Gross Generationalisations

Apparently as a middle class Gen-X girl-lady, I have been sold a lie. I was told I could do whatever I wanted. As a young women living in a post-sexist society I could have it all. Our female teachers were all over us like a rash; a generation of women who fought to change the status quo heaped their victory spoils on to us young girls with our fluro socks and ra-ra skirts. Here you go, they shouted. You don't have to stay at home while your husband goes off to work and has all the fun. In fact, you must not! You must go to uni and climb the ladder and break through that glass ceiling. Do it for us! Show us that our battles were all worth while. You are just as good as them. You must compete.

But sadly the numbers just don't add up. Nobody really thought it through properly. To slum it round Europe, to get the 6 year degree, and to climb the ladder, you just can't even think about babies. To even contemplate marriage before you are 30 is considered weird and unhealthy. Mind you some of the more organised ones planned it all out to the month and made sure they were in just the right place at just the right time. These are the ones who also book their child into long day care the day after they are born, so that they can return to work 3 months after their vagina or abdomen is ripped/cut to shreds. And then of course if you were like me, at 17 years of age you chose a uni course that you thought might please the watching wise women folk. After a few years of stress and confusion you realise it was the wrong decision and so you go back to uni and start all over in the attempt to do something that you might actually enjoy (because you should). So by the time you are not even a quarter of the way up the ladder you suddenly realise that you have to have a baby and it has to happen now. 

Many of us are now in a weird place that we weren't really expecting. Recent results from a long term study by Melbourne Uni which has been following a cohort of people who would have finished Year 12 in about 1990, have found that "90 per cent of (the) men who had gained tertiary qualifications were working full-time in 2009 compared with only 38.4 per cent of women with tertiary qualifications. Women with tertiary qualifications were the most likely of any group (including women with no tertiary qualifications) to be not in the workforce". But what are your options? Pretty much no one regrets anything. I'm yet to meet a mum who truly wishes she wasn't one (we all have our daydreams mind you). I also haven't met a women who wishes she didn't go to uni and just got cracking on the baby making at 20. Many are almost truly happy and contented at home with the kids. But in the back of their mind lurks the post graduate degree half finished, or the promotion promised if they returned from maternity leave. Many of them have an obscene HECS debt that the government rubs in their faces once a year in a meaningless letter. Many of us work part-time and our work days are our "day off", much to the chagrin of our mothers. Many of us will go through a year or two or ten of utter lostness and emptiness, loving our children yet not knowing who on earth we are anymore.

What I'm suspecting is that what emerges on the other side of this weird and confusing place is what we have actually been waiting for. I really do think that for the Gen-X girl-lady, married, single, mother, childless, the best is yet to come.