My first born is five years old. When you meet her, you might be fooled by her white tendrils and the angelic smile, but that girl is a shrewd negotiator. One of her many, many schemes is to convince us to let her reserve something for later if we won’t let her have it in the moment. She’ll come to us and ask for a cookie. The answer is usually no. She’ll nod respectfully, but then ask for the same thing in a different way: Can she put a cookie on the table? When we inquire why she wants to do this, she explains that perhaps later, maybe after dinner, it would be all right for her to have a cookie. And if it is, the cookie will be ready for her. This is surprisingly effective. In general, the women I mentor are in the middle of a negotiation. And I don’t mean a salary negotiation—though we go over and over how they deserve at least equal pay. I mean they are in the middle of a life negotiation. Negotiating for the lives they want. Now, it’s humbling to have women in my general age bracket ask me for life advice. But they come to me because I’m an expert on this. Well, I gave birth to the expert. As she’s taught me three powerful negotiating strategies that I pass on to my female students as they negotiate for the life they want.
The first of these strategies is understanding: one choice does not eliminate another. My daughter has it in her mind that negotiating for a cookie now, in no way makes her ineligible for a popsicle later. And yet, an hour after eating the cookie—when she’s negotiating for the Popsicle—she’s baffled when we explain to her that she already made her choice. My daughter doesn’t ever think one choice eliminates another.
And yet my students believe if they take a certain job or pursue a certain degree, they have essentially made a choice that will render them ineligible for any other choices. Every single student I talk with has several interests and skills, and numerous ideas for how her career could go. Lots of things she wants to do. Last semester a student was talking to me about her career path in the nonprofit sector, while lamenting the fact that she couldn’t also be an artist in New York. When I asked her “Why can’t you?” She replied, “Well, those choices just don’t make sense together.” So she had to choose one at the expense of the other.
We’ve had that drilled into our heads, that we have to make a choice. The choice. Select a major. Choose a career. Pick a small dot far off on the horizon and spend your life aiming for it. My daughter would find this line of thinking ridiculous. And I tend to agree with her.
As a faculty member at a university, I help run a graduate program that prepares people to be leaders in the public and nonprofit sector. I believe in what I do, I love what I do. But my path to this job wasn’t a straight line headed at a small dot. It wasn’t a choice I made in the distant past. Unlike most academics, my job wasn’t even in my plan five years ago. I was actually an English and Creative Writing major in college. Now there’s a choice I think some people questioned, namely my parents. But I simply chose what interested me at the time: writing. And even though my graduate work, my research, and my subsequent faculty position are in an entirely different field from English, writing is still a part of my career.
In fact, writing is my career. I’m a creative non-fiction writer. And an author. I write for magazines, websites, I run a blog, and I’ve published a book that ranked in the top ten humorous books on Amazon and won a few awards. So in my daughter’s worldview, the choice to be a professor is the cookie, and choice to also be a writer is the popsicle. Choosing one didn’t and doesn’t eliminate the other.
Yet, like my students do, I struggled to make sense of these two choices I was pursuing at the same time. And when my book came out last summer I was conflicted about how separate I should keep these endeavors. Up until that point, they had been dirty secrets from one another.
But at the book launch, when I looked out in the big crowd, I was surprised to see the first row was filled with my female students. Unbeknownst to me, my students had been reading my writing all along. They had read my very candid accounts of my own life negotiations. And that’s why they were coming to me at the university. My writing career was unintentionally fostering healthy relationships with my students. These two choices I made at different times, and for different reasons, made perfect sense together when I stopped trying to define my career by a single choice.
Choices become overwhelming when we see them defining our lives or our careers. But I’d argue the less defined your career is, the more protected it is. If people can’t expalin what it is you do, then they can’t come after it. So live a life and build a career your parents can’t explain to your grandmother. And when my students come to me grappling with a single life or career choice, I just tell them: play to your strengths, and pursue your passions, and your career and your life will make sense and take shape all on its own. And whatever the choice is you are struggling with, it’s not going to eliminate another.
