We thought we had it all

And we were a generation who were convinced we could have it all. We would be the wearers of the expertly tailored corporate suits, the carriers of the leather briefcases, the tossers of perfectly coiffed hair. We would take plane rides as regular as our mothers took maxis and would control budgets worth millions. And after spending the day in the office proving our worth we’d jump in our well appointed cars and cruise home to our children and our husbands who were just as successful, good looking and well-balanced as we were. My generation firmly believed that anything was possible if one worked hard enough and were smart enough. The sacrifices and compromises of our mothers we believed were due to settling for less. We would never settle.

I think we were the generation the most distant from our mothers. Previous generations had sought to be just like their mothers — to get married to men just like their fathers, to have the same number of children, to make a lovely home. My generation scoffed at what we perceived to be narrow ambitions, grew up watching mothers suppress ambition for household or, rarely, and to our strange reckoning, slightly better, ignore family and focus on career. We looked too at our fathers and found them just as limited as or limiting to our mothers. Men that they eventually divorced or fell out of love with had the final say in their lives and their dreams. They were the millstones that kept our mothers perpetually anchored to earth. We swore to be different. We were going to marry the right man, at the right time who had the same ambitions and goals and would support us no matter what.

At school too they fostered this. They taught us how to be businesswomen, secretaries, teachers, grist for the government mill, anything but mothers and wives. I remember home economics classes with some outdated nun or the other, body swollen with rheumatism and age, attempting to teach us the importance of sterilising utensils or the rudiments of making a pineapple upside down cake. We laughed and scorned these women who taught skills they’d never had a chance to use themselves, their biological clocks ignored and now winding down, the workings faulty with age and neglect.

And so my generation went out to become masters of the universe. We got our degrees and licenses, pierced every imaginable orifice. We studied to become doctors, accountants, lawyers and managers. We moved out on our own and instead of juggling children we juggled men, loved what the combination of youth and social freedom afforded us. Many of us drank like men, smoked like men, had sex like men and convinced ourselves that we were living far better lives than our poor mothers. To admit otherwise was a deep, unforgivable betrayal.

But now my generation meet and talk sometimes. With thirty or forty looming large and portentous before us we examine our lives and wonder, did we really do that much better? Few if any of us have discovered that magical balance we could so easily see as teenagers. The twenties were for studying and partying hard, proving to the boys that we were just as good as them. The late twenties and the thirties were for focusing on our careers, setting strong foundations on which we could build our own little empires. Somewhere in there we’d meet the ideal man and start a family. Only it hasn’t happened that way. Many of us have jobs, not careers. Many of us don’t make enough money to dress/travel/live how we would like. And those of us who have job satisfaction feel like we’ve failed in our private lives. Many of us still dress up and go to the right parties, join the right clubs, choose the right acquaintances in the hope of meeting the right man as we feel our own biological clocks winding down. And the few of us who have managed to do both — to have a career and a family — have found ourselves many times choosing one over the other, committing the terrible sin of compromise.

How exactly were we supposed to have had it all when no one really could show us how? And few of us had any real concept of what our freedom meant, other than the chance to go to a fete in flesh coloured bodysuits or get drunk and pass out in the parking lot of clubs? And though many of us hate to admit it, we look back at our mothers now and instead of deriding them and the seeming narrowness of their lives, we wonder how with so little, they managed so much.

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