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The Unexpected Primary Caretaker

/ Liz / Leave a comment

This piece originally appeared on The Salt Collective, a now-defunct online magazine about culture, faith, and politics.

“I just love being with Spencer all the time,” she said as she crawled up the play structure, on the heels of the child in question.

I was at a neighborhood playground with a new mom-friend, our toddlers happily ignoring each other.  We had met at a preschool open house the weekend before.  Our sons were less than 3 months apart, we lived mere blocks from each other, she had an engineering degree from the prestigious university down the street, and she was a full-time parent.  Excited to find another high-achieving mom who spent a lot of time taking care of her kid, I got her number immediately.  I had so many questions for her:  I wanted to know how she made the decision not to work.  I wanted to know if she still had professional ambitions and, if so, how she was keeping them at bay while she raised her child.  I wanted to know if the same drive and intellectual curiosity that had gotten her that degree ever made it frustrating to read the same Elephant and Piggie book eight times in a row.  I wanted to ask her all the questions I’d been wrestling with for the last 21 months, questions that neither my working-mom friends nor my stay-at-home friends could answer.

Five days later, we were having our first playdate, and I was quickly learning that we might have less in common than I thought.

“I can’t imagine having another kid for at least three and a half more years,” she continued. “We’re just having so much fun.”

I looked at her as she animatedly chatted with her son.  Then I looked down at mine, furiously turning the steering wheel of the plastic car he was sitting in, and sighed.  I was in my eleventh hour of the day with him, and there were still two more to go before bedtime.

So much for a friend in a similar situation, I thought.  I could not relate to anything she was saying.

***

Until I had a child myself, I knew virtually no stay-at-home parents.  Both of my parents worked, as did all the parents of my childhood friends.  When they had children, the high-achieving folks with whom I went to high school, college, and grad school all took as much parental leave as they could before returning to the full-time jobs their educations had earned them.  I did not expect to be any different.

But when my husband and I started talking about having kids, I found myself considering a different path.  I was trying to start a second career (really a fourth and fifth career, but who’s counting these days), building a caseload of career consulting clients and starting to write in earnest.  It wasn’t the best time professionally to have a child, but my circumstances did offer the possibility of caring for a baby by day and working by night.  Not to mention that our nearest relatives were 2,000 miles away and I was not, at that point, making enough to justify the cost of child care — which, in the San Francisco Bay Area, rivals the coronary-inducing cost of housing.

On top of the practical concerns, I was curious about what it was like to be a primary caretaker.  When I was three, I told my parents that I wanted to do every job in the world for 10 days — doctor, McDonald’s cashier, mother — and that statement had proved surprisingly prescient.  Even after working in three different fields and dipping my toes into two more, I wanted to know what it was like to be a full-time parent, at least for a little while.  And frankly, it sounded refreshing to go from juggling too many things for, oh, my entire life to having only one focus every day.  So I decided that I would be the primary caretaker, and after taking a month or two off, I would start writing again and seeing a few clients in the evening and on weekends.  No big deal.  I didn’t know anyone else who had this kind of arrangement, but it seemed like it could work for me.

Not surprisingly, things turned out to be far more complicated in reality.  The first year was a blur of naps, feeds, and diaper changes — one in which I ended up getting very little work done at all.  After the one-year mark, though, my energy started to return.  I started writing again.  I started speaking again.  I got a job teaching about race and sexuality.  One of the pieces I wrote helped spawn an organization into which I was excited to pour my limited time and energy.  The little mental space I’d been able to clear out after a year of parenting was quickly filled — and then some — by work.

The remarkable thing about this transition is how much better I felt after I resumed working.  To no one’s surprise but mine, I loved working again.  I was energized in a way I hadn’t been in more than a year, and not just because I was sleeping more; I was buzzed from checking things off my to-do list and making things happen.  I was less bored when my son and I went to the playground for the second time that day or read There Is a Bird on Your Head! nine times in succession, because I had other ideas percolating in the back of my mind and other things to look forward to.  Paradoxically, I was a better parent now that I had other things going on in my life; I was more satisfied overall, and when I was with my kid, I was more present and more intentional.