The second negotiating strategy I’ve learned from my daughter is: have it all by never giving your all. My daughter will often ask for something, maybe a new toy. And, if in a moment of weakness—or sheer exhaustion—we agree, she’ll immediately say, “Well how about two new toys?” She never stops to think about how she’ll be able to play with two toys at the same time. She’s only worried about the things she wants. And her strategy is stockpiling. Now, society likes to ask if it’s possible for women to have it all, and our gender should never feel compelled to dignify that with an response. But I appreciate that my female students do grapple over their ability to “give their all” to everything they want in their life.
This isn’t just a question I get from current students. I’ve had countless prospective students come talk to be about graduate school. One young woman came to talk with me about the program and I’ve never seen anyone as fired up for graduate school as she was. She expressed her intense desire for the program, and conveyed her true passion for the field. As we were wrapping up our meeting I told her I looked forward to receiving her application. Her hands went up in protest and her face twisted with tension. She said, “Oh I’m not going to apply right now. I want to wait until it’s the right time. So I can really give it my all.”
Now, maybe that was just a turn of phrase. But it’s become the rhetoric, and the practice, of my generation of women. This idea of giving your all. Give your children your all. Give your all to your spouse. Give that career of yours all you’ve got. But all that does is make women hesitate for something they really want to do.
Look, it’s fine if you don’t want kids. Ok if you don’t want to pursue graduate school. And fine if you don’t even care all the much about establishing and nurturing a career path. But let’s say you do want any or all of those things, then the worse thing you can do is wait around for a time in which you can give it your all.
I won’t go into the graphic details of this, but my husband and I planned to get me pregnant while I was in the middle of my doctoral program. We were successful—again, none of your business—but people at the time thought we were crazy. And sure, it was difficult slogging away at a dissertation with a screaming newborn on my lap, but I relished in the fact that I was making progress on everything I wanted in this life. I wasn’t letting my desire for children interrupt my desire to finish school. Nor was I letting my career put my personal life on hold.
Look, sometimes my kid got drive thru nuggets when I had to run data. And sometimes my dissertation sat idle for weeks while my child was sick. But it was never about being able to give my all to either. If I waited until I had the ability to give my all, I currently wouldn’t have a PhD or any children.
We have to stop using phrases like this. And we have to stop thinking like this. You physically can’t, and emotionally shouldn’t, give your all to any one thing. So instead, give your some to a lot of things.
And that’s what I want my female students to know. Yes, you can have it all. But not if you put any aspect of your life on hold to benefit another. Try my daughters’ strategy and stock pile everything you want. You will sort it out later. Don’t worry about giving your all to each thing at the same time, that’s never actually required. Take the pressure off of yourself and go have it all by never giving your all.
The final negotiating strategy I’ve learned from daughter is: don’t confuse your wants with someone else’s. I was cautioned that when my second daughter was born, my oldest would become very jealous. She would suddenly have to compete for resources that had always been solely available for her. Everything I read, and every seasoned mother, warned me of how competitive siblings can be. Especially two little girls. So, after the birth of my second daughter, I braced myself for sibling rivalry and female competition.
Now, don’t let my Instagram account—brimming with pictures of sisterly love—fool you. There were times my two daughters competed for my attention. But over time, I began to see they weren’t really competitors. I mean, my oldest couldn’t care less about this little red dinosaur we have, until she saw her younger sister want to play with it. Then my oldest would become immediately entrenched in a cutthroat battle over something she didn’t care about five minutes earlier. She was confusing her wants for someone else’s. But, one day I saw my oldest child reconcile this as she watched her baby sister play with the red dinosaur. She looked around the playroom and realized all the other toys were up for grabs. Toys she in which she was actually interested. And so, from that point forward—as best a preschooler can—she stopped confusing her wants for someone else’s.
