Womanly Ambition
At a recent public event, a young mother in the audience approached me after I left the stage to talk about her writing. That was her stated intent, but minutes into our conversation it was clear that she was wrestling with more than a little self-doubt. She had recently become a single mother, and her confidence was in shambles.
Too many people in her life were fueling her biggest fears. Who was she to think she could be a writer? How would she find the time, or the talent? Who did she think she was, this mother with her womanly ambition?
I have had similar conversations with so many young mothers. Motherhood attracts uninvited critiques, from loved ones and strangers alike. Admit to ambition beyond childrearing and even people you thought you knew best can surprise you.
When I was around that young mother’s age, I was a 31-year-old mother of two in a marriage on the brink of implosion. I needed a plan. I had gone to college to be a journalist. It was time to become one.
That’s me in the frayed chenille robe, sitting on the floor in front of a Smith-Corona typewriter with a baby girl on my lap and a stare of exhaustion on my face. I was on deadline, and I was going to meet it. I wanted to be a writer.
My son, Andy, took this picture. I often wonder what he thought as he picked up the camera and focused on his mother. I’m not sure why I’ve never asked him, but I have a hunch. This guilt, it never goes away; thirty-three years later, it’s still inflicting unnecessary harm. What a waste of a conscience.
Most people in my life at that time thought it was too late for me, a stay-at-home mom, to become a writer. It can be hard to believe in yourself when you’re immersed in the low expectations of others. You can feel like you’re drowning, and the only hands reaching out are trying to push you under.
But we don’t need to be the victims of other people’s missed chances and lingering regrets. Once you stop buying into their version of you, the hands pushing you under tend to pull away. Off they go, those naysayers, onto the next target for their disregard.
We don’t have to understand a person’s dreams to support the endeavor. Showing up is everything. One of the most meaningful gifts I received in those early days came from my friend Buffy. She arrived one day banging on my kitchen door with her foot because her arms were full of boxes.
She stacked the stationery and envelopes on the counter, and then pulled out a business card from a smaller box. She crossed her arms as I read it out loud:
Connie Schultz
Writer
“I’m taking your career seriously,” she said. “How about you?”
That’s a friend you hold onto for forty years.
Last month, I spent an evening with three women I barely knew. We were part of a larger gathering of mostly men, but we quickly managed to carve out our own cocoon in a corner of the deck. If you had been watching us, you might have noticed how often we laughed and interrupted one another. Women do this often, in my experience. Not to reposition the spotlight onto themselves, but to shine it more brightly on the woman who is speaking.
And then what happened?
When did you know this about yourself?
What did you tell him after he said that?
Tell us more, more, more.
Each of us is still immersed in our ambition, and that was the main topic of our conversation. Not just our careers, but all the womanly aspirations that telegraph an unwillingness to disappear and become irrelevant. Each of us had stories about others questioning our judgment, and even our motives. Together, we found the punchlines.
We know we are lucky. We are healthy enough to keep working, in careers we love that are not wearing our bodies down. For many women, including some of my friends, retirement has given them the freedom they craved. Finally, their calendars are filling with all those hopes and dreams they had filed away, hoping one day to bring them to life.
Suddenly, I am fielding the occasional question about the retirement I’m apparently not enjoying. Golly, that came fast. At 64, my ambition illustrated how I was young for my age. At 66, that same ambition is proof that I am squandering my golden years, which sounds a little too much like walking into the sunset. How delightful to be such an object of curiosity. I feel like a panda at the zoo.
In those first, frightening weeks of my life as a single mother, my friend Jackie gave me a greeting card. On its cover was a copy of poet and artist William Blake’s 1793 engraving of a person about to climb a ladder to the moon. Handwritten under the etching are four words, “I Want! I Want!”
This wasn’t a declaration of material greed. It was an answer—my answer--for questions about my womanly ambition. I would become who I wanted to be.
Back then, I wanted to be a good mother, daughter, sister, and friend. I wanted to learn how to be happy as a woman on my own, for the first time in my life. I wanted a big career, the one that began as an exhausted mother in a tattered robe, sitting at a typewriter with a baby on her lap.
Eventually, I bought a poster of William Blake’s drawing and framed it in weathered white wood. Until recently, it hung in our home. Now it’s in my office on campus. It’s a declaration or a warning, depending on how you feel about Grandma and her ambition.
I want a big life full of writing, reading and teaching, and colleagues who shout my name from across the hall.
I want to see students’ faces when they behold Blake’s drawing and imagine their version of climbing to the moon.
I want to sit in the front row the day that single mother tells her audience how she became the writer she was meant to be.
I want. I want.
A reader rightly noted my misuse of “just desserts.” I have edited it to read:
At 66, that same ambition is proof that I am squandering my golden years, which sounds a little too much like walking into the sunset.
Also, an it’s was abandoned by its apostrophe. They have been reunited.
When I got divorced, I bought a print that says, “This is the beginning of anything you want.” I still look at it every day and remind myself it’s true.