Not to say that life was perfect.  For all the energy and meaning it gave me, having more things to do meant more stress and less sleep.  There were moments, like when my son initiated a fifth lap around the block, when I wished I could be using that time to write instead.  He was constantly changing, and whenever one of these changes took place — in his nap schedule, in his activity level, in the sudden advent of tantrums — my work life had to be reorganized in turn.  And the boundaries between work and childrearing were hazy at best; I went from chasing him through the house in the morning to writing emails during his naps to chasing him around the block in the afternoon to grading papers when he went down for the night.  My weekdays were sometimes 18 hours long, and my weekends — time when I would ideally be resting more and spending more time with my family — were often no different.  When working only evenings and weekends started to feel unsustainable, I had to decide if and when to start child care; then I had to decide how much, weighing how much I could justify on my variable income against how desperate I was for relief.  Two mornings of daycare a week soon became three, which soon became four.  The balance between work and childrearing was, and still is, constantly being reassessed and renegotiated.

***

I’ve looked for other parents — mothers especially — who can relate to these struggles, whose experiences I can learn from.  But they’ve been hard to find.  Nearly all the mothers I know who also love work returned to their full-time jobs after a few months of maternity leave.  They have offices to go to, set work hours, regular interaction with adult coworkers.  Their situations aren’t perfect either — they have to deal with leaving their kids with caretakers before they feel ready to, in many cases; guilt for not spending more time with their children; sadness that they miss milestones; the sense that their kids are growing up too quickly.  They have their own set of parenting baggage, one that’s entirely different from mine.

Meanwhile, most of the mothers I meet during the week have chosen not to work.  They do not have the same professional angst that I have, the stress of pent-up ambition, a constant longing for more time and space to work.  They wrestle with isolation and boredom, and if they have any qualms about not working, it’s guilt for not getting more out of their education.  But, as my new mom-friend illustrated, that guilt is usually dwarfed by the satisfaction they get out of being with their children all day.

I can’t relate to that either.  Make no mistake:  I love my son more than life itself, and he’s filled my life with more love and unbridled joy than I ever thought possible.  But being with him 24/7 is not my dream.  I am not creative when it comes to finding things for us to do.  I do not enjoy scouring mom groups for fun outings or Pinterest for new crafts and projects; I do not get excited about finding new storytimes or playgrounds to visit.  His toddler tantrums are more exhausting than anything I’ve ever experienced, including anything that happened in his first year.  I love that he wants to hold my hand and spend time with me, and I love that I get to spend hours of every day within tickling distance of him.  But I also love the work I do and the meaning and purpose it gives me.

So I find myself in an unusual situation:  I’m a parent who loves to work but spends much of her time childrearing, without a traditional job, an office, or consistent work hours.  I’m a mother who does not feel like time is going too fast or that her child is growing up too quickly because I get more than enough time with him.  I feel like mothers like me are out there, especially in the economy we live in, where freelancing and gigging are (for better and for worse) on the rise.  But so far, these parents have been hard to find.

I understand that I’m lucky to have this set of problems.  Having flexible work hours is a gift.  Having the option of not working full-time is a gift.  Feeling like you have too much time with your child is a gift, because it means that you’ve gotten enough, and plenty of parents would kill for that.  I am lucky.

But I also wish I had a few parents in my life who are in the same boat, who fit in neither with traditional working parents nor the stay-at-home crowd.  Who’ve had to constantly negotiate and re-negotiate the lines between work and childrearing.  Who know what it’s like to have the unusual wish that they had a little less time with their kid and a little more time to work.

***

A few weeks later, my new mom-friend and I were texting each other, trying to schedule our second playdate.

“Are you free Thursday or Friday?” I asked.

“Possibly Thursday. I have a job interview!” she replied.

I laughed.  My first reaction was cynical:  What happened to the emphatic claim that she loved being with her son all the time?  Did she get an opportunity that she had never considered before, one so perfect that she was willing to disrupt all the fun they were having?  Had she been she trying to convince me?  Had she been trying to convince herself?

Then came a more gracious thought:  Maybe she and I have something in common after all.

The Asian American Quarter-Life Crisis.

/ Liz / 298 Comments

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In the 10 years since I graduated from college, I’ve had the same conversation hundreds of times:

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m an engineer/a lawyer/a pharmacist/an analyst at [insert name of large bank here].”

