No, Women Aren't "Lazy" For Not Having Kids
Because it's not like women have any purpose until we use our uterus, right?
Sofia Zhuravetc / Shutterstock I have no ambition. Most days I work 10 or 11 hours; I'm constantly pitching stories, taking on assignments I barely have the time for and I don't know the last time I didn't work on a weekend. Oh, wait — I do: it was in 2010.
My brain is constantly in motion and so am I but because I don't have a child, apparently I'm not ambitious.
At least according to Heather Havrilesky, a knower of everything important in life because she's a mother, I'm definitely not ambitious. Ambition only comes after you have a kid.
Oh, brother.
In keeping with the endless need to inundate the Internet with rage-inducing, clickbait, comes Havrilesky's condescending piece on how, in only having a child, you get to know what true ambition really is.
Before she had her first kid, Havrilesky, in her own words, spent most of her waking hours "procrastinating, sulking, obsessing over trivial problems, and engaging in aimless tasks that added up to nothing," and she's pretty sure that you, all us women actually, do the exact same thing if we don't have kids.
I mean, it's not like you have any purpose until you use your uterus, right?
"There's something undeniably miserable about your 20s and 30s, even when you're advancing your career and you're meeting great people and everything is falling into place as you hoped it would," writes Havrilesky.
She continues: "There's still a lot of extra time to eat yourself alive using only your own brain. It's easy to be wildly judgmental and tremendously self-involved, even as you lament the self-involvement of the judgmental navel-gazers around you. When you have less time, that's when you can finally ask yourself questions like, 'Is this really the career I want?' and, 'Do I even like my friends?' which means you might actually shift your priorities in ways that improve your life for once."
In fact, Havrilesky is so ambitious now, that after her second kid, she wrote a memoir, Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage.
Granted, if we're to go by this miserable dribble of total obnoxious judgment, the book is just as awfully self-absorbed and holier than thou.
But the point is, Havrilesky would like you to know that she wrote one. When did you last write a memoir? Even if you did find the necessary ambition to do so which is unlikely, of course, there's a very good chance that it's boring, especially if you don't have kids.
Basically, this is what Havrilesky would like you to realize about yourself, you useless waste of space. What does one write about if they don't have kids?
What Havrilesky would also like you to know is that she's winning at life; you aren't. Her piece reads like a girl who managed to go from loser to "the plastics," a la Mean Girls, overnight and because of this she feels it's necessary to impart her newfound "wisdom" on the rest of us.
With her choice of punctuation (!!) and approach, she's all but laughing in the face of those who have not chosen the path she's chosen. While it's too bad that Havrilesky's life was completely a waste before she had children what I feel really sorry for is the person she is now.
Can you imagine what she must be like at dinner parties? Oh, wait ― she doesn't go to dinner parties; she's too busy being ambitious.
What Havrilesky's insufferable piece also does is perpetuate the idea that a woman's life couldn't possibly be even remotely worth a damn if it's childless. She just reiterates the age-old societal mentality that women are here to make babies first and foremost and whatever else they manage to get done after that is all inspired by her motherhood.
A woman isn't complete until she has a baby; she's not ambitious, noteworthy ... hell, she's not even a woman.
While a tiny part of me gets where Havrilesky is going with this, she's doing it wrong. She comes out guns blazing, judging from the very first sentence.
As you read along, you hope that she'll redeem herself, that she'll write, "LOL! Just kidding! I'm really not THIS horrible," but she never does. She never wavers in her conviction and writes about all the joy that children bring to your life, clearly a joy that's unattainable without them.
She's offensive until the bitter end.
I may not want kids but at least I'm of sound mind enough to know that I'm in no position to judge those who do, nor would it be fair of me to assume that a woman with kids doesn't have ambition.
But that's something Havrilesky doesn't seem to understand; instead, she'd rather tear others down who are different from her. Talk about a waste of her "precious" time.
Amanda Chatel is a writer who divides her time between NYC and Paris. She's a regular contributor to Bustle and Glamour, with bylines at Harper's Bazaar, The Atlantic, Forbes, Livingly, Mic, The Bolde, Huffington Post, and others.