Everything Is Negotiable

TACTIC ONE

Don’t Confuse Your Wants

I was cautioned that when my second daughter, London, was born, my older daughter would become jealous. Lowery would suddenly have to compete for resources that had always been solely hers. Everything I read, and every seasoned mother, warned me about how competitive siblings can be, especially two little girls. After London’s birth, I braced myself for sibling rivalry and female competition.

Don’t let my Instagram account—brimming with syrupy pictures of sisterly love—fool you. There certainly were (and still are) times my two daughters competed for my attention. But over time, I began to see they weren’t really competitors. Lowery couldn’t have cared less about this little red dinosaur we have until she saw London wanting to play with it. Then Lowery would immediately engage in a cutthroat battle over something she had not cared about five minutes earlier. She wasn’t competing for it, but she seemed to think she should.

One day I saw Lowery reconcile this as she watched her baby sister play with the red dinosaur. She looked around the playroom and realized all the other toys were up for grabs—toys that actually interested her. From that point forward—as best a young kid can—she stopped confusing her wants with her sister’s.

Women are expected to compete with one another. Darwin figured this out way back when while sitting idly by and watching female chimps claw at each other over that one male monkey throwing his feces. Or something like that. And since then there has been an entire field of study devoted to understanding the territorial competition among females. Social researchers T. J. Wade and S. McCrea conducted a study in 1999 trying to gauge the response women might have when looking at attractive women. Female participants looked at pictures of other women who varied in physical attributes, like breast and waist size. They concluded that women exhibited a physiological response, as if threatened, when looking at pictures of perceived attractiveness. Their responses were based on looks alone. It’s not like they had the IQ scores or cooking samples from the women in the pictures. After all, the most attractive female gets the best mate (although sitcoms in the 1990s and early 2000s—such as Married with Children, King of Queens, and According to Jim—seem to say otherwise). Anyway, this competition is so engrained in women—and primarily based on physical traits—that we are essentially trained to size one another up instantly as competitors.

But over the years of mentoring women and watching my two daughters get along better than anticipated, I’ve come to realize we women aren’t in competition with one another. A competition implies we are vying for the same goal, mutually and equally engaged in a struggle for the exact same thing.

I know a lot of women. I’m friends with women. I teach women. I’m raising two little women. I see women walking around. And I’ve never once seen two women trying to do the exact same thing. Not once. All of my female students are roughly the same age and are pursuing the same specific degree, yet they do not have the same personal goals or career aspirations. No two women are ever trying to achieve the exact same thing. I mean, rarely are there even two women running for president in the same election year. And even then, it’s never on the same side. So if we aren’t competing, what are we doing?

We are comparing. And that’s a much more dangerous thing because comparison sets arbitrary metrics for our life and often creates random deadlines for when life experiences should happen. Comparisons trick you into confusing your wants with someone else’s.

A few semesters ago, I had a student in my office who had just started the program, and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to complete graduate school as quickly as possible. When I asked why she wanted to speed the process up, she explained that she had to graduate quickly so that she could have kids by the time she’s thirty. Now, I didn’t have her full medical chart in front of me, so I couldn’t speak to the possible reasons for her timeline. But, in retrospect, I would guess she was looking around at her friends and placing an arbitrary deadline on her life. In other words, she was confusing her wants with someone else’s.

When I first became a mother, I was suddenly—overwhelmingly—out of my element. My parenting in that first year was based almost exclusively on what I saw other mothers doing. One mom made persuasive claims about the importance, benefits, and sheer joy of making her own organic baby food. My interpretation of that at the time was that if I wanted my child to have a shot at Harvard, I’d need a hand mixer.

So that first year—despite my being a full-time doctoral student and an adjunct professor—you could find me at home for hours on end, (ignoring my child) in the kitchen, elbow deep in farmer’s market squash—sautéing it, pureeing it, blending it, pouring it, and serving it up to my six-month-old, who would immediately spit it out in disgust. But I repeated that process over and over because this was important.