“Oh, cool!  Do you like it?”

[shrug] “It’s work.”

Or maybe:

“Not really, but… I guess it’s okay for now….”

Or maybe just:

“No.”

I’ve had this conversation so many times that I feel like this problem is epidemic:  So many Asian Americans I know have great jobs.  So few of them enjoy their work.

I’ve dubbed this the Asian American Quarter-Life Crisis: intelligent and hard-working twenty- and thirtysomethings in stable, well-paying jobs that they detest but don’t leave.

If the conversation continues (and often it doesn’t, because the other person is depressed by it or just doesn’t want to talk about it), the reasons for staying in the job are sometimes predictable.  “It pays the bills.”  “The economy is crap.”  But what I hear most often is this: “I don’t know what else I would do.”

***

Working a job that you don’t like isn’t unique to Asian Americans, obviously — it’s a problem so common that complaining about it is cliche.  But I think this issue is especially pervasive in Asian American communities.  For one, Asian cultures tend to be risk-averse, to value knowing your place and not rocking the boat.  On top of that, our parents came to this country for the sake of financial security and stability, and they inculcated us with the same values.  Most of us have been raised to think about our futures for as long as we can remember.  It starts with math workbooks.  Gifted summer camps.  Endless SAT prep.  All for the sake of fabulous college applications, which lead us to the best universities.  The best internships.  The best (read: most lucrative, most prestigious, most stable) careers, which usually fall somewhere in the vicinity of medicine, law, engineering, and (corporate) business.

In midst of all this striving for the best, there’s little to no attention paid to what we might actually enjoy.  That would be indulgent, if not completely unheard of.  There’s little concern in Asian cultures for personal strengths and weaknesses; there’s no such thing as someone who’s “not a math person” or “not a science person,” because excellence in any area can be attained through hard work.  There’s nothing that can’t be achieved through more repetitions or more discipline.  Failure to excel at something is not attributed to our unique dispositions; it’s attributed solely to laziness or lack of effort, and that is unacceptable.  As a result, we’re trained to excel at everything.  We become excellent at jumping through hoops and knocking down any task that’s placed before us. That’s what we end up enjoying, at least while we’re in school.  These are not terrible skills to have, mind you.  But the flip side is that as we’re trained be great at everything, there’s very little attention paid to what among those things we actually like.  Generally speaking, this is not on our parents’ radars at all, and as a result, it goes neglected on ours.

The result of all of this: a generation of Asian Americans who are excellent at achieving but have no idea what they want to do.  (Or, if they do know, are reluctant to pursue it because it isn’t as stable or well-paid as their current jobs.)  A generation that is incredibly successful but, professionally speaking, not terribly happy.

Not to say that there aren’t Asian Americans who, in the midst of racking up achievements, figured out and pursued what interested them.  And there are certainly Asian parents who are exceptions to the rule, who are actually interested in what their children want to do and support them regardless.  I have Asian American friends who are graphic designers, actors, community activists; who are rethinking math pedagogy for Teach for America and doing campus ministry; and yes, even a few who enjoy being doctors and programmers and brand managers.  Their numbers, however, are dwarfed by the scores of Asian Americans I know who would be much happier in other fields — engineers who should be teachers and filmmakers, lawyers who should be writers, doctors who should be chefs.  And, of course, those who have no idea what they should be doing.

Also, I’m not trying to invalidate or trivialize how difficult this quarter-life crisis is.  It’s a crisis, after all, because there are significant pros and cons to all available options.  But I can’t help but wonder what kind of creative, innovative projects and careers Asian Americans would tackle if they weren’t confined — psychologically, financially, or culturally — to jobs they didn’t enjoy.  And how much happier and more fulfilled they might be as a result.

***

Of course, I draw not only from my peers’ experiences but also my own. I grew up as a little achieving machine.  My parents weren’t just Asian immigrants; they were Asian immigrants who came here to get PhDs and went on to become professors, so education was paramount in our family.  The value of education (and stability it would eventually bring me) was so strong that my mom didn’t even need to be a tiger mom; by elementary school, I had so deeply internalized it that she didn’t need to do anything to motivate me to achieve.  In high school, I cleaned up across the board — not only in math and science, the stereotypically Asian subjects my parents taught, but also in English and social studies.  I had to be the best at everything.  There was no excuse not to be.

