First off, I want to give a shout out to my favorite magazine: The Week.

You can mark the ages of my life by the magazines I want to read: I quit reading Glamour to get a subscription to Better Homes & Gardens, and ran it concurrent with Sports Illustrated until I tossed both in frustration…the former because they kept taking incredibly-priced homes and making them even more beautiful, when all I wanted was to see what I could do with my incredibly-average home; the latter because they kept concentrating on incredibly-overpriced athletes and trying to make really huge, groundbreaking stories about whether Tony LaRussa really intended to give the steal sign or not.

I got hooked on Real Simple early on, but dumped them when they ran a Financial Makeover story that featured a young stay-at-home-mom whose husband just got a 50% raise, they were putting $5k a month into the baby’s college fund, and Young Mom couldn’t bring herself to spend any money on herself and ohnowhatamIevertodowithsomuchmoney?????

Which brings me to The Week, which is fittingly published every (you guessed it) week, and is a handy consolidation of every ruddy thing that’s happened in the last seven days. Everywhere. Financial news? Check. World events? Check. Food? Theater? Film? Celebrities? Fate of the Euro? CheckCheckCheckCheckCzech. They give opposing views, too, so the political races feature commentary from both sides, no matter what the topic. Takes about a half an hour to read, and is awesome.

One of the stories they featured this last week was that whole business in The Atlantic about Anne-Marie Slaughter having to quit her job as policy director at the State Department because her fourteen-year-old son quit talking to her and she realized that she couldn’t have a career as ambitious as a man’s and have a family. (I’d link to the story but you have to be a subscriber to see it online, so I’m gonna condense the condensation for ya.)

She concluded that “if career success requires working from dawn to dusk, no woman can ‘have it all.'”  Mona Charen from Nationalreview.com pointed out that no one, man or woman, can do everything. If you wanna see the first words, every school play, etc, you’re (and by ‘you’ she means any parent, man or woman) gonna have to give it up on another end at some point or another. Of course, in the middle of all that sense she had to blame feminism for making everyone think we could ‘have it all.’

So Maha Atal at Forbes.com pointed out that feminism never promised we could have it all, or at least any more than a man had. We could just choose to pick which parts we wanted to have a shot at. Maha said that feminism never promised a fantasy world ‘in which each woman does whatever she wants without consequence.’

I was an early subscriber to Ms. magazine, and I will bear witness that Gloria Steinem never said that it was possible to see every play, see every kid milestone, bake all the cookies, AND compete equally, or even equivalently, with childless folk in the job market.  I agree completely with Ross Douthat in the New York Times: the employee who’s willing to stay later ‘will always, always have a professional advantage over a peer who wants to leave at 5 p.m.’ Not only is that true, I believe that it’s right.  As someone who has spent twenty-five years determining what is equitable and market-competitive about corporate pay structures, I say this: An employee who is willing to leave it all on the table for the company should make more money and get promoted more often and to higher positions, than an equally-qualified someone who doesn’t. If it is turning out that women are less likely as a group to be willing to leave it all on the table for the company (for whatever reason), well then: too bad.

Also important to note: Slaughter was able to ditch her State Department gig and walk right into teaching. In today’s soft market that easy transition is not an option open to many of us.  As a major breadwinner for my family (and eternally grateful to my foremothers who faced scorn and derision as they moved the societal needle so I could have a shot at doing so) I am as busy as I have to be; I don’t have any time to listen to the unwanted commentary about what is appropriate for all women from anyone, women and specifically Anne-Marie Slaughter included, who is as busy as she wants to be. There IS a difference.

If the secret to having it all is knowing that you do, in fact, have it all, I think I made it: I have the right mix of my career success (so far, at least!), the pride and confidence from knowing that I can provide for my family, and the love and companionship of four delightful kids who have not yet turned out to be serial killers. And while it is not a contest, I would like to point out that my fourteen-year-old son is not only talking to me, he’s making dinner every night.

Check. Check. Czech.

© E. Stocking Evans 2012