Adventures at Midlife

I just spotted this from the Brits:

If a woman has a serious career, how many children can she get away with? And how do women with large families manage their careers — and their marriages? These were the questions Valerie Grove set out to answer in 1987 in The Compleat Woman: Marriage, Motherhood, Career — Can She Have it All? Long out of print, the book gave an extraordinarily intimate insight into the home lives of 20 women…

To qualify as “compleat” (the title was a play on Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler), they had to have been married for more than 25 years, have had three or more children and a stellar career. In the late 1980s, with accelerating divorce rates, women secure in the workplace and the birth rate plummeting, Grove wondered whether these working mothers of three or more were an endangered species: “The kind of mothers I write about here may well prove to be the last of their kind.”

(Let’s see… Married 29 years. Check. Two kids. Oh, sorry, scratch that. Stellar career. Uh, could you define stellar?)

The more I think about Grove’s thesis, the more it sounds like 1987, not 2007. Even though she zeros in on three issues that have preoccupied many of us for years, her scale seems curiously out of date, which could be why the book is out of print.

The Guardian’s Viv Groskop observes that “[S]tatistically very few in the current generation are likely to achieve more than one of these, let alone all three.” Oh, forget the CURRENT generation, Viv. I don’t have many friends in MY generation who qualify on all three counts.

A slight digression: I subscribe to The Spouse’s Brass Ring Theory: Very few of us will rise to the pinnacles of our professions. Grabbing the brass ring takes a lot of talent, hard work, personality — and a certain elusive element, call it luck, chance, karma, Divine Providence, timing, what you will. Most of us, hopefully, will achieve some level of success in a pleasant environment with adequate and maybe even generous compensation, and will pick up some great stories, good colleagues and useful skills in the process (along with the workplace disasters, office creeps and inevitable scut-jobs, which I won’t dwell on).

So, stellar career? No, but I’ve been lucky, I have a few plaques hanging on my office wall attesting to my adequacy, and I’ve had a good time so far. The two sons, whose pictures also figure prominently in my office decor, have been a complete joy, and while I wouldn’t have minded a third (or fourth, even), it didn’t happen.

That my marriage has endured, even thrived may be the most interesting milestone. (Divine Providence, indeed!) I watched my two BFFs marriages of 30+ years fall apart within three years of each other. One has a career, one doesn’t, but both now take a large measure of satisfaction from their grown children and grandchildren. And they both have rich social and inner lives. Would they have any place in Grove’s 1987 notion of compleat-ness?

Grove even admits in the Guardian article that her thesis may have been flawed from the get-go, particularly in light of her sample group, which was a very British mix of titles, academics and free spirits:

It took months to get the interviewees to talk to her about the minutiae of their private lives and the results, Grove agrees, were mixed. Not one gave her the advice she craved: the secret of how to do it. There was no real consensus on how to make it work: all their lives were too different and, usually, quite odd.

“There is a sort of aura of strangeness about the whole book and I realised very quickly afterwards that I always felt more rooted in ordinary life than any of them. Initially the working title was Impossible Women because they really were so strange and unusual.” …For many, there was definitely an element of privilege in their situations.

Do we even talk about “having it all” anymore? If we do, I think the definition of “all” has become much, much more personal.