Not Becoming My Mother

- & Other Things She Taught Me Along The Way- by Ruth Reichl

Well I'm finally joining the neighborhood book club. I've been meaning to for months but I never seem to figure out which book they are reading or where they are meeting until the last minute. So today my neighbor brought over this book so I could read it before the get together tomorrow night. Lucky for me it was nice and short and didn't take me long to read. It was a decent read, definitely not going on my list of favorites but I wasn't bored either.

The book was a little scattered but I like the underlying ideas. It's about the pressure women born toward the beginning of the century felt to conform to certain ideas of womanhood and how they struggled to give their daughters something more. It was interesting to think about what the pressure to live within limitations especially after the war and depression could do to a woman's happiness and mental health. I think there is still a lot of that today.

My biggest irritation with feminism is that it sometimes seems to me that it's no longer about women making choices. We get pulled so many directions and get told we can do it all when that isn't reality. You can't be the perfect mother, wife, business woman, housekeeper, etc. while wearing high heels and having a beautifully decorated house. I do know a few women who make it look like they do it all but it's a facade. You have to make choices everyday and those choices aren't easy and aren't always respected. (Story of every woman's life right?)

I'm a terrible cook and I hate even trying. I'm not a great housekeeper and I try to juggle a career while working from home and being a full time mom. The balance is never totally right. Sometimes I'm doing great at my career and I carry around terrible mommy guilt that I can't attend to Red Fish every minute. Other times (like right now) I think I'm really engaged in being a mother and I'm totally uninspired as an artist. I get disorganized and I fall behind in my work and that's frustrating. I don't know if the balance will ever be right completely. On the other hand I've gotten to do a lot of really cool things in my life. I've had some incredible opportunities and always been encouraged by my family, husband, and friends to shoot for whatever I want in life. Maybe thinking I can do it all isn't always a bad thing, I just get tired of the pressure sometimes. I wonder how the next generation of women's opportunities will be effected by our choices and what opportunities await them.