In which pretty blonde women have babies (gasp)

Have you read Kate Chopin's The Awakening? If not, you should.

Seriously. Go do it now.

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Have you read it? Great. Let's talk about Marissa Mayer.

Actually, let's not talk about Marissa Mayer. She'll be much more interesting to talk about in a year or so, when we can see if she's managed to jolt Yahoo! into the 21st century. Let's talk about the fact that people are talking about Marissa Mayer's fetus as though it's the biggest piece of news related to her hiring.

Marissa Mayer is, by all accounts, an intelligent technologist, an extremely capable executive, and generally a Web 3.0 star. The biggest news here is that she wanted to work for Yahoo!

But no - we have to talk about how she's pregnant, and how she doesn't seem to think that giving birth will totally destroy her ability to lead an enormous (and enormously struggling) company. What madness!

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Edna Pontellier, the woman who awakens in The Awakening, is a decade younger than Marissa Mayer, and much less intelligent. Oh, come on - you've read the book by now, and you know it's true. She's good at betting on horses, but she's no towering intellect.

In fact, Edna Pontellier doesn't have much in common with Marissa at all. She's got absolutely no experience with the internet, most of her money comes from her husband, she's not very self-possessed or self-confident, and she's terrible at remembering to wear sunscreen. But she resembles Marissa in a few ways, some of them important: she's blonde(ish) and attractive, she is wealthy, and she would like to do more in life than be a beloved and loving mother.

Edna puts it like this:

"I would give up my life for my children, but I wouldn't give myself."

Her friend Adele, a splendid wife and mother, a beauty bent over the sewing of tiny bibs, doesn't understand this in the slightest; but of course, we can hardly blame Adele, since Edna doesn't quite get understand herself either. But we might observe, from a comfortable readerly distance, that Edna would really like to be the kind of parent that her husband is: unquestionably loving towards their children, very considerate of their material welfare, often absent, and beloved in absence as in presence.

Edna wants many things, of course. She wants to be in love, and to be loved, and to remain married to her husband while having sex with rather more exciting men, and to make art - make good art, even - and to run her own household, and to learn how to swim, and to hear great music, and to walk unencumbered down the streets of New Orleans, and to have happy children, and to eat crackers and Gruyere at midnight if she feels like it.

Edna might be greedy and selfish; that's a pretty fair response to her characterization. She makes sometimes astonishing demands on her husband, who is conveniently absent for much of  the story. But it's very important to note that she does not want everything. There are many apparently desirable things that Edna simply does not want.

She doesn't want to be a powerful society woman (although she probably could be). She doesn't want to summer in Paris (although she certainly could). She doesn't want a big, beautiful house (she has one, and leaves it quite willingly behind). She doesn't want a career in banking (which is fortunate, because she certainly couldn't have one) or a massive amount of wealth (which she has no interest in helping her husband acquire). She wants a certain unexpected combination of things, but she's willing to sacrifice a great deal of advantages; she wants a lot, but she doesn't want it all.

She wants, in many ways, less than her husband wants; but it seems she wants too much.



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This is, to my mind, one of the most absurd elements of this whole cultural argument over how women spend their time and when they have their children - from that Atlantic cover story to the reports on Marissa Mayer back all the way through these so-called "Mommy Wars." The desire of certain middle-class or wealthy women to have both children and a successful career has somehow been successfully branded Wanting To Have It All.

Madness! As though a career and children were all the world had to offer. Listen, I have neither a career nor children, and I can promise there are many other things in the world; there are mountains to climb, craft beers to drink, great works of fiction to read; there's art to be made, and chores to be done, and bills to be paid, and I just learned how to make sopes the other day (they were delicious); there are parties to go to and cocktails to learn how to make and crossword puzzles to solve and I am BUSY, okay? I don't know how anybody has time for a career OR a family when there's like five whole seasons of Star Trek to watch.

There are so many different things you can ask from the world: you could want to see every Phish concert live and intoxicated, you could want to get your picture on the cover of Forbes Magazine, you could want to get the most epic neck tattoo of anybody you know, or you could want a quiet, peaceful life on a mountaintop in Nepal. Probably there's nobody on earth who wants all of those things simultaneously; if there is, I kind of admire that person's inner life, even as I regret their constant disappointment with the limitations of the space-time continuum.

But mysterious Nepal-dwelling, neck-tattooed, Phish-loving young executive aside, most of us are really quite okay with the idea that our lives cannot contain all possibilities. Saying that women "want to have it all" suggests a childish inability to comprehend that every decision demands the sacrifice of alternate possibilities. And here's the thing: we all get it.

Yes, of course no one can have it all. But who wants to have it all?

I submit that full-time Phish enthusiasts understand that, in order to smoke as much pot and hear as much Phish as they intend to, they will not be placing themselves on track to be VP at a multinational by the age of 30. And most ambitious young executives appreciate the tragic number of Phish concerts they will have to miss in the pursuit of a higher profit margin,.

