The flight was packed and a young woman sat down on the aisle seat, cradling a very fresh baby. A year ago I would have flinched, but this time I leaned in closer, smiling to reassure her that since I am now also a mother, understood her apparent anxiety. “Such a beautiful baby! How old?” The brave mother smiled back shyly, two months.
An older lady stopped at the aisle, sizing up the middle seat between us. She reminded me of my eldest auntie, neatly dressed and tan with sporty glasses.
“Oh a baby! Can I squeeze in here?”
The plane took off, and the older lady introduced herself as Dixie Dayo, Alaskan native. For the rest of the flight and for the first time in a very long time, I got to know a perfect stranger. The first thing she asked though, was what I did for work.
I still struggle when people that have never met me before ask me what I do for work. The thing is, I was never very ambitious with my career. I don’t know what is wrong with me. As a child, I excelled at writing and loved to draw, but what child doesn’t? I attended a polytechnic high school because my friends were going there, and majored in Health Occupations because the alternative was Tech which seemed boring to me at the time. Turned out that Physiology and Anatomy wasn’t much more up my alley. When I graduated high school, there was so much pressure to know what I was going to study and which college I was going to that I completely gave up and didn’t apply to any universities at all, but ended up at the local community college after my parents threatened to disown me. A part of me rebelled against the whole idea that I needed to pick a path and had to follow it, and that I would have to sacrifice everything else I could have been.
I eventually graduated from Oregon State with a degree in Public Health, something I really did enjoy learning about. I worked part-time as the social media girl for a tech startup off campus during my time in Corvallis, and the engineers there told me something I never forgot. It doesn’t matter what you study, study what you think is interesting because all you really need to get a real job is a degree, and the rest is experience. I may have taken that idea too far, because that summer I moved to Taiwan for a self-declared ‘gap year’ and didn’t come back for four years.
When I finally did start a ‘real job’, I think the stars must have aligned. For the next eight years, I was the luckiest gal on earth to work across social media, brand/digital marketing, analytics and project management at numerous companies like Airbnb and Nike. I met incredible people, worked on impressive projects and made lifelong friends along the way. My work was the type of stuff that was nearly impossible to explain to anyone my parent’s age and beyond. It wasn’t my goal and I had no formal training, I just kept on walking through one open door after another, learning everything I could along the way. I never pretended to know what I didn’t, and found that asking the right questions helped everyone. I loved my managers and they seemed to take a liking to me as well, maybe it was my diligence, talent (?) honesty, or curiosity, but it certainly wasn’t my ambition. I think I could have been happy budgeting ad campaigns or building Airtables for awhile, as long as I liked my coworkers and I could afford to eat out whenever I wanted and travel. I made plenty enough for that.
Sometimes I could even sense frustration from my bosses during 1:1 reviews, over the fact that I wasn’t sure how to advance in my career or knew what I wanted to do. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I would even make stuff up just to seem more driven then I really was. The opportunities kept on coming though, and I kept on taking them, like walking in the dark with the tiniest flashlight. **Wow this is the opposite of a LinkedIn post, how depressing! Dare me to post this on Linkedin haha. **
When I found out Owen was coming, I decided that I may have taken my career as far as I wanted it to go for now. For now, I told myself, I can take a break from trying so hard to make it matter. Andrew and I agreed that there would be no one better person to love, nourish and raise our little boy than his own mama. It felt like I was agreeing to a 1950’s idelogy, so I made sure that I wasn’t expected to clean and cook everyday wearing a half-waisted apron. Being a stay at home mother would be a job just like any job, and both parents will care for Owen together once Andrew got off work. I told myself that this would only be for a season in my life, and that I could always join the workforce again whenever I felt ready. I had to tell myself all these things over and over again because deep inside I felt ashamed and guilty for not being eager to be a working mom, for not embracing the hustle, for not being my idea of an empowered, modern woman. I also felt ashamed for how privileged I am to even have the option of staying home, letting my husband support the family. I brought it up with other moms, gently prodding them to judge me or guide me. Would they think of me as less? Did I think of myself as less?
To be continued.