Then one day I was in the grocery store, and I don’t know if I just don’t ever look around, but can you imagine what I saw? Jars and jars and jars of organic baby food. Aisles of this stuff. I picked up a jar and studied the baby on the label, a very happy, well-adjusted looking, Harvard-bound baby. And I thought, Wait, what am I doing? What I was doing was spending an inordinate amount of time on something that was never a priority for me. I had looked around at another mother and immediately become entrenched in something I had never cared about before. There is not a distant version of myself that couldn’t wait to blend avocado and rhubarb in a BPA-free container. I don’t even like to cook.

But I was comparing myself to these other mothers, and it set me up for failure because I didn’t have the same goals as these women. Not in parenting, and not in life. But that feeling, that knee-jerk reaction of panic and pressure—I have to do more, be more—crops up in other aspects of my life, not just parenting. I feel it in my professional life, especially as a female in academia.

When I first took a faculty position at a major university, I was incredibly intimidated. I was new and young (and female!), and I had no idea what was going to constitute success in the job. So I looked to those around me: professors who were decades into their careers, with publications and awards that took up pages and pages of their CVs. For nearly a year I stressed about living up to their standards, completely ignoring that I had been hired to save and grow a dwindling graduate program—no one else around me was there to do that. All of us at the university had completely different goals, not just in our job descriptions, but in our own professional ambitions.

When I started to have some success with that specific program, something I didn’t expect happened: I became a threat to those who threatened me. It wasn’t too long into my time at the university that I began to hear some grumbling about the attention my program was getting, or—maybe more accurately—the attention I was getting. During the first few years, I felt like I was running to catch up to all the academic giants around me—to even be considered a peer—only to turn around one day and see those giants wanting a little of what I had earned.

The turning point came when I recognized that I didn’t want the career of a peer I admired just because she had great credentials. I wanted a career that I had built and that made sense for my personal and professional goals. But it is hard not to look at other scholars or mothers and not feel intimidated or immediately compare myself. So I must constantly keep in mind what my plans are for my career and for my life. I can’t get bogged down in comparison because I’ll confuse my wants with someone else’s.

So how do we keep from confusing our wants? After all, sometimes we want something because we actually want it. And though our wants may be governed by various things like our peers, society, and Gossip Girl reruns, there are a few checkpoints to keep in mind when you are trying to figure out your wants.

YOUR WANTS ARE ALL YOURS

Competition among women is the nastiest stereotype of all. Gendered conditioning to see one another as the enemy is a big barrier we all face. My mother once told me, “Women don’t dress for men; they dress for other women.” I laughed because I was, like, seven, and I wasn’t quite ready to absorb such wisdom. But I learned soon enough. When I was in junior high, I arrived at school one morning in my favorite outfit, a seersucker plaid jumper (I was hella cool). When I walked up to a large group of students standing outside the classroom, a girl named Alicia turned around, looked me over, and loudly said for all to hear, “Meg, you’ve already worn that this week.” Now, evolution would point to the fact that as a junior higher, Alicia was set up to see my twelve-year-old bod cloaked in breathable plaid as a threat to her ability to attract a mate. At the time it was a tall, swarthy boy named Mark. Six months later we had all moved on to a short, blond, athletic kid named Wes.

But for the rest of junior high, I was overly stressed about how often I should wear an outfit. Was twice a month too much? I didn’t have that many clothes. I fretted about this to varying degrees all the way up until I got married, and then I came to realize that men—particularly the man I married—were not that invested in what I wore. One evening, I was putting on makeup in our bedroom while my husband was struggling with his tie. We were preparing for a nice dinner out. A few minutes later I joined him downstairs. “Oh,” he said. “You changed. I really liked the dress you had on earlier.” I looked at him, befuddled, and said, “That was my bathrobe.” Throughout my entire life, I was conditioned to believe women were competing with one another’s physical attractiveness for a mate. But then, my actual mate didn’t even seem to notice my outfit. What the hell?

So we spend our time thinking we are in competition with women. And, although we aren’t really in competition, here’s the trouble with thinking we are. In 2016, a couple of economics professors at the University of Amsterdam conducted a study looking at what happens to women who compete in the Math Olympics. They drew two interesting conclusions from studying the women as they competed: 1) Women are less likely to keep competing if they aren’t getting positive feedback; and 2) They are more likely to stop competing after a setback. Yikes. This means that unless women are both being praised and winning, they are more likely to give up in the competition.

