Caught at the end of my freshman year of college, I am no stranger to the question everyone asks. The one thrown across the dinner table with family on thanksgiving. The one handed out to every student who is not employed yet. If I had a nickel for every time someone asked, well, I would have a lot of nickels.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I want to be a mom.
I have discovered when you tell people that you want to be a mom, they laugh and say, “But what do you actually want to do?”
Well, I guess this is the world we live in now. Where it is acceptable for young women like me to desire a career more than anything else, to make her way in the world and leave her mark. (Don’t get me wrong, I think this is awesome.) Maybe she will even break a few glass ceilings while she is at it.
More and more evidence pops up every day showing how millennial women are choosing to put off a family in favor of their careers. After all, moms and mothers-to-be sacrifice a lot of time and potential wage-earning opportunities when they choose to have a child. So it makes a lot of sense that women are putting off pregnancy and children to climb their respective career ladders.
Though I have the possibility to blaze my own trail, it is not something I really want to do. What I really want to do, what I have always wanted to do, is have a noisy house full of kids. Maybe two, maybe five, I’m not really sure yet. I do not know if I’ll have them all myself or if I’ll adopt; but somewhere down the line, my goal in life is to be a mom.
Some people view this as a failure or an oddity. Why would you want to give up a career and just be a mom?
My answer: You are not just a mom. You’re a superhero, a best friend, a teacher, a storyteller, a caretaker, a source of warm hugs and good advice, a shoulder to cry on, a role model, a tutor, and more. Mothers are everything to their children as they grow up.
There are still millennial women like me who favor raising a family over nurturing a career. We might seem rare in our generation, but at some point or another, we all found a connection to kids that made us all want our own. (Have you ever seen an 18-year-old with baby fever?)
Instead of a having a Monday-Friday 9-5 job, I’m looking at 24/7 work hours where the management is stretched thin and the employees aren’t always cooperative at naptime. Instead of filling out three hours of paperwork, there could be three hours of signing field trip forms, finishing practicing the times tables, and looking over countless worksheets. The demands are countless, but the benefits are limitless.
You can stop laughing and asking me what I actually want to do. I’ll sort out my career later because the only thing I know for sure is that I want to be a mom.