Now, competition between women is expected to exist. And for a while, I strongly believed it did. That was just my conditioning in junior high. But over the years of mentoring women, and watching my two daughters get along better than anticipated, I’ve come to realize we aren’t actually in competition with each other. Because a competition implies we are vying for the same goal. Mutually and equally engaged in a struggle for the exact same thing.
Now, I know a lot of women. I’m friends with women. I teach women. I’m raising two little women. I see women, you know, walking around. And I’ve never once seen two women trying to do the exact same thing. Not once.
All of my female students are roughly the same age and pursuing the same specific degree program, and yet none of them have the same personal goals or career aspirations. No two women are ever trying to do the exact same thing. I mean, rarely are there even two women running for president in the same election year. And even then, it’s never on the same side. So if we aren’t competing, what are we doing?
We are comparing. And that’s a much more dangerous thing because comparison sets arbitrary metrics for our life. And creates random timelines for when life experiences will or should happen. Comparison makes you confuse your wants with someone else’s.
I had a student in my office a few semesters ago who had just started the program and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to complete graduate school as quickly as possible. When I asked her why she wanted to speed the process up, she explained that she had to graduate quickly so that she could have kids by the time she’s thirty. Now, I didn’t have her full medical chart in front of me, so I can’t speak to reasons behind her time pressure. But I can argue it’s coming from looking around at her group of friends and placing an arbitrary deadline on her life. Confusing her wants for someone else’s.
When I first became a mother, I was suddenly—overwhelmingly—out of my element. My parenting in that first year was based mostly on what I saw other mothers doing. One mother in particular made sweeping claims about the importance, the benefits, and sheer joy, of making her own organic baby food. My interpretation of that at the time was if I wanted my child to have a shot at Harvard, I’d need a hand mixer.
So that first year of parenting—despite being a full time doctoral student and an adjunct instructor—you could find me at home, for hours on end, (ignoring my child) in the kitchen elbow deep in farmer’s market squash. Sautéing it, pureeing it, blending it, pouring it, and serving it up to my six-month-old who would immediately spit it out in disgust. But I would start that process over and over because this was important.
Then one day I was in the grocery store and I don’t know if I just don’t ever look around, but can you just imagine what I saw? Jars and jars and jars of organic baby food. Aisles of this stuff. And I picked up a jar and I studied the baby on the label. A very happy, well-adjusted looking, Harvard-bound baby. And I thought—wait, what am I doing? What I was doing was spending an inordinate amount of time on something that was never a priority for me. Like my oldest daughter, I looked around at others mothers and I had immediately become entrenched in something I have never cared about before. There is not a distant version of myself that couldn’t wait to blend avocado and rhubarb in a BPA-free container. I don’t even like to cook.
But I was comparing myself to these others mothers and it set me up for failure because, as I said before, I didn’t have the same goals as these women. Not in parenting, and not in life. But that feeling, that knee-jerk reaction of panic and pressure, that crops up in other aspects of my life. Not just parenting. I feel it in my professional life. Especially as a female in the field of academics. And as a female writer in the competitive world of book publishing. It’s hard not to look at other scholars, other authors, and not feel intimidated. Or immediately compare myself. My book is in the same category as Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey. That’s rough. But I’ve got to remember why I wrote my book, what my plans were with my life. I can’t get bogged down in the comparison because I’ll look around and confuse my wants for someone else’s.
We are all negotiating for the lives we want. What we’re willing to give and what we need to get. And I particularly invested in making sure my female students are equipped to negotiate for the life they want. And when they come to me I hope my advice is helpful, I hope our conversations are productive. But the truth is I’m just borrowing the advice I give them. Because I’m relying on the wisdom of my demanding, opinionated, negotiating five-year-old daughter at home—begging for a cookie to put on the kitchen table until later—because she has taught me the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned as a woman: Ask for everything you want, find a way to have it all. And leave nothing on the table.
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