In my work as a life consultant, I often speak with professional women who have recently married and become mothers. Particularly in the early years of raising children, it’s not unusual for these highly educated, successful women to find themselves challenged by the new burdens of domesticity. They often struggle to maintain a career, navigate the identity shift to “mother,” and manage a household (usually alongside a man who carries less of the domestic burden than they do, regardless of who makes more money). Despite choosing both marriage and motherhood, women in this situation can end up feeling both stifled and resentful—and frustrated that they feel this way. They aren’t helped by what marriage researcher Brad Wilcox describes as the “Midas Mindset” pervading our culture: “the idea that money, educational attainment and, especially, a stimulating career offer the deepest sources of personal fulfilment and therefore should be the highest goal for men and women.”
Many high-achieving women who have chosen to prioritize motherhood, caregiving, and homemaking simply do not know how to make sense of their situation. They love their children fiercely, but they are often bored with baby music class, secretly wondering if they’ve bonded properly with their babies. They respect their husbands, but they find themselves frustrated at the men’s ability to simply keep on, professionally, despite the needs of small children. They’re grateful to have a home with hot running water and matching throw pillows but are totally overwhelmed by keeping it in order.
After a life of succeeding at every measurable test of achievement the educational system and professional world could throw at them, many highly accomplished women secretly wonder if they’re just wimps. After all, our culture tends to operate on the assumption that domesticity is low-value, and therefore easy work.
But the truth is, marriage is difficult. Raising children is difficult. Housekeeping and homemaking are difficult. This is true for everyone, but the difficulty seems to come as more of a shock to professional women who have achieved their success by striving to meet the standards of an entirely different metric. Why is this so? I believe these women are struggling for the very simple reason that they have not been prepared for this.
What Have We Lost?
The skills that children used learn in the home and more recently were taught in “home economics” classes—basic cooking, cleaning, mending, woodworking, gardening, and so on—have not been handed on to a largely digital generation. Such skills are difficult to “imbibe” culturally if a child grows up spending eight hours a day in school, being raised by parents who both work full time outside the house. Home becomes a place to touch base before heading out again, rather than the locus of most activity. If this was their experience, it’s no wonder that mothers spending much of their time at home with their children are shocked by sheer amount of labor required to maintain even a bare minimum of order and cleanliness. Anyone who has had to go from cleaning a home that is lived in only a few hours a day to one that has constant activity from dawn ’til dusk can attest that the wear and tear is hardly comparable.
Similarly, small family sizes and isolated suburban living means that most of these women haven’t grown up around infants or gained experience caring for younger children. They haven’t seen a variety of approaches to mothering and haven’t been exposed to an array of vibrant family cultures and domestic practices. Some new mothers haven’t held a baby since their younger sibling was born twenty-five years ago. Suddenly being handed your own newborn when you have merely a fuzzy childhood memory to guide you can be wildly disorienting and not a little overwhelming. Maternal instinct may be strong once the baby arrives, but basic familiarity and practice go a long way in instilling confidence.
A woman who used to be a successful stockbroker, well-dressed and well-respected, now looks around while the baby cries and discovers that no one has clean socks and she hasn’t had time to wash her hair in four days. She wonders what happened to that woman who used to be so competent, and she can resent this new life because it makes her feel like she’s disappeared—or worse, been erased. She feels guilty for feeling this way, precisely because she doesn’t subscribe to the “Midas Mindset.” She knows that relationships are a source of deep fulfilment, but she finds it difficult to believe in the moment, when covered in spit-up and facing a mountain of dirty laundry.
What if the problem is not this woman, who is doing her best? What if her expectations are all wrong? It would be odd for a successful baker to become a florist overnight and then accuse herself of being a total failure for not immediately producing professional-quality bouquets. But this is akin to what happens to many elite women. A successful lawyer or academic finds herself puzzled that she is not an overnight success at being a competent housewife. After all (she thinks), it’s just laundry, dishes, a baby or two: hardly a prestigious partnership at the law firm or endowed chair at the university.
Acknowledging the Different Difficulties
Professional work has a different trajectory than domesticity, though. Elite professional training (which can begin quite early for high-achieving girls, who learn to accept nothing less than an A on their second-grade spelling tests) is dependent on achievement milestones. AP exams, SATs, GREs, LSATs, or MCATs snowball into a collection of prestigious degrees, publications, job titles, and awards—all things that can be checked off a list and put on a CV.
Domestic work, by contrast, is largely Sisyphean. As soon as (nay, before!) you’ve finished one load of laundry or set of dishes, there’s another waiting to be done. Tasks rarely remain completed, and milestones are few. There are no real achievement bonuses or praise from “higher ups.”
