Stepping Through Oneself—The Beauty of the Out of Control Life

Image via Pixabay

I’m a control freak. At least, I like things to be in their proper places. Like the beloved Auri in, The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss, often I find that things inside of me aren’t right unless things outside of me are.

Most of my young life I had a plan, and for the most part, those plans worked exactly as I wanted. Sure, people would upset me or let me down, or maybe I missed out on an award, a kiss, or an opportunity, but with a plan, I could rush through the pain of failure, get back on my feet, and still be…me.

Twenty years ago, when my birth control failed, I got my first taste of a plan crumbling to the ground with no way to put back the pieces, no matter how hard I tried. Until that moment, I saw the future clearly—I would work in a Fortune 500 tech company, rise to the top as a female leader, and live in a condo on Lake Shore Drive. Then my son was born, and I discovered that the feminist promise of “having it all” had obviously been created by someone not like me. For I couldn’t handle “it all” and after two years of trying to be the perfect working-mom-wife-in-tech, I was far from leaning in, rather I fell out, and into my home, trying to raise two children, with no plan.

At first, I made new plans. Lots of them. Plans were my way to survive, but as the children’s needs began to grow and change, I found my plans being foiled, time and time again. The darkness set in. Hormonal depression is common after giving birth, but few mention the identity crisis that birth brings the modern woman. From a young age, we told that we’re more than mothers, that caregiving is for other women, those who can’t, and that in this unfair world we women must fight, break through that glass ceiling, and focus on nothing else. The world of breastfeeding, diaper changing, and toddler discipline doesn’t fit in that narrative. The mother is not only demonized in this modern myth, she is forgotten. As such, I was lost.

I spent the first four years of my children’s lives trying to figure out who I was with them. Twenty years later, I’m still not sure who I am with them, except that once I let go of plans, once I stopped leaning in, and learned instead to weave in and out of the various callings in life, my identity became, well, meaningless.

As my sons leave me, I’m entering yet another phase that modern feminism has no place for—middle aged with at least another 40 years left before my sons bury me, filled with a desire to work in the world in a new way. The home has no meaning without children to raise, and while I’ve worked many part-time jobs, none have become my focus, because in each phase and stage, their needs changed, and I changed with them. I’ve been a school-teacher, a blogger, a novelist, an Airbnb hostess, a dance company director, a CTO for a startup and a novelist. But mostly, I’ve been a woman, weaving in when need be, and out when the time calls for it. To live with my sons in peace and satisfaction, I’ve had to let go of any real plans, for the plans of life are always changing.

That’s not to say I don’t have plans now. Oh, I do. I’m in school, retraining to re-enter tech. My time as a CTO taught me that I wanted to be a part of the world of technology, just as I had when I was 18 and starting out at Purdue in CS. However, unlike my 18 y.o. self, I’m no longer sure exactly what this plan will bring. Meaningful employment, yes, but where, or how, or what? I have no idea. And honestly, I like that. Not because it will hurt less if the plan goes awry, for midlife is full of pain and change, but because I’m ready for that pain and change. Knowing that I’ll never truly know myself, because I’m ever changing, is fine with me.

What is the purpose of a middle-aged woman? One whose children have left her? What is the purpose of marriage at this point? What is retirement when you’re just getting started again? Who am I, now that they’re gone? Feminism doesn’t answer this, because it focuses on power dynamics and the acquisition of that economic power. This, my friends, is about love, and no ism can help me here.

As my sons wonder what their next steps are, I too, share that anxiety. Yet it’s okay. In the tapestry of life, there’s a new row to begin, a new color to add to the pattern I’ve been creating. I have a novel coming out in the fall, a trip planned to France to celebrate my 21^st wedding anniversary, and something to add to the tech landscape. Beyond that, anything is possible, and I can see no further than each stitch I make.

Who am I? The one who watches all the plans come and go, who delights in the patterns that emerge, as this little life unfolds.

Hey Silicon Valley--I Have a Gender Equality Solution for Ya!

There has been a lot of talk for years about women in STEM, from trying to get girls to fall in love with science and technology, to getting women to stay in the workforce once they’re trained, a lot of time and effort has gone into studying this problem. Decades of research, funding and programs later and we still have an issue, almost 40% of women leave the field, yet we’re still not entirely sure why.

I applaud programs that seek to encourage females to enter STEM careers and stick with it. I myself have been lucky enough to have been a part of many. But there is one age group that no one is paying attention to: women in their middle age who majored in engineering, but took time off to raise children, that are now empty-nesters.

