The Have-It-All Myth

April 15, 2009

This week I read the newly published book “Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations” by James N. Kimball and Kent Miles. Inspired by the stories of heroic Mormon women who have done everything from starting orphanages in Africa to winning the Pulitzer Prize to selling twenty-five million books, I turned to my own mother who I’ve always considered an extraordinary Mormon woman herself. Below is an excerpt from the essay The Have-It-All Myth from my book, “How To Be A Twenty-First Century Pioneer Woman.”

Like many of you, I learned to value motherhood from my own mother. But, paradoxically, it was precisely because my mother worked the entire time I was growing up that I came to appreciate motherhood. My mother is an extremely gifted and hard-working opera singer, and the Lord gave her opportunities early in her life to develop a professional career that many only dream of. She seized these opportunities, magnified her talents and rose to the height of her profession. However, the Lord did not bless her with equally rich opportunities to be a mother. Being one of five children herself she wanted several children, but when it came time to bear them, I was the only child she was able to successfully deliver.

Because of her career, my mother has been able to represent the Church and be an example of the Gospel to untold numbers of people. She has touched people with the Spirit as she sings and communicates with others in a totally unique way. I have always loved the fact that my mother works – that she has this whole other life outside of me in which she is able to fulfill herself and do good. I am intensely proud of her, in awe of her skills, and am always trying to be like her.

Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s as I was growing up, my mother gave dozens of firesides and talks throughout the Church on “having it all.” As a professional and a mother, she was, in fact, having it all – family, career, faith – and she served as an inspiring role model to Mormon women everywhere. But what allowed my mother to touch Mormon audiences was that she never preached the have-it-all myth as I was taught it in school or as it is touted in the popular media. She never claimed she could do everything well all at one time. What she taught instead was balance: she was the first to admit that she had made sacrifices – a little here and a little there – to have the rich life she did. She only had one child, for starters, which in itself put her in a unique camp among Mormon mothers. Her husband, my father, was not an active member of the Church and they did not have a temple marriage, so that too added a unique dimension to her situation. Also, her job did not keep her away from home the same way a corporate position would; a lot of her work was done at home memorizing music, and when she was “at work”, it was often at night during a performance that was after my bedtime. In addition, she was able to involve me in her work, bringing me to rehearsals and, when I got older, even to performances where I would knit clothes for my Cabbage Patch Kids with the opera house’s make-up and costume artists in the backstage dressing rooms.

And so my mom was always the first to admit that she was not living the life of a typical Mormon mother. She never told Mormon mothers they could be like her or that they too could have successful jobs while being successful mothers. What she did tell them was that, despite the glamor of her profession and the ability she had to be a unique missionary for the church, her most treasured role was that of mother. She told her audiences that, even though she only had one child at home, she chose not to magnify her career even more by traveling and performing internationally because it was important that she be home for me. She told her audiences that I was her “five-in-one” – that she had really wanted five children but that Heavenly Father gave her all five just in me. The few times I saw my mother lose her usual elegance was when some insensitive Church member would assume she had wanted “only” one child and would imply that my mother was therefore inferior to more typical Mormon mothers with more kids.

And so, in her way, my mother revised the have-it-all myth for Mormon women a generation ago by revealing that in order to have it all, there must be sacrifices. She sacrificed a more prominent career because she wanted to be home with me. Heavenly Father’s plan for her forced her to sacrifice the large Priesthood-bearing family she had anticipated, and, she acknowledged, that is not a sacrifice Mormon women typically want to or are forced to make. And when childbearing proved to be easy for me, I knew it was not a sacrifice I was willing to make either. For myself, for my mom, for my belief in eternal families, I want to have the children my mom never had.  I remind myself of this whenever I struggle with letting go of my own have-it-all dreams. I will never be my mother: I don’t have her rare professional gifts. But she is not me: I’m growing a larger, more typical family. Neither of us will ever have it all. But what we have is enough.