Great Expectations: The Perplexing Paradox of Women’s Unhappiness
Oh ‘t ain’t what you do it’s the place that you do it
‘T ain’t what you do it’s the time that you do it
‘T ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it
That’s what gets results
~ Ella Fitzgerald
I began with the best intentions. This weekend, while the hubby was working in Sacramento, I planned to work at least 10 hours on dissertation, compose a 1500-word article plus two blog posts, prep for some upcoming interviews, dissect a single chapter of John Paul’s Theology of the Body with a friend, and finally to read (and write a book review of) three other books. Sound crazy? Just a little over a year ago, this break-necked speed felt normal. Anything less and I was downright bored.
Enter Little Miss Marathon, who, on her very best days, slept 3-4 hours straight and ate only the minimum required for her age. For the last 6 months, we’ve been trying to figure out ways to get her to sleep and eat—but it seemed that all she wanted to do was go, go, go. Her energy levels made me feel like a century-old centipede. And all this came to a roaring head this weekend. After 24 hours of screaming and no sleep and fighting food at every turn, I finally wondered, “Does she have an allergy?” The next three days were filled switching from milk-based products to soy and finding ways to get her to sleep regularly. By Sunday, she was a new baby—sleeping 12 hours straight at night and eating a more normal amount. On one hand, I was ecstatic that my baby was now comfortable and content; on the other, I was exhausted, and rather than focusing on what I had “done right”, I honed in on all that was left undone, namely, every single thing on my to-do list.
Every year since 1972, The United States General Social Survey poll 1500 men and women regarding various aspects of their lives. The participants cut across all education levels, income levels, and marital status. In one question, participants are asked “How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being very happy, and 1 being not too happy?” Across the globe, women’s level of happiness has progressively declined. And this study is only a representative; at least six other studies conducted in this same time frame point to the same problem: in the face of unparalleled growth in educational opportunities, greater financial stability, and progress in the work sphere, women are more unhappy than they were pre-1970. Markus Buckingham at The Huffington Post aptly summarized: “Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men.”
These findings have understandably stirred up a great deal of discussion and debate with many voices trying to make sense of the data. Wharton Professors Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers scandalously speculate that women’s level of unhappiness is due to women’s rising expectations for themselves. It’s no longer sufficient to be a devoted “stay-at-home-mom” or a “successful business women”—women feel intense pressure to be everything at once, all the time. Inevitably, they fail to achieve all that they set out to accomplish—be it in the home or the workplace.
As a new mom and an academic, Stevenson and Wolfers’ assessment rings a chord with me. Take this last weekend as a case in point: despite my daughter’s giggles and sighs of relief, despite deep moments of satisfaction and well-being, I could not shake the nagging burden of my own self-created to-do list. I wondered where all my time had gone. I wondered how on earth I was going to finish a dissertation while raising a young family, even with shared household duties. Rather than savoring the moment, I let my expectations get a hold of me. It’s not that I think I can’t be a mother and a professional; it’s just that it’s probably realistic for me to remember that I can’t be all things excellently all at once. Even the Proverbs 31 woman probably did not accomplish all her feats in a single day.
I would take Stevenson and Wolfers’ claim even further and say that for good or bad, our expectations are closely related to comparison. Working women sometimes envy the apparent easiness of life that stay-at-home moms have. Stay-at-home moms sometimes envy the apparent freedom that working women have. Many envy the women who appear to have both. Our own judgment of what other people have and do, however misinformed, directly impacts our expectations for ourselves and thus, our level of happiness. I can’t help but think that given our basic necessities (food, water, shelter) and barring medical and/or mental problems, our level of happiness would improve if we really believed that less is more.
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Mama’s Got a Fake I.D.: A Map for Motherhood
It was a quiet morning in mid-March of 2008. A fellow professor and I were softly chatting in Stamps Theological Library at Azusa Pacific University, savoring the lull in activity that always comes in mid-semester. The semester had been launched, lesson plans were written, and final exams were in the distant future. We talked about theology, about our students, about our stage fright when giving lectures. But most of all, we talked about our futures. Both of us had achieved significant accomplishments at a fairly early age: she had been the recipient of the only full scholarship that Fuller Theological Seminary provides for all four years of her MDiv program and I was a published writer wrapping up the final semester of coursework for my PhD program.
Both of us had been encouraged by mentors from early on throughout our academic careers, about our potential for contributing to the academic community, about charting new territories for women scholars. And we loved academia. We loved the life of the mind. And we never thought, in all our years of learning and studying and teaching and writing, that our gender would ever stand in our way. Both the feminists and our fathers had taught us that we could be anything we wanted to be, that the world was ours for the taking, that we were only limited by the things we never chose to do. But on that March morning, we secretly admitted that we didn’t feel that the academic world was all we wanted out of life—we didn’t just want to be scholars and writers and professors—we wanted to be mothers. And we wondered how on earth such two demanding, seemingly opposing spheres of life could ever be reconciled and how we could participate fully, incarnationally in both worlds. I remember the tension building as we talked, as our minds scrambled for answers to what we thought were new questions. “The problem,” I said, “is that there are no maps.”
Exactly one year later, I gave birth to my daughter. Motherhood is all and more that I ever dreamed it could be, but tension I felt that March morning remains. Motherhood and academics and writing don’t always meld. It’s hard to transition from diaper changes to dissertating on the dynamics of spiritual formation. It’s a strange, foreign, and sometimes stark borderland where I often check and recheck the path I have chosen. (Did I really invest 13 years for a PhD to spend copious amounts of time every single day force-feeding my daughter-with-no-appetite?) But fortunately, Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira, in her recent book, Mama’s Got a Fake ID, has provided me with a map. In a chatty, friendly way, Caryn addresses the identity crisis that many (if not all) women face when they become mothers.
Caryn’s book contains three main parts. In Part One, she unpacks all the various reasons that women lose their identities when becoming mothers including stereotypes that society place on mothers and losing sight of who God designed us to be, as human beings with individual giftedness that reaches beyond our roles as mothers. In Part Two, Caryn looks at seven ways to uncover—or rediscover—our core identity: overcoming false guilt about our gifts, finding and rooting your identity in Christ, discovering who you are in God’s eyes (your God-given likes, dislikes, passions, interests), learning to describe and introduce yourself to others in ways that acknowledge both your giftedness and how God knows you, acknowledging, accepting, and even treasuring your limitations, and admitting that you’re not perfect. In the final portion of the book, Caryn advises her readers to look beyond themselves to see how they can be a blessing to other moms.
Mama’s Got a Fake I.D. is a candid, thoughtful, and fun meditation on the tensions mothers face when their passions and giftedness extend beyond the home. She provides questions to help those women whose identities were buried long ago under piles of grocery lists and laundry baskets and family schedules. One of the most profound and moving chapters for me personally was the chapter on treasuring limitations. As a person with high achievement standards, accepting the limitations imposed by motherhood is a tremendous effort, but Caryn’s book gave me freedom to not only accept these limitations but embrace them. But probably the best thing about the book is its balance: Caryn denigrates neither motherhood nor giftedness outside the home, but rather brings the honor due to them both. A highly recommended read for new and more seasoned moms.
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