Stay at home? Go to work? Why women don't know WHAT they want!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=512718&in_page_id=1879

Every Monday afternoon I sit chatting with a group of mothers in the draughty
hallway of a school while our daughters take part in a ballet class.


Among us we number an accountant, a nutrition worker and a solicitor, thus
representing a fine snapshot of professional success. And what was the hot
topic of debate this week for us women at the coalface of female achievement?

No, not storming through the glass ceiling but the best way to roast a
chicken.

This energetic exchange followed last week's even livelier discussion about
how certain salad dressing recipes trigger premature wilting in lettuce
leaves.

Now it seems our weekly domestic symposium places us at risk of being labelled
what a new survey identifies as Generation Nigella: an emerging group of women
who have replaced their taste for a glittering career with a hankering for the
traditional values of child-rearing and home cooking.

Fortunately, among us ballet mums, nothing could be further from the truth.
Indeed, part of the reason we love discussing the kitchen is because we know
it isn't the only thing that defines us. Yet according to this latest
research, there are plenty of burnt-out career women who would gladly be
classified this way.

But far from simply identifying a restless group of wannabe domestic
goddesses, what this research reveals is an unpalatable but uncompromising
truism: that we women are never truly satisfied with what we've got because we
don't really know what it is we want. We cannot have it all, quite simply
because we don't really know what 'all' might be.

We complain about living in perpetual motion and yet shrink from a state of
absolute rest. That's why Generation Nigella isn't an evolutionary discovery
but simply a reaction by bored alpha females who want to escape the tedium of
professional, financial, sexual and emotional liberation with an exit route
marked breadbaking and baby-making.

Before I'm accused of launching a cheap and treacherous rant at the fickle
female mind, let me declare that I am the worst offender.

My own family/career trajectory is littered with the hallmarks of a woman who
clearly doesn't know what she wants. When I was a full time, office-based
newly-wed, I dreamed of giving up work to have babies. Once pregnant, I
couldn't wait to go on maternity leave.

A few months of pushing a pram through the damp of an English winter then
propelled me back to working part-time. But instead of enjoying the cliched
best of both worlds I felt restless on my days off and guilty when I was
actually at work. Eventually, as more babies arrived, I quit and decided to
freelance from home.

My husband was promised that I would be so much happier now that I could be my
own boss and make a living and a casserole without having to leave my front
door. But after a while I missed the buzz of office life.

So when I was offered work at a local newspaper I leapt at the chance. Was I
happy? Quite the opposite.

As a freelancer I had become used to powering through deadlines. Back in
employment, I completed my work in record time and was forced to spend long
afternoons colour-coding paper clips until the clock struck five, while
seething that I wasn't free to pick up my children from school.

At least such capriciousness puts me in good company. Only last week the Spice
Girls, who gloried in the worldwide adulation of their recent reunion tour,
have discovered that the life of a born-again pop phenomenon-is not all it is
cracked up to be.

They cancelled the rest of their world tour, with the tacit acknowledgement
that hoofing around in improbably tight Roberto Cavalli outfits pales when
compared with bedtime stories and nights in by the telly.

So why are we women so changeable in our desires, so rootless in our desire to
be rooted?

Partly because we are helpless victims of a biological dichotomy: our hormones
yell babies while our brains shriek freedom. Consequently we have no idea what
it is that will really make us happy.

Is it any wonder men complain that they don't understand us? Generation
Nigella, so we are told, embrace domestic life, with only one per cent saying
"work is the most important thing in their life".

But, in truth, once we women get what we think we want, it just makes us yearn
for what we had, or what we have yet to attain.

One friend spent years negotiating (and complaining about) the childcare
minefield while building a career. Now that she is established, her children
are at high school and she can handle the balance of work and home, she is
having another baby. Life had become too "easy and boring".

Just as the uptight Fifties housewife gave way to the permissive Sixties free
spirit, so the career feminists of the Nineties have become the wannabe Martha
Stewarts of the Noughties.

It won't last, of course. And before long we'll be reading about a wave of
fortysomething mothers who are the new economic power players as they resume
their once stellar careers with a vengeance.


--
And tell them "If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear" -
from The Secret Policeman's Handbook

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing -
Edmund Burke

Truth is hate to those who hate the truth - Alexandra

In times of deceit telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George
Orwell



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