Lara Bazelon - Ambitious Like a Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career Is Good for Your Kids

M y mother once told me, Never be at the financial mercy of anyone else.

More than any other advice she gave me, it stuck.

Throughout her life, my mother worked. She never stopped. Not after having my sister Emily in 1971. Or me in 1974. Not after finishing her medical residency in 1975. Not after having my sister Jill in 1976, and not after having a fourth child, my sister Dana, in 1979.

My mother worked to be independent. She worked so that she would have an identity outside of her marriage and her four children. She worked because it made her happy. She worked to be free from the ever-present stress and misery of the near poverty that defined her childhood. She worked to set an example for her four daughters.

And she did. All four of us went to college and graduate school. We are all mothers who work full-time.

My mother lost her father when she was three. He died of a heart attack early in the morning on February 17, 1948. He was thirty-one. It was completely shocking, she said, and devastating. An engineer with the Department of the Navy, he had been the familys sole breadwinner. My mothers mother, Edith, was left alone to raise a toddler. She had no savings, no job, and no money aside from her husbands five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy.

The next two decades of my grandmothers life were marked by her struggling to make ends meet while battling severe anxiety and depression. She could no longer afford the rent for the New Jersey apartment she had shared with her late husband and had no choice but to move with my mother to Baltimore to live with her parents, with whom she had a contentious relationship. Even when my grandmother could finally afford a small garden apartment in a nearby neighborhood, she and my mother shared a bedroom. That remained true until my mother left for college. Edith worried constantly about money, at times relying on her younger sister and brother-in-law for support.

My grandmother had a college degree, but in the late 1940s, the options for womenparticularly women with small childrenwere limited: teacher, nurse, secretary. After substitute teaching for months, she found work as a middle-school English teacher in a Baltimore public school. Her students previous education had been severely lacking and they struggled with the curriculum. Edith was frustrated by the way that the system had failed them and her; she was grossly underpaidas most teachers at that time were and continue to be today. From June through September, when school was out, she had no salary at all. Her dream of living a middle-class life with a husband and a houseful of children behind a white picket fence had shattered. She went through bouts of depression and repeatedly threatened suicide. Not having money drove her crazy, my mother said, and she could not adjust to her life.

In response, my mother focused on her education. She skipped two grades and got a full scholarship to Bryn Mawr College, a prestigious all-womens school, where she was premed. It was 1961, and she was sixteen years old. A few months later, she met my fatherher first and only serious boyfriend. Toward the end of college, she began applying to medical school. Her mother and grandparents advised against it. They told me I would never get married because no man would want me if I had a career. She ignored them. My father was not put off. Several months into her first year of medical school, he proposed. They were engaged on New Years Eve 1965 and got married six months later; my mother was twenty-one, my father, twenty-three.

Getting married did nothing to stop my mothers ambition. We had a saying at Bryn Mawr, she told me: Only failures only get married. From 1966 to 1969, she and my father, a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, lived in a basement apartment next to a country club. My dad was an avid tennis player but he wasnt allowed on the courts; the club barred Jews from admission. But, as my mother pointed out, they couldnt have afforded it anyway. Instead, their lives revolved around school and homework. In 1970, my mother graduated from the Medical College of Pennsylvania. First in her class.

The more I dug into my mothers storyover hours of interviews spanning more than a yearthe more it became clear that my fathers role, and their relationship, were complicated and complicating factors in her success. On the one hand, my father was supportive of my mothers professional aspirations, which was relatively unusual for their generation. On their first date, at the Bryn Mawr College Inn, my mom, seventeen, told my dad, nineteen, she was going to be a doctor. He said, I thought it was great. It showed ambition. It showed determination. It showed wanting to do something that was important and useful. It showed independence.

On the other hand, my father made it clear that for the marriage to work, my mother needed to make sure their kids were fed, dressed, and transported to various activities, dinner was on the table on time, and the house was clean. In figuring out that logistical equation, she was mostly on her own. She outsourced the housecleaning and some of the cooking and childcare; we had housekeepers and a babysitter who worked full-time for my family for more than a decade. But my mother also drove the Hebrew school carpool and took us to the pediatrician, the dentist, andthree of usthe orthodontist. She brought cupcakes to school on our birthdays. (Back then, sugary treats in the classroom were still legal.)

Of course, growing up in my parents house, I was aware of this dynamic. For all of us to thrive, or even function, my mother had to treat the domestic sphere as a second joband that meant she worked very hard and seemingly nonstop. What I didnt understand until I started writing this book was the sacrifices she made continuously along the way. Some of those sacrifices were professional. Some were personal. My mother spent decades plagued by guilt that she was shortchanging her daughters and her patients. As an ambitious mother, she experienced a peculiar kind of loneliness, part of which stemmed from the decision to keep her angst private for fear of inviting further judgment.