Can a woman have it all?

When I was a little girl, I was told over and over again, that I could do anything I wanted to do. In my family the message was clear, if you work hard enough at anything, you will succeed. There was little tolerance for excuses and even less tolerance for quitting. It is safe to say that ambition was placed in me as early as I can remember and has stayed with me to this day. During those formative years, there was nothing more important in my house than achievement. You had to go to school and do well and even in subjects that you could not excel, you had to work even harder even if you were only going to get a C. When I hit puberty and began to wonder about my future post HS, the message was clear. Go to college so you can have a career; marriage and kids can wait there is no rush, it will come. So from about the age of 15, I decided that my focus had to be 100% on school/career and as soon as I was done achieving there, like Mommy said “the marriage and kids would come.” What my Mommy in all her infinite wisdom and my Daddy in all his love and adoration failed to tell their young ambitious daughter was that the very ambition they were instilling in me would not always be received well by the world and it may be the very thing that will make marriage and children that much more difficult to attain. But how could they tell me that, they were feeding me the other message that if you work hard enough at anything, you will succeed at it. I am not sure if the messages conflict, or simply just don’t complement each other. Although both Mom and Dad have both passed away, I can say that I knew both of them pretty well. And seeing their daughters’ unmarried without children at 34 and 29 wouldn’t have bothered either of them one bit. For mom, she didn’t live long enough to have the conversation with me once I began to feel conflicted about the choice of career over family, but I suspect she would have said something like, “don’t worry about it, it will all come in time.” And I would have probably said what I am thinking now, sorry Mommy, that answer just isn’t good enough.

Will it all come in time? Maybe. But right now as I approach 30, I am feeling less and less assured that it will in fact come at all. Furthermore, I am concerned that the choices I made throughout my 20’s to focus only on school/career will be choices that I will question in my 30’s. Finally, I am going to say the thing that no single woman with no children and a good career is supposed to say; I am sure that my career, as great as it is, will not be enough. I cringe at the thought of it and shudder as I write it but it’s the truth. So what is a girl to do? I worked really hard to get here and I am not where I want to be ultimately. I have some more climbing to do. But when does the climbing stop, the ambition subside and the start of the work on my other life begin. I wonder, why didn’t anyone ever tell me the truth, that as a woman, I really cannot have it all?