Career choices – atlantablackstar.com

Happy Friday! TGIF!
There’s been a lot of controversy lately around women having to choose between career and motherhood. With the pressures of a successful career piling up on a minority of women, and the sense that career opportunities are really too far and few in between for women, the sense of an impending choice is all too real, all too often…

“I can just sacrifice and do this for a few years, then I can have my life back!”, or “If I don’t seize this opportunity now, it’ll never happen again!”, or even “If I get pregnant now, I’ll never be able to achieve my dreams”, are just some of the thoughts going through many a corporate sister’s mind, as we consider the possibility of motherhood against the narrow career path for women.

While we’ve seen some women for whom delaying motherhood has somewhat worked, allowing them to reach high levels in their careers before “settling down”, we’ve also witnessed cases when choosing career over motherhood has translated into heartbreaking infertility stories. By age 35, a women’s chances of conceiving decreases, with a 20 to 35% chance of miscarriage. Yet again, some corporate sisters would have preferred having children earlier in hindsight, mourning the time lost and having a hard time grappling with time-consuming careers and families.

Is there a right choice to be made here? Is there a right or wrong answer to this perennial dilemma? I don’t believe there ever will be. Simply because there should not be a dilemma in the first place. Because we, as women, mothers and professionals, should not have to choose between nature’s course and achieving our dreams. It’s because society, and ourselves, have been imposing this pressure on our bodies and lives, that it has now become one additional (and weighty) limitation.

It is up to us to change the dialogue and teach society and companies alike (and ourselves in the process) that there should be no choice required. That both career and motherhood may be par for the course, and that neither ought to cancel the other out!

The Corporate Sister.