In fact, domesticity is largely about caring for people (and their stuff)—many of whom, while young, are cute but irrational. The kind of interpersonal work that it takes to maintain healthy familial relationships is often different from that demanded by the business world, academia, law, medicine, or research. There, you succeed by collaborating (and often competing) with other highly competent, ostensibly rational adults (and by engaging in the habit that no one wants to admit is part of the game: people-pleasing). Familial relationships, by contrast, often require not self-assertion but self-gift. They demand tremendous patience and the ability to manage situations in which boardroom tactics often fail.
What’s more, much of the collaboration in marriage happens between a man and a woman. In the professional world of knowledge work, sexual difference tends to play a smaller role. But it’s difficult to find a point in life where sexual difference is more pronounced than when a woman has a baby. Suddenly, even a couple who has followed a spreadsheet religiously for an equitable division of tasks is hard pressed to “measure out” the different work of mothering and fathering. She—in her body, mind, and emotions—has experienced things he simply cannot comprehend, no matter how empathetic he is. Those early months and years of childhood require both parents, yes, but the demands on the mother are radically different. Perhaps this is why, despite everyone’s best intentions, mothers still do more domestic work when both husband and wife are on generic “parental leave.”
This foray into the fires of sexual difference can make or break a marriage. How can she (sleep deprived, with a radical hormonal cocktail racing through her bloodstream, in love with a crying infant she has no idea how to handle) explain to him (confused about why the confident, competent, professional woman he married is bursting into tears at random intervals) how utterly unfair it all feels? True, he was not prepared for this, but she? She spent her formative years in a system that practically delights in ignoring, denying, and devaluing what now dominates her life.
She also hasn’t been taught how to tune into her menstrual cycle and the effects of its various hormonal shifts on the rest of her life. She hasn’t watched, up close, the delicate dance of a long and happy marriage. She hasn’t been around enough infants to develop the confidence to know what’s normal and what’s worrisome. She has been taught (implicitly and often explicitly, too) that the tasks and skills of domesticity are beneath her and therefore not worth learning.
What’s a woman to do?
Finding Our Way Forward
There is a way forward for women who want to embrace the reality of sexual difference, who want a life-long marriage, who love their children, but also feel utterly overwhelmed by the whole situation.
First, the skills required for managing a home are just that: skills that can be learned. As Fairer Disputations author Ivana Greco points out, “We don’t accord the same respect to the skills displayed by competent mothers and fathers at home as we do to surgeons, but perhaps we should.” Competent homemaking requires practice. Families who live in a well-ordered home do not do so accidentally. Much thought is given to things like chores, calendars, individual tastes and preferences, developmental changes, and shifting circumstances. In short, successful domesticity can be mastered, but not overnight, and not without intentional work and consistent practice.
What’s more, the same type of energy and drive that elite women put into gaining graduate degrees and job promotions can be channelled into learning the basics of cooking, cleaning, gardening, and the like. In fact, as Fairer Disputations author Lane Scott has noted, “it’s the career skill and the habituation to keeping your head down and working through rough patches that also get you through tough stages with lots of little kids.” Some skills and habits, in fact, are transferrable, and it can be helpful to tap into and develop the ones that are.
There are, after all, many elite women who are doing exactly this: embracing domesticity after having, or while still having, successful careers. Trained as lawyers, academics, and writers, these women are welcoming the both/and of domesticity and professional work on culturally atypical timelines. They are embracing “seasonality” in their motherhood and in their homes, devoting some seasons to being present with small children; some to home-educating their school-aged children; some to dipping into and out of more sustained paid work; some to writing in the margins of the day; some to volunteering in their communities.
Of course, prioritizing the goods of the home isn’t a solo endeavour. It is a shared life project—even if there is no precise 50/50 split of tasks between spouses. Every couple will face the inevitable stresses that come with marriage and family life, but how they approach those challenges matters. The results of one recent study support “the idea that stress ‘well-negotiated in one relationship may be the death-knell of another,’ and that stressors, as unwelcome as they are, ‘could bring couples closer’ if dealt with effectively.” Taking a “we” not “I” approach can go a long way. Just as good domestic skills can ease, though not eliminate, the unending laundry burden, good relationship skills can ease, though not eliminate, the stresses of marriage and parenting—including the realities of sexual difference.
Marriage and domesticity are difficult, but they can also be incredibly fulfilling. The key is to recognize unhelpful cultural narratives for what they are, treating homemaking and housekeeping as achievable skills and channelling energy into fostering healthy relationships through self-sacrifice and good communication.
To elite women who care about domesticity yet feel ill-equipped to meet its many demands, I say: you’re not a wimp. It is possible to be competent, and even flourish, in the challenging, rewarding life that you’ve chosen.
