I think as a woman, this sentence has been enough to send cold shivers through me. The sense that you can ‘have it all’, though ‘having it all’ is never defined, and sometimes really feeling the societal pressure to try because otherwise, you’re a failure. So, what does ‘having it all’ mean to me, and do I think it’s attainable?
If I am completely honest, I tried to follow the societal expectations and ‘have it all’ when I was working in my senior executive career. To me, it meant motherhood, being a successful career woman, having a happy marriage, the perfect home, and keeping all the balls juggling in the air, apparently single-handed. I returned to a high-pressured career after having my son, and taking 9 months maternity leave. I travelled to China for work for 10 days, and missing my second Mother’s Day in the process. That year, I think I spent 3 out of the 4 weeks of March overseas, plus all the other overseas and UK trips the rest of the year. At least once a week I wouldn’t return home from work until late at night because of a work dinner or evening event I had to attend. I would leave early in the morning for breakfast meetings, often in Westminster. And I would work late to battle deadlines for Board reports or funding deadlines, including working when I got home and at weekends. Even on holiday, I would take my work phone with me. One particular year because we were having problems with some funding for an innovation centre, I was taking calls and responding to emails every day. Another year, I took two weeks holiday but as we weren’t going anywhere the first week, I snuck in two meetings in London on one of the days of that week. Yes, my home was ‘perfect’ because I paid for a cleaner and someone to do the ironing. In theory so I could have quality family time at the weekend. My husband worked full-time as well, and if it wasn’t for my mother being retired so able to look after our son, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. She would have him overnight far too often than she should have had to, and in the two and a half years I had that job, I missed too much of my son’s life. His nursery didn’t really know me, only my mother, and the GP was more familiar with my mother than he was me if my son was ill. On the surface I had it all, underneath, I was drowning. Mostly in guilt and exhaustion.
I didn’t have it all, far from it. I was just trying to adhere to the ‘rules’ of how women ‘should’ behave. Being all things to all people. I used to joke that I was leaving my full-time job for the day to go home and resume my other full-time job. Because while I had a cleaner and someone to do the ironing, I did all the cooking, I did all the washing and drying, I did the tidying around, and I did all the organising of household ‘stuff’. It got even worse when we moved into a bigger house – one of the other trappings of ‘having it all’, the material belongings as well. The Jaguar and Audi cars. The designer clothes and handbags. The independent school. All that juggling, juggling, juggling. Mostly being a square peg in a round hole as I’ve said repeatedly in my blogs, living life in the unconscious and crushing all those thoughts that I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t living my purpose.
It finally stopped two years ago when I was made redundant from my last job, and since then I have been on a much more intense spiritual journey. I started writing my first book before I was made redundant but I knew the redundancy was very much on the cards, and I wasn’t unhappy at the prospect. Because it would give me time to write. And I have, but financially things have not been easy. So, it seemed for a while that writing was the way forward for me (yes), but the stereotype of the starving writer was to be played out alongside. I couldn’t ‘have it all’. Thinking about it now, though, I hadn’t fully defined what ‘having it all’ meant for me in the new way of living because I was approaching it as the old me. I wanted a lot of the ‘stuff’ from my old life, but also the new approach to life which the Universe has clearly decided is not the right way for me! Instead, it pushed me onto a path where I went through a lot of dark nights of the soul as I stripped my ego down layer by layer to find out who I truly am, while doing something I loved in writing. No one else understood my journey, many judged it, but it was something I needed to go on to get to the point where I do have a definition of what ‘having it all’ means to me and if it’s attainable.
I have pealed back many layers of the onion over the last two years, with another one happening just the other day. I was sitting with people who I used to spend a lot of time with through our children (the independent school went, but not all the personal associations). There was something about the whole experience that, to me, felt ‘off’. I couldn’t explain it to myself let alone anyone else, but I didn’t feel comfortable. I wasn’t interested in anything that was going on around me, I didn’t feel inclined to ask any questions and I was unusually quiet for me. Nothing inspired me, and I aspired to nothing in what was happening around me. I contrasted it to the previous evening when I had spent time with a different friend, an evening when I had felt inspired most of the time and aspired to some of the things I was being inspired by. The difference between the two events, linked by personal association with my son’s old school, was that one represented the ‘old’ me. The person who was trying to fit that square peg into the round hole, whilst the other represented the ‘new’ me. The person I am emerging to be. The round peg in the round hole person. The fact that I am starting to fully realise what that round hole is for me. And to not be ashamed or embarrassed by it, but to embrace it. Because it’s about drive, it’s about ambition, it’s about aspiring to more. It’s about how I want to see my life, not how anyone else sees it.
That for me is ‘having it all’. Understanding what the round hole I fit into is, and making that my focus. It’s about accepting that I am deserving of doing the work on myself when for too long I felt like I was failing as a mother because I still wanted to be my own person. It’s about realising that I have done that bit when my son was very young by taking my last, less pressured, job, but now it’s about setting an example to my son that going out and achieving what you want to achieve, about being true to yourself, is so very important. I am still here for him, I recognise he is still vulnerable and still needs me, but that I can balance that alongside being me.
Is it attainable? Yes, of course it is. It’s a journey to get to an understanding of what ‘having it all’ truly means for you as a person, and once you have it’s then another journey to start attaining it. But then, life is always about the journey and not the destination. As my son said to me the other day ‘someone who enjoys the journey will always get further than the person who only pursues the destination’.
Louisa Simpson 