A Good Woman

They say that behind every good man is a good woman. It may hearken back to a time when women’s lib seemed like a bigger struggle than that for health care reform. Or to a time when that was all women could say for their self worth and contribution to society…clean laundry and a home cooked meal.

As a product of the 80’s and a single sex education up until my freshman year of college, the idea of being a super woman was force-fed to us in the media and in schools. No way did simply being a wife and mother seem adequate or even a passing excuse to be alive. We had to achieve. We were given the opportunity; we’d better not waste it.

I always thought marriage and children would come. That they were things that would just happen not things you had to work on. Working at work seemed work enough.

Who knew that marriage and family took so much effort other than the forgotten women of the 50’s who didn’t burn their bras so they could build families?

I’m no saying women’s lib is bad, of course not…but it makes you feel bad when you reach 37 and all you really want is to take care of a man who loves you and hope you’re still fertile enough to have his children.

That life, the life I personally and I believe countless others as well put aside, knowingly or unknowingly in pursuit of something more, found out that something more was also something less.

I can’t complain. I’ve been proposed to 2.5 times. .5 because we discussed marriage and there would have been a proposal had I been willing to renounce Jesus and convert to Judaism. And I didn’t say no because they weren’t good men, we just weren’t good fits long term. I’m sure that now, as painful as it was in the moment, those men would agree.

And yet, I never thought I’d be where I am now…getting on in my 30’s with no husband or kids. But I’m not one to live my life by a clock either. Most people think I look ten years younger and anyone over 30 still feels like their in their 20’s even if only in their hearts, so what’s really the difference?

It’s just that when you see your friends’ younger sisters on Face Book with kids posting status updates about Sarah’s first day of kindergarten, you realize that if exactly one year from now you pushed out a little Sarah or Spencer, you’d be well into your 40’s on his or her first day of school. And while good genes and the miracles of modern science may all conspire to make that happen, it seems somehow like you’re just trying to catch up to the natural order of things.

My dad once told me that if I wanted to marry a doctor I should hang out in a hospital. I think he suggested I have lunch at the Columbia Presbyterian cafeteria. For me, someone who thinks love should and does just happen, his method seemed too calculated. I’m sure it seemed too calculated as well and knew it was less romantic but perhaps the necessary and more practical approach for a woman who worked in an office full of other woman and who didn’t seem to be getting out there enough or meeting the right people.

I was lucky though. I did just happen to meet become friends with and then fall in love with a really good guy who I believe just may have an opening for the position of a really good woman behind him.

Unemployment rates are high and if that spot is open, I think I finally have the experience and the desire to be a success in that position if asked again.