I made three trips (!) to my son's school today—a parent association meeting after school, pick-up, and then a night of learning at school. I forgot my phone for trip two, sucked in because I couldn't listen to my podcast about cults. It was a lot. For most of the past 18 years, I have been home with my kids (or more accurately, the driver to and from their homes) while my husband has financially supported our family.
Now with one son in college and the other in high school, I find myself increasingly becoming an automatic worker. Which, naturally, makes me think about cave women. I have a question: How did this whole hunter-gatherer gender divide come about anyway? Did cave women have ambitions beyond keeping a tidy cave and providing their cave children with three square meals? Did they ever get it up to here with the system and the uprising?
When I was six, I had a favorite picture book that I studied as if I were being tested on it. Its gospel was that girls could be anything they wanted when they grew up. Anything. Like a hairstylist or a baker or a teacher or a policewoman (if you were the girl who insisted on wearing pants). It was 1976, and, as a descendant of Cave People, I was completely satisfied with, even excited about, the options. I mean, who wouldn't want to be a glamorous flight attendant?
The women's lib movement had different ideas. Its mantra for girls is that we should aim higher for everything, as if traditionally female careers were beneath us. (Hey, if we learned anything from the pandemic, isn't it that skilled hairstylists are an absolute necessity for civilized society?) Bacon-wrapped, fry it in a pan, and if I wear a certain scent, I will never let a guy forget he is a man. Add to that the to-do list of biological duties for kids and kids behind, and that's a pretty full plate. To be honest, even at ten, all of this seemed a bit much.
But, I have tried to fulfill the duty of being as modern a woman as possible. Gloria Steinem is counting on me to break the glass ceiling, and I have to start somewhere. In high school, I worked as many shifts as I could at Benetton, mainly because the staff was allowed to wear the merchandise, then tag it back so it could be sold (yes, EWW). I shared my fair share of babysitting and camp counseling. I spent a few summers working the local festival circuit, selling funnel cakes, fried veggies, and homemade lemonade. I don't even know where to start explaining that experience, but I will say that no human or pet should eat or drink anything from a booth at a summer festival. I was paid three dollars an hour cash, got stung by bees, biked to work from a guy whose car door didn't open and had to climb through dangerously styled window dukes, and came home every day smelling like onions. A step up the ladder to have it all, this job was definitely not.
In the next decade and a half, I did all the things I thought I should do to live up to my potential. I graduated college, law school ACED, even held a prestigious federal judicial clerkship. Surely I was the next Ally McBeal, trying hot cases and having an even hotter dating life. Or not.
It turns out, and I know this is blasphemy, I am not the most ambitious person.
The last time I actively pursued and found a job was in the 90s when I was a young lawyer moving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Even then, the only criterion for my search was that the job had to be walkable to Century City Mall. I was probably the laziest corporate lawyer the firm had ever seen, followed by a tireless stint as a business executive, and a failed attempt at writing for TV. While all my friends were working their way up, reaching for the brass ring, I preferred to hang out on the fun wheel. At the mall.
I thought there was something wrong with me. Was I depressed? Did I have ADHD? It wasn't until I had my kids and quit my job that I felt truly passionate and fulfilled by a Viking's work. But there was no bacon in stay-at-home motherhood. Or enough respect for it. Sometimes, I felt judged or looked down upon by working mothers. I thought surely you would have time to make a Halloween costume from scratch! If not actually saying it out loud, I knew that was what they were thinking when they saw my kid in his wrinkled Pikachu getup, frankly. Or maybe it was my own guilt for not living up to the expectations for my generation of women. Now, 18 years later, my kids are baked pretty well (see, even at six, I was destined to be a baker), and I find myself—anxiously—wondering if I can do anything else. My time feels somewhat complete. Where to start?
I typed a few keywords into Google. Writer jobs, others yielded a plethora of links that could also be written in Python. What is an SEO blogger? Direct response copywriter? Content mill? Two cents a word? Is that even legal? It was like I had been in a cryo chamber for the last two decades and someone just thawed me out. What I thought the Interwebs would reveal was how to get an article published in a Luddite magazine. Instead, what I got was a series of job posting websites with descriptions of contracts I didn't understand or sounded utterly flimsy.
I tried another search: Jobs for introverts.
As a child, I don't think I ever heard the word introvert, and if I did, I probably thought it was a pathological condition. After all, it was always the quiet ones at the post office. When I was in my late 40s, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test as part of a school board retreat. When the results came back, we were tasked to sit four to a table in the conference room, eagerly devouring our respective reports. Who among us was an EFSP? An itij? An ETSJ? While I quietly read every word of mine, my friends shared and compared theirs with each other. Hmm…. Which of these does not look like the others?
The introvert status confirmed.
The more I learned about introverts, the more moments I had. Some of the most common traits and preferences of introverts include: being alone or with few people; drawing energy from within rather than from external stimuli; wanting plenty of personal space and downtime; listening and observing more than talking; spending extra time thinking before speaking or acting; working well independently; rarely engaging in self-promotion; SHODING EXERCISE Outside of emotionality; and having limited public contact. I am all of these.
The introvert status embraced.
According to the Internet, nearly every species on Earth has both introverted and extroverted individuals. Dogs. Gerbils. Humpback whales. Cave women, perhaps? Also, there is more than one type of introvert. There are four—social, thinking, anxious, and restrained—each excelling in different professional sectors. I think I am really a bit of all of these, which I hope means there are plenty of jobs I fit into.
Thinking introverts spend a lot of time thinking and self-reflecting. They are good aerospace engineers, social media managers, and fashion designers. Anxious introverts are anxious. They excel as statisticians, beta readers, and, curiously, pilots. Restrained introverts are quite slow, making them well-suited to be personal financial advisors, mental health counselors or addiction specialists, geologists, zoologists, and content writers or authors. Finally, social introverts, for whatever reason, are said to make good welders, commercial divers, marine mechanics, animal trainers, and plumbers. The reasoning leads me to believe that I am primarily an anxious and/or restrained introvert, so perhaps I have a future as a beta reader or even a writer, although being a welder has a certain appeal that I can't quite put my finger on.
The introvert status embraced.
In recent years, I have worn my introversion if not loudly, then certainly proudly (in the safety of my own home, of course, where I don't have to interact with anyone outside my immediate family). And I have realized that I shouldn't beat myself up or feel inadequate. I was just barking up the wrong tree most of my life. Nurturing cannot inflate my nature. I enjoy sitting at my computer in my pajamas writing all day and not caring about talking to anyone too much. I hate the phone, and I don't thrive in meetings. I don't want clients, or navigate office politics, or hobnob to get ahead. I always thought I had to thrive in those things, but I don't and never have.
So, perhaps the moral of the story and one of the many legacies of the women's lib movement is that girls should be anything they want when they grow up, whether that is a stay-at-home mom or a welder or a lawyer moonlighting as a baker. No guilt, judgment, or sense of inadequacy. While I am grateful for the choices and opportunities and for those who fought so hard for them, no one should feel obligated to hunt when she prefers to gather. Or go against her grain. We should wholeheartedly support each other as we identify and pursue the path that fits us. Except, perhaps, working the festival circuits.