Why can’t you have it all, anyway?

by Ms. M

That title could easily continue our debt theme, but switching to the motherhood category for a minute, let’s consider the old favorite, rhetorical phrase: “Can you have it all?”

Though ostensibly a general, open-ended question, we all know this is code for “if you want to be a parent and an income earner, prepare to fail, lady!” And the pat answer is that “no, you can’t have it all … balance … tradeoffs … choices … etcetera”.

This is not untrue but let’s just stop a moment and remind ourselves that every human being has 24 hours in the day, 7 days in the week, 365 1/4 days in the year. And so forth. Angela Merkel, Bill Gates, Michael Burry, no matter, the sun stops for no one. The difference between men and women, female parents and male parents is how they choose to spend those 24 hours, not that one class of them has more hours than the other. (Though actually, since women live longer on average than men do, they actually do have more time in the long-run.)

Let’s say you sleep 8 hours (generous, eh!) and you work 12 hours (hopefully less) and get 4 hours for life stuff each day during the week plus a full weekend of no work. That means you are spending a little over 1/3 of your life working, 1/3 of your life sleeping and 1/3 of your life doing life stuff, in an average week. So if by “it all” you mean things that cannot be fit into that remaining 1/3 of your life – that’s right, you cannot have it all. And if the working bit needs 80 hours a week but you can’t do only 32 hours of “life stuff” (not much time really), you cannot have it all. But for most reasonable people (not investment bankers or management consultants), 52 hours a week for life stuff pretty much covers it. What matters is what you want, not who you are.

And I would caution all female parents to be sure they are considering what they genuinely want, not what they think they should want.

(And if you are the partner “doing it all” in the partnership, man or woman, stop. Now. Just stop. I still agree with my original point here.)