Eeee Gads!

I’ve spent the morning (and most of yesterday) uploading and reworking the Home-Based-Parents website. It was quite a chore considering that I believe my web design skills to be less than tip-top. After much headache and hassle I’m happy with the results. The website, this blog, and my shop all coordinate, which - as I’m sure most women will understand - is nice to have the three coordinating finally.

I guess that sounded pretty sexist… but let’s face it, most of the time women prefer to have things looking neat and coordinated. Men, for the most part, could care less.

Isn’t this a funny tightrope we women are walking these days? I once wrote an article talking about how my mom’s generation was responsible for breaking the glass ceiling and my grandmother’s generation was focused on having the cleanest windows on the block. I’ll avoid the lengthy history lesson - both of those descriptions are very general, I admit.

My point is that my generation, I believe, is stuck in the middle. I read somewhere (wish I could quote it, I stink at that) that my generation would be far less likely to divorce than my parent’s generation. Growing up, everyone I knew had parents who had divorced, many were dealing with step-parents. By the time I was 12, my parents had split and I was joining the ranks of latch-key kids whose moms worked full-time (sometimes more than 1 job) to make up for the lack of income.

Truth is, many of us were so traumatized by our parents’ divorces and being forced to deal with step-parents who felt the need to impose themselves where they weren’t welcome and probably didn’t belong to begin with, that somewhere along the line we decided that come hell or high water we wouldn’t do the same to our children.

Part of what brought my husband and I together were our childhoods that were remarkably similar. We shared the same background of “Ozzie and Harriet” until we hit our early teens. Our families went to church, our moms stayed home with us, and eventually our parents hit a wall and couldn’t hold it together any longer. No point in dredging up the past, but suffice it to say that the shrapnel from the bomb that was our parent’s marriages spread far and wide leaving thinly disguised carnage in their wakes. We watched our lives implode, explode and sat dumbfounded as they were put back together in a freak, frankenstein-ish way.

These similar experiences allowed my husband and I to build a family-life based on very similar, personal, equally-shared values. It is what allowed us to build a foundation that has gotten us through very tough times and helped us to appreciate the good times even more.

Still there are times when I feel the pull - so much is expected from women these days. We’re supposed to be strong, educated, ambitious, every bit as competent as our male counterparts, most of the times even more so, quick on our feet, light in our clothes, amazing moms, Betty Crockers, interior designers, family managers, financial planners, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…

;o)

You get my point.

Yet, our natural instinct (for those of us with 1/2 a brain and an ounce of sanity) is that our children take top priority above it all…

Forget that, it’s not a tightrope we walk at all. We’re trapped in an unending, hellish, game of twister… that’s what it is.