I know, I know. Why would anyone bother with a 45 y.o. woman, but hear me out. We spend money on programs to train young girls in the sciences, we spend money on programs to get young women to major in engineering. We spend tons of money trying to figure out how to keep them and support them as they raise their children. Yet that’s where it ends. If you chose to leave to raise your kids, you’re gone, forgotten, and let go. But many of those women are done raising kids, and only in their forties. Why not spend some money re-training them and getting them back into the lab?

According to PewResearch in 2014, 29% of women were stay-at-home-mothers. It’s hard to find the data to see how many of them were STEM majors, but of the 40% of women who leave STEM careers, about a quarter of them do so to raise families. This means they didn’t leave because they no longer love engineering, they just chose to take time to raise their kids.

Many of these women are now in their mid-forties and their kids are on the way to college, which leads me to wonder, just how expensive would it be to train these women to become coders and technology workers today? With all the coding bootcamps out there, as well as other retraining programs, why not recruit from this group of women to fill not only your technology needs, but also to balance gender in the workplace?

A few years back, Apple and other big-name companies began offering female employees money to freeze their eggs, with the idea that they can invest in their careers until their late thirties/early forties, and then begin their families. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of “Sequencing," made popular by the book by Arleen Rosso Cardozo in the early nineties. The idea being that women can have it all, just maybe not all at once. This works for certain types of women, particularly those who enjoy diving deeply into their careers and find the work/family balance to be too difficult.

We all agree that a woman can begin her family at age forty, and that in some ways, she may make an even better parent than she would have when younger, given her life-experience. Then why not say the same about a woman in her forties and her career? If we’re physically and intellectually capable of handling an infant at forty, we’re certainly physically and intellectually capable of coding in our forties. Having done both, trust me, the infant is way more difficult.

So why not include Gen X female engineers who are done raising their families and ready to return to work in your recruitment plans? Why not spend some money retraining them, and growing your female base from this older stage of life, rather than only investing in young girls and college aged women?

To help get the conversation started, here are five reasons to consider recruiting Gen X engineers who are done raising their kids:

1.       They’re already in love with engineering! You don’t have to convince them math is beautiful, or that software rules the world, they already know this. As young girls they were interested in STEM fields and pursued them in college. They naturally have the mindset of an engineer, raising children doesn’t change that. And many of them have just spent twenty years or so raising their own engineers and science loving offspring, like Kim Moldofsky, The Maker Mom, and many of her website’s followers.

2.       They already have engineering degrees. True, the technology has changed, but most have a foundation in engineering, math or computer science. You might be coding in Javascript and Ruby, but C++ is still the sixth most popular language in GitHub, and most of these women have ten+ years using that language before they took time to raise their families. With this foundation, they can easily be trained how to write code using today’s tools and development environments.

3.       They know how to adult. I hate to say it, but it’s true. Women in their forties got their shit together, and they can manage a performance review just fine. In addition, they don’t suffer the same social media/Tinder/out of control rents/roommate issues that younger employees who are just launching from home are dealing with. A woman who has raised children to adulthood is the ultimate adult herself.

4.       They’re done raising kids. This is a big one, and both men and women wonder how to balance work and family. While we still need to continue the important work of bringing that balance to the workplace, many women in their forties are done with this part of their lives and find themselves empty nesters with lots of time to invest in their careers.

5.       They’re excellent program managers. Many educated SAHMs are deeply involved in their communities and often serve in executive roles on school boards, church leadership committees, and other clubs that their kids are involved in. Many also have blogs, write books, and share their love of technology on social media. They haven’t been lounging around eating bonbons the past twenty years, rather they’ve been putting their managerial and intellectual talents towards the next generation. This means that even though they might not have run an international software release in a while, they have for example, overseen the development of a new building for their kid’s school, or launched a new coding club for their kids, or even founded a soccer or gymnastics team. They drew upon their natural leadership skills to do this work, often for free, as a service to their children and the community at large. This capacity is a part of who they are, and all of those skills transfer to the latest apps being developed in the valley.

So there you have it Silicon Valley. Everyone knows you have a gender issue, and I applaud all of the nationwide programs that serve our girls and young women in this way. All I’m suggesting is taking a look at the 25% of Gen X engineers who left to raise their kids, and encouraging them to come back and be a part of the future of your business. What do you have to lose?