In the midst of all this achieving, I also figured out what I wanted to study:  Oddly enough, the recurring refrain of “Why are you like that?  Like, the way you are?” in My So-Called Life, which I watched obsessively in 7th grade, triggered an interest in psychology.  My parents were down with this, because they expected a doctorate degree, and whether it was in medicine or psychology, I would have tangible career options.  So I went off to college as a psych major.  Meanwhile, my Asian American friends swarmed to engineering and premed classes, spending long days in the chem lab or long nights in the computer lab, which they almost universally loathed.  I toiled with them for one semester, taking multivariable calculus and organic chemistry (“to challenge myself,” I said at the time, though in retrospect, I think I just had something to prove) before retiring from all things premed.  For the next 3 years, I looked at my peers with a mix of pity and smugness.  They mindlessly studied what their parents wanted them to study, but I was studying something I actually liked.

I kept this chip on my shoulder for years — until I found myself midway through a PhD program and seriously questioning if I wanted to be there.  I found myself in the very position for which I had judged my peers:  I was pursuing a secure, well-paying career that my parents wanted for me but I wasn’t sure I wanted.  Meanwhile, the people in college I smirked at for their hapless pursuit of stable careers — they were no less happy than I was, but at least they were making great money.  All I was doing was accruing debt.

All of this came to a head 4 years ago, when I started the full-time internship that made up my last year of grad school, and I realized that my worst fears had come true:  I had spent 5 years in school for a career I didn’t want.  I had endured more classes, papers, and exams than I could count; an exhausting master’s thesis and an even more grueling dissertation; countless hours stressing about clinical hours, data analyses, internship applications, and all the other work of grad school.  I was getting my first taste of what my life in this field would be like — a life I spent years doggedly pursuing — and I didn’t like it.

I was also getting my first taste of what many of my peers had been experiencing for years.  Working at a job you hate SUCKS.  Like, REALLY sucks.  Getting up in the morning is terrible, because you’re tired and you don’t want to go to the job you loathe, and then you’re there for 8 hours — the entire time the sun is out — if not longer, and you come home and you’re exhausted and you have no time or energy to do the things you actually want to do.  And you have to do this AGAIN.  And AGAIN.  And AGAIN.  And a respite comes on Friday, if you’re not too tired to enjoy it, and then Sunday comes too quickly and you sink into your weekly funk because you have to repeat the whole cycle AGAIN.  It’s like being in hell.  All I ever thought about that year was my next day off, when I could maybe sneak in a sick day and just sleep….

Meanwhile, the next hoop was being placed in front of me.  Announcements for post-docs started flooding my inbox almost the minute my internship started — post-docs that my peers were applying for, interviewing for, getting.  There was pressure all around me to swim with the current — but could I do it if I was so, you know, unhappy with what I was doing?  Could I really sign up for more of the same?

I started peeling my fingers away, one by one.  I held out for half-time post-docs, which are virtually nonexistent, thinking that maybe I could do what I was trained to do part-time and use the remaining time to pursue something I actually liked.  The few half-time opportunities that materialized fizzled out quickly.  In the end, I was left with a gift:  I did not have a job in my field.  Or any job, for that matter.  I had no choice but to do something else — to maybe figure out what I really wanted to do.  At 28, with a PhD in a field I didn’t want to work in, I was about to embark on the task I should have started 10 years before.

***

I took a very different tack this time around:  Instead of setting a long-term goal and obstinately staying the course, no matter what data I collected along the way, I would look for jobs that interested me and try them.  If I liked them, I would continue; if not, I would quit.  And I would see what opportunities unfolded that way.  After years of meticulously planning my professional life, this strategy — one that involved working forward and not backward, in which my future would be determined by opportunities that may or may not arise — was terrifying.  But it was also thrilling — like stepping onto a tightrope without a 5-year plan to catch me.  And, well, I had seen how my previous strategy played out.  I didn’t think I could do much worse.

