Searching for mojo.

So here’s the thing. I have just turned 38 and things have not quite worked out to plan. Not that I had really planned things up to this stage, but as women, we have a fair idea of what we’ll be up to at this point in our lives. We will be mums.

During yr 12 I had to plan my future. That was hard. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, what I didn’t want to do, I had no idea of what I was good at (Don’t we love the shitty of self esteem as a 17year old) or really, what I was even bad at - other than picking decent boyfriends and saying no to crappy sex. Not much to work with. But I did know I had to go to university. My cousin and I were the first generation of women to do this. It was up to us to set the feminist trails blazing, at the age of 17 and 18 we were to rock the academic world with our brilliance. We were to be career women. Then I was going to be a mum. That was the plan.

I had an image of myself as an independent, working woman who travelled the world and potentially managed to look pretty funky while living out of a pack. I had an image of myself as someone who worked and travelled, then at some point had children. I didn’t even really imagine myself as wife, but definitely as a mother. I think that for most women, at least my age, it was the same. But that hasn’t happened and although I’ve made an excellent, if occasionally erratic effort at being a wife, I’m not likely to be a mum. So now the question is;

What’s the fucking plan? I have to adjust the image I had of myself, the energetic woman walking the pram down to the clifftops to walk her bab/ies along the beach. The woman who sleeps little but is happy having a break from work to be at home with beautiful, demanding bubs. The woman who could talk to other women her age about breastfeeding, teething and sleep patterns. Who hung around with other women in mother’s groups and occasional coffee catch ups, living and breathing in a nice, nurturing, sleep-deprived world of women and babies. The woman with a bond to other women and her friends that their partners can’t totally share. The woman who has a priority in her life other than work and who has something to devote herself to other than work.

Because ultimately, work isn’t enough. I love it, I appreciate it, I enjoy it most of the time. But it’s not enough. It’s like biologically I’m programmed to need something else, and now that I can’t have it, I’m a bit at a loss. I have to re-design the image I have of myself and I’m not sure how to do that.. What to replace the slightly dishevelled, yawning woman reading stories to her kids, with.

And it annoys me a bit, surely as a woman who grew up in post-feminist times I should be able to think of something else I would like to do other than have kids. Surely, in 2010 I can have an identity that does not tie me to nappies and breast pumps. Surely I can find meaning and worth in something other than in reproducing some slightly dodgy genes. Except, so far, I can’t. I don’t know if this is the same for other women who have found their lives have turned out differently to what they expected. But I am surprised to find that fundamentally, my hopes and dreams haven’t been that much different from those of my grandmother, or the great grannies who came over from Ireland, making the lace for the baptism gowns that would be handed down through generations. Is it always that many women go through the motions a bit, just biding some pretty interesting time until they become, as predestined, mothers?

We were told we “could have it all”, but as many women have discovered, we don’t want it all. It is a recurring concern in our society at the moment that women don’t hold as many high powered-positions in the workforce as men, that we aren’t paid the same, we aren’t in corporate control. But that would seem to be, because for the most part – making some generalisations I know, but that is my world at the moment, women don’t want those positions as much as men. Their wants are the same, biological, emotional wants that they have always been for women. They were my wants.