We don't want it all. We understand you give up one thing to have another; you do it every minute of your life. But we all fully expect to have more than one thing at a time. This is hardly a revolutionary idea. Both a job as a CEO and an frequently-exercised golf habit; both the responsibilities of president and a loving family; both a rewarding job at a nonprofit and a modest boat, both an income and a career as a poet. To have more things, you simply give up more things; you don't buy a new car, or keep up with five TV shows, or sleep eight hours a night, or eat organic, or take weekends off. You sacrifice the excitement of a city for the cheap price of land in the country, or you live in a 300 square foot apartment for the job opportunities in a city, and either way you can still give up your sushi habit in exchange for a more detailed hobby railroad. There are lots of ways to arrange a life.

The questions are: What do you want? How do you plan to get it? What are you willing to give up in exchange?

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What exactly is so excessive about Edna Pontellier's demands on life, anyway? Her artistic ambitions are limited to improvement; she doesn't plan on being the next Rembrandt. Her means match her expenses. She has time enough for all the walks she wants to take and all the men she wants to love, and doesn't ask for any great measure of respect from society. So why is it too much to demand?

It's not that she couldn't possibly demand to the point of excess. To cry out for respect as well as sexual freedom would be to expect too much from her society. To want great artistic success as well as great wealth would be a pretty high bar. Some kinds of lives are harder than others, some are luckier, some demand more fortitude (only a strong-winged bird can fly against the wind, to borrow Mademoiselle Reitz's ominous metaphor). Some simply cost more than they are worth.

But other ways of living might seem workable, yet be unacceptable to the world. And this is the point that drives Edna wild. It seems to her perfectly reasonable that she might have a modest income from her art and her inheritance, a small house, a constrained social life, an appreciation for art and music, and healthy, happy children; how she will manage the lover and the husband never quite coalesces in her mind, but she suspects it can be done.

She's right about almost all of this - except the children. At the end, while it might seem like the note from Robert is the final straw, read closer. It's no accident that a birth scene immediately precedes the romantic disappointment. In the final scene, just like Adele demanded, Edna is thinking of the children.

What she thinks is that she cannot possibly be their mother and be also herself. Mothers can have affairs or hobbies or interests or appreciations, but they cannot be individuals; they cannot be let alone.

She cannot live her longed-for life because her children possess her too completely.

And yet her children are living with their grandmother; she has visited them once, brought bon-bons, kissed them and loved them exorbitantly, and left. They seem to be perfectly happy with this situation. She has nannies and maids to care for their needs and keep them safe, relatives to help shower them with love, she has an abundance of affection for them; there is no practical reason why she should feel that her children are preventing her from living the life she wants. And still she is wholly convinced that they are, devastatingly certain that they have destroyed her independence through their very existence.

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There is something patently absurd about suggesting it is unworkable for a woman to both raise a child and do difficult, time-consuming work. That "something" is the entirety of human history - including the present - in which the vast majority of women struggled and labored just to keep their children alive.

It is as absurd as Edna's internal claim that her children, who love her fondly and miss her hardly at all, are a concrete obstacle to her attaining an independent life of happiness.

And both these absurdities are, of course, not the real argument at all.  Rather, the critics of the new Yahoo CEO and Chopin's dour heroine have reached the same underlying conclusion: that a woman cannot properly love her children while acting on any unmaternal desires - any longing for fame, respect, sex, or power. Regardless of how the mother and child in question feel about the situation, regardless of the family finances, regardless of how controlled or confident or strong the woman in question is, regardless of the father's aid or absence, regardless...


What do you want? How do you plan to get it? What are you willing to give up in exchange?

Pontellier and Mayer can make any answer they want to the second and third question. It doesn't matter. The problem is with their answer to the first.

It would be fine for their critics - though perhaps not for them - if they were, in some way, fighting fundamentally for the needs of their family. "I want to feed my children, so I need to work" is never part of the "Women Can't Have It All" discussion.

It would be acceptable if they wanted no children at all; if Edna, like the prickly pianist Mlle. Reitz, were willing to forgo the rewards of a family, she too could be unliked and independent. Mayer's uterus would never have made the news at all.

But they want a family and. And and and. A family and an art career, a family and professional success, a family and love, a family and freedom, a family and some revolutions in the way the internet is used on a daily basis.

While they might see a thousand ways to build a life of "ands," the world cries out that the very idea is unacceptable. Chase both money and religious satisfaction, pursue moral certainty and gustatory excess and artistic excellence, seek both quiet contentment and constant excitement from the world - you can ask for anything else, but add "and family" and suddenly you Want It All.

Don't bother explaining all the things you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of your "and" - didn't anyone ever tell you you Can't Have Everything?

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It is a strange world that views children as cages. It was strange to Chopin, a mother and an author, 115 years ago. It ought to be deeply strange to us now.