Baby vs. Career
The Ten-Year Nap's author on whether to work or stay home.
by Meg Wolitzer
May 19, 2008
For a long time, I think I had been somewhat judgmental about women who stayed at home. I went by the easy assumption that someone who worked was by nature more interesting than someone who didn't. But really, I came to see both as I wrote and as I lived in the world: if you are seated at a dinner next to someone who works in marketing at Revlon, say, will you definitely have a better time than if you were seated next to someone who stays at home? Suddenly, I knew this wasn't all clear-cut, and I knew that it wasn't my place to create a hierarchy of worthiness. That's a polemicist's job, not a novelist's.
Work itself doesn’t make you interesting, I saw, though interesting work can. My notion of "work" in this novel centers as much on the concept of "purpose" as it does on the notion of money-making employment. The characters in The Ten-Year Nap have to make decisions about whether to stay home or go back to work, and their decisions are reached through various complex processes, some financial, some about that dreaded 1970s word "fulfillment."
These characters in fact have a luxury to consider these matters in a way that most women in America do not. I was very aware of this disparity, and in certain ways the book became a novel about class. But even though I think the most concentrated drama about this topic takes place within a narrow band of society, (and I set my novel in New York City, to heighten that idea), ideas about staying at home versus going back to work do bleed into the lives of many women in different kinds of places around the country, for whom ideas of work and motherhood remain shifting and tricky and ongoing, to some degree or another.
For me, work and motherhood have been deeply entwined. I'd been a novelist since college,
Work itself doesn't make you interesting, I saw, though interesting work can. when I sold my first book for $5000 and headed out into the nebulous and small-potatoes world of being a fiction writer. I had no family money, no secret reserves of cash that would cover my rent. But back then, in the beginning of adult life, I didn't care that I had very little money. My expenses were few. I went out in large groups of friends for cheap Indian food at night. We were all working, working, and none of us were thinking about babies. Then, in a kind of "Sunrise, Sunset" moment, suddenly time had passed and our children were born. I watched as friends who had had great careers or big or tedious jobs they disliked let work deliberately fall to the side, focusing happily if sometimes anxiously on their babies, and on the present moment.
And then, those big ten years passed. (Incidentally, though I called my novel The Ten-Year Nap, I certainly don't think most women are idle during that period. But there is in fact a dreamlike quality to the intense early years of mother and baby, and there is also frequently a sensation of "waking up" to the idea of something new, once your "baby" is no longer remotely a baby.) I wanted to write about a very important sweep of time that I had observed in the middle of life, and so the novel came out of that desire. It may seem, to the mothers and fathers of little babies who are even now pressed against you in an idyll of oneness, that none of this may ever be your own experience. It may seem — and it may even be true — that somehow parenthood and work and desire and ambition and money and sexual equality will all fall gently and evenly and unambivalently around you like a soft snow. I think I once thought that too. But the novelist in me is glad it wasn't true.
©2008 Meg Wolitzer and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Meg Wolitzer's novels -- in addition to The Ten-Year Nap -- include
The Position and The Wife. Her short fiction has appeared in
The Best American Short Stories. She lives in New York City with her
husband and their two sons. |
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