That’s problematic for a couple of reasons. First, this study implies—perhaps rightly so—that women need positive reinforcement. I know that if my children don’t “ooh” and “ahh” over a meal I cook, there’s a stronger likelihood I might never feed them again. But the second concern is that women are giving up when they face setbacks like a loss. Yet, as I said before, women aren’t competing in life. So you can’t technically lose! Now, if you perceive you are competing, at some point you’re probably going to perceive yourself as the loser. And then what? You. Will. Give. Up.

Studies like this might help explain why women don’t go as far as men in fields such as academia or corporate leadership. And we bring that weird competition into other parts of our lives, too—like parenting, or skin care. And when we feel we are not measuring up, we back down. This is some bullshit. We are not competing! Wear your plaid jumpers!

It’s been a long time since junior high, and I’ve made plenty of interesting fashion choices along the way. I’ve also had an abundance of female friendships that remind me we are not in competition. I find the women around me in my professional life to be incredibly supportive and encouraging. But I’m still susceptible to steering into the stereotype. Allow me to elaborate:

I first met Melissa at the open house for the preschool our children attended. At the time, the director of the school hosted a dinner for incoming parents to ease them through the tumultuous transition from maternity leave to full-time childcare. The event was arranged so parents could drop off their infants in one of the classrooms where three teachers eagerly awaited and then shuffle into the dining hall to meet other shell-shocked and sleep-deprived new parents.

Melissa and her husband showed up a little late. She had her newborn son, Jack, pressed tightly to her chest. All the other parents—especially me—were ecstatic at the thought of free childcare for an hour, and we had happily dropped our babies and run. But not Melissa. She had her son in her arms, looking lovingly down at him as he blinked up at her.

At the time, our babies were mere weeks old. I was in the darkest period of postpartum depression, having long given up the ability to nurse, and I was still struggling mightily to bond with my child. Watching Melissa effortlessly cuddle and nurse her baby—the only mother in the packed room to reject the available childcare—I decided definitively that I hated her.

I tried to avoid her after that night. When I saw her in the halls during morning drop-off, I cringed. She would so carefully and lovingly place her precious son in the teacher’s arms, hand over a bucket of breast milk, and float effortlessly out of the room accompanied by bluebirds and field mice.

I would awkwardly hand over my child, leave her portions of formula, and slink out of the room, wondering whether I should have held my kid longer or brought a warmer blanket. Six years and two children later, mothering is now natural, fun, and fulfilling. But in the beginning, every aspect of it felt monumental, and I struggled to adapt. Especially the part in which I fully realized the depth of female competition.

Yes, I had my fair share of this in junior high. But being a woman never registered as anything other than the annual pap smear and picking a brand of tampons. When I became a mother, however, my eyes were opened to the two greatest downfalls of our sex: intra-gender competition, and salads as a meal.

Oddly, these two aren’t unrelated.

In fact, most women suffer from both syndromes in a chicken-or-the-egg fashion. Although I assume competition came first because I think it is somehow hardwired into women. Eating rabbit food is a learned behavior.

Our perceived competition with one another is something society has thrust upon us (exhibit A: any cover of any fashion mag; exhibit B: all other aspects of life). We’ve been conditioned to believe there is an ideal image of us—how we look, live, mother, and marry. If we are presented the ideal image and we see another woman closer to that image than we are, we must assume she’s someone to beat. But this is silly, of course, and nothing more than perception. There is no ideal; it’s all fabricated. We are all going after different things but find ourselves sometimes steering into the false ideal that society (and Vogue!) has set before us.

When I first met Melissa, I didn’t stop to think that perhaps she just had a different way of coping with her struggles as a new mom (which I found out years later was true). Or that perhaps the only reason she was holding her son that night was because they came late and didn’t know childcare was available (I found out later this was also true). Or that maybe, just maybe, I intimidated her as well (also true).

Instead, I saw her as an opponent.

I looked at her and assumed I was witnessing a woman being better than I was. Handling motherhood better. Bonding to her child quicker. Balancing work more easily. Losing the pregnancy weight faster.