When I came to the States, I suddenly found myself surrounded by a thriving nationwide dialogue on feminism and women's rights. In my 17 years of growing up in Indonesia, I had never once witnessed nor participated in an educated and effective conversation on this topic.
It was and still is liberating. Now, however, it's also confusing. On one hand, there are many progressive advocates for women not having kids, being career-centered and essentially playing the role that, for so many years, men have monopolized.
On the other hand, some take the more traditional view of prioritizing women's role as mothers and home keepers. They say that a woman's job is to take care of the children and the house and that this is in no way inferior to men's job of securing income.
The fashionable view today is that women should have the freedom to choose to do either and to do both, which is all very well until the obvious practical implications of this are considered.
Juggling a career and children is freaking hard (not that I would know, but it definitely seems so). I admire the strength, patience and time-management skills of the incredible women who do, including my own mother, but I doubt whether I myself would be able to rise to the occasion when the time comes. My mom seems to be more stressed out than she is happy, and it would be amiss to deny that both her motherhood and professional life require sacrifices from each other.
The simple solution to this dilemma is to pick one instead of both. But if I were to choose children, what if I can never let go of my ambitions and goals and actually begin to resent my kids for it? If I were to choose the career route, what if I wake up one day two decades from now feeling as if I've missed out on something beautiful? In other words, in both situations, I run the risk of the biggest case of FOMO ever.
At this point, all one can say is that each woman should figure it out for herself, that we all are different people with different lives and that, like clothing, there is no one size fits all solution. I mean, yes, to some extent that is true, but it still doesn't warrant dismissal of these concerns. Furthermore, there are some things that most women can relate to, namely the prospect of motherhood and the (lessening) disadvantages of being a woman in the workplace.
I am extremely grateful that I even have the choice to make. Some women are surprised with pregnancies at a young age and have to evolve into a supermom overnight. Be that as it may, I can't help but feel pulled in different directions by all the negative anecdotes of women feel like they made the wrong decision. It is true that the joys of both having a career and your life to yourself or raising a child are immense, yet the human brain was designed to have a negative bias and weigh the cons more than the pros. Not to mention the numerous other factors that affect this decision: spouses, financial stability, family background and even geographical location.
I decided a while back that if I were to have kids, the ideal age would be in my early to mid-twenties. I turn twenty in less than two months, and even though five years might seem like a while, it seems just like yesterday that I was starting high school. Additionally, I would like to have as much time as possible to plan things out if I decided to go down the motherhood route. Maybe (hopefully) I'm overthinking and maybe I got some things completely wrong. Maybe it's the unpredictability that makes life life, and we should all limit our meticulous life-planning tendencies and just roll with it.