So, new game plan in hand, I started my job hunt.  I got an adjunct professor position at my alma mater; aside from the absurd amounts of prep work and the occasional entitled student, I found that I really enjoyed teaching, and it was a much better fit for me than clinical work.  Then a friend from college asked if I would be interested in working with high school students, which I had done in undergrad and was happy to take up again.  That job also led to some consulting work, which I had never done before but turned out to be right up my alley.  Thus I patched together a professional life, running from meeting to class to meeting — but, in a dramatic change from the previous year, I loved going to work.  Each of my jobs felt meaningful, played to my strengths, and had far more awesome moments than terrible ones.  I finally got a taste for what it was like to do work that was life-giving, and it was fantastic.  On top of that, I found that my satisfaction at work trickled into every other area of my life; after a year of being a zombie, I was happy, well-rested, energetic.  I felt alive again.

Then, a few months ago, we had to move for my husband’s job, and I found myself back at square one.  As wonderful as youth work and teaching were, I didn’t feel a strong need to continue either one.  So back I went to trying-and-seeing.  Two of my professors from grad school offered me a job as a consultant, helping millennials figure out what they want to do with their lives.  Given my experiences, both professional (therapy, assessment, working with students, consulting) and personal (knowing intimately how it felt to end up in the wrong career and to wonder what I was doing with my life), this felt like an excellent fit — and it was, for once, something I could see myself doing long-term.  I had also wanted for years to write more seriously — a desire that I had struggled to acknowledge, fearing that it sounded pretentious, frivolous, or both — and it appeared that I now had time to give that a shot.  But I also needed an income as I built up these lines of work, so I looked for yet another job.  I applied to work at a few independent bookstores, something I had always thought would be fun but never had the chance to try.  One took a chance and hired me, even though I was both incredibly overqualified and incredibly underqualified.  So I find myself splitting my time between three different gigs yet again.

And lo and behold, I am happy, for the same reasons I was in my previous trifecta of employment.  Obviously, the situation isn’t perfect:  I spend every day shifting between very different tasks.  At the moment, I make significantly less than my peers from grad school, who are now licensed psychologists, and pretty much everyone I went to college with.  My resume makes no sense at all.  I’m almost 31, and I’ve made only the slightest headway into a career I want to have.  But for me, all of that pales in comparison to how it feels to be doing work that I actually enjoy.  After years of jumping through hoops because it was all I knew how to do, of achieving for the sake of achieving, I’m finally doing work that I find meaningful.  And it feels pretty awesome.  In a sharp contrast to my previous way of living, I have no idea what my life will look like in 5 years — but I’m content and fulfilled right now, and that feels like a good trade-off.

***

Now, I’m not saying that what I did is the right thing to do and that every Asian American who’s unhappy with their job should leave it immediately.  I am lucky to have no student loans or house payments or children to support, to have a husband who is entirely supportive and as eager to see me in a job I love as I am, to have parents who had ample warning about this sea change and accepted it with minimal resistance, and on and on and on.  I recognize that some people have children, parental demands, mortgages, and other constraints that keep them from making similar changes — and some have found a way to be content in the midst of less-than-thrilling careers.  I respect that.

But in my case, I felt so dissatisfied with the path I was on that I needed to ask myself some serious questions about the choices I was making — and judging from all the conversations I’ve had in the last 10 years with other Asian Americans about their jobs, I don’t think I’m alone.  I don’t think that pursuing careers that are safe and stable is a bad thing by any means; having a consistent income, health insurance, and resources to live in a safe neighborhood with good schools is nothing to sneeze at.  But I worry that as a community, we hyperfocus on security and stability to the point where we don’t think to explore what could be life-giving and fulfilling for us.  And as a result, a lot of us walk around not very happy with our professional lives — which is to say, for most of our waking hours — and not really knowing how to change that.

I don’t have any easy answers or one-size-fits-all solutions, but I do think we need to spend more time reflecting on our choices, both individually and collectively.  And I wonder what would happen if we allowed ourselves more room to explore.  I wonder what kinds of things we would pursue — and how much more fulfilled we could be.

***

A final thought:  If anything here has resonated with you, I’d like to hear your story, too.  If you left your career, if you decided to stay, if you’re trying to figure that out right now — what has your process been like?  What’s made it hard or easy for you to make your decision?  How will you advise your children, should you choose to have them?  I’m super-curious to hear.