In a previous post, Elizabeth Marquardt mentions a lovely quote that seems to “evoke the assumptions of an earlier era” by describing the transition from girlhood to womanhood as the “simple somersault by which a young girl becomes a wife and mother…”
The contrast between this and the description of “pre-adulthood” in Kay Hymowitz’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today is stark. To me, the first image conjures something like an icon of the Madonna—a woman with the flush of youth and babe in arms—while the second makes me think of city grime, long workdays, late nights out, and the confusion that so many of us twentysomethings struggle to tame as we agonize over the future. Most weeks I have at least one friend who is deciding whether or not to move to a different city to chase a better position, whether or not to propose to or break up with his long-term girlfriend, whether or not to move to Brooklyn or find a place in Harlem or Washington Heights when the lease is up, whether or not to move closer to family or stay in New York, whether or not to keep waiting tables or to look harder for something else. With this constant flurry of motion, Hymowitz comments that “it’s no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a ‘quarter-life crisis.’”
Yet while for a segment of young adults pre-adulthood is the norm, Hymowitz notes that “pre-adulthood is a class-based social phenomenon, reserved for the relatively well-to-do.” In those well-to-do circles, the script of college then career often means that “‘what you do’ is almost synonymous with ‘who you are,’ and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.”
On the other hand, for those in small town Middle America who do not usually partake of the pre-adulthood phenomenon (at least not to the same degree) the case is often reversed: family defines you, and what you do matters only in so far as it helps you to support that family.
This doesn’t mean that these Middle Americans don’t have plans to finish college or start careers. They just have plans to do so during or after they have children. Erin, a 24 year old who finished college while she was a single mother and is now married to the father of her second child, pities those who wait to start families:
“And then [after they’ve established careers] they’re probably going to be really close to not being able to [have children] and then that’s gonna really suck in their lives when it comes around. Because you know that’s gonna be really hurtful to them. You know, ‘Why didn’t I do that?’ I think in my head that’s what I think that they would be doing, you know, regretting that decision that they didn’t have children.”
Ally, a 29 year old who currently works as a nurse’s aid and whose youngest child is just about ready to go to school, is getting ready to go back to school herself. Ally recently married her fiancé of 10 years and father of her three children, and has this to say about her educational goals:
“I was going to go to college, but I decided I’d start a family first. Because I figured, you know, if you’re young and you have a family first, then you can get that out of the way and then you can have like [makes a “sheesh” sound] 50, 60 years to work!”
Ally is smart, creative, multi-talented, and competent: it was not for want of potential that she delayed her professional life in favor of family (although it was in part for lack of funds). She just sincerely wanted to make having a family her first priority.
I know that to many Ally’s logic will seem entirely foreign, impractical, and perhaps even ludicrous. And of course we could have a lengthy discussion about the benefits of finishing school before having children (for one it’s just a lot easier, although I know women who have done it the other way around with a great deal of gracefulness—and I have much respect for them). We could also talk about the need to find ways to help Middle Americans achieve their educational goals without accruing loads of debt, which will just make the family lives they prize all-the-more difficult.
Yet setting that discussion aside for another time, I can’t help but compare the “simple somersault by which a young girl becomes a wife and mother” that I saw in the lives of Erin and Ally, with the chaotic identity-seeking of a pre-adulthood defined mostly by career-building, which is often a lonely ordeal. For Erin, Ally, and many others in Middle America, having children is the most important, most natural, and most fulfilling thing to do in their twenties. And while in reality sometimes this “simple somersault” becomes a tragedy more complex than the self-saturated quandaries of pre-adulthood, I’m not sure that wanting to establish a family early (even if it does push the limits of the prevailing orthodoxy) is such a bad thing.
