the wake-up call she needed to do what she refused to, to slow down.
She described taking her kids to school and packing their lunches, and spending time with them, more in the year she fought cancer than the rest of their lives put together. It felt gratifying to see her echoing all the things her husband told me in frustration the last few years
For the other woman, I don't know how it's going to go. Her and her husband are separated still, but the need for him to pitch in when she got cancer brought them back on good terms and working as a team. I'm not sure they'll get back together, but she got some perspective.
But in her case, I'm not sure she'll learn her lesson. Without her husband it's not like she has the incentive or ability to stop working. Her article about her cancer experience almost entirely kept referencing how much she loved her career, over and over again.
I think we're going to see more of this burnout among millennial women who actually managed to both get married and have kids, who are still in the workplace in demanding careers. It's a part of their self-perception that many of them refuse to let go of.
And while some families can rock the two income household with kids and make it work, it just feels like many of them are on borrowed time. It doesn't look uncommon to see that raising kids in daycares or with nannies is just a bandage on the actual problem.
Children need mothers, and husbands need wives. The pattern that seems to anecdotally emerge to me is that between a career, a marriage, children, and a household, the center can never hold and something has to give.
It feels as if women in this situation have two choices, to try and hold all 4 of these things up on their shoulders like Atlas, until their health deteriorates, or to neglect one of them, usually the husband, until the marriage deteriorates.
And when the marriage deteriorates, it's even less likely the woman can then hold up the career, the children, and the household, all by herself.
I know this much, my wife ain't going back to work and I gladly pay through the nose and work my ass off to keep it that way.
I know this much, my wife ain't going back to work and I gladly pay through the nose and work my ass off to keep it that way.
This is also an important point. In our case, we've never really had extended family around to help with any of this.
My parents live too far, my in-laws lack the desire. Probably this way for a lot of Americans, which is unfortunate.
My parents live too far, my in-laws lack the desire. Probably this way for a lot of Americans, which is unfortunate.
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