They say she's working like a man, but they don't understand.

I was born in 1971.  A little girl in the seventies, I grew up in the eighties, and I graduated high school in 1989.  I was a child of feminism.  I am Generation X.

I was raised to believe that I could be anything and anyone I wanted.  I grew up believing that gender differences were fully the result of nurture, despite living amongst evidence to the contrary.  I endeavored to live the life I imagined, and I waited for success in uncommon hours.

I was particularly captivated by the notion of househusbands.  I wanted to be a career woman, and the idea that I might someday have a husband who stayed home sounded like a perfect arrangement.  Perhaps he would work out of the home, allowing him flexibility to manage the home front while I was out bringing home the bacon.  It stills sounds like a good idea to me.

His name was Jason, and I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone.  He had long, dark hair, combat boots, earrings.  Long, delicate fingers that could draw and fix things.  Beautiful eyes that looked straight to my soul.  He was younger, less educated, broke, and everything I wanted.  When we kissed in his front yard, his father came out and turned on the porch light.  I was twenty-seven.  He was twenty-two.

We'd only been dating a few months when his parents said, time to grow up and move out.  So he came to live with me.  I thought I had hit the life jackpot, and when I finally, finally discovered what I wanted to do with my life, he came with me to film school.  He kept the apartment clean, he did my laundry, he did the shopping.  He loved me.  I thought I had it all.

But being the partner of a graduate film student is a difficult world.  Two years in Tallahassee is a long time for a young man who doesn't drive and doesn't blend with the locals.  He couldn't get a job and matters weren't helped by the fact that I'd picked an apartment next to the community college instead of the mall, in a town given to monsoonal rain.  I didn't give a rat's ass about him getting an associate's degree, but he'd said he wanted to, and two years in Tallahassee certainly seemed like a good time to do it.

He tried.  In retrospect, he was lonely and depressed, and I was in my own hell, swept away, crazy with stress and sleep deprivation.  I made stupid mistakes and bad choices.  He ran up mobile phone bills.  When I said that one more $300+ phone bill would be the last straw, he ran it up one more time.  When we broke up, it turned out that his friends where moving back from Colorado and coincidentally were driving by with a moving truck the next week.  He was really going.  He was gone.

And I realized that every man I'd dated pretty much did what I wanted until the day I told them to leave, and they did.   

What it took me years longer to realize, was that I was the husband.  And when it came time to BE the husband, I failed.  I wanted him - needed him - to be a man in a way I'd never asked him to be.  I started to hear the voices around me who thought he was a mooch and a user and I was a fool.  I felt the pressure of full responsibility for a partner, responsibility that I had asked for, sought out, and I didn't rise to the occasion.

At the time, I was proud of myself for the clean break with someone who I loved as much the day he left as I ever had.  Even in my pain, I thought I'd made a strong decision, stood up for myself.  In a way, I had.  I had more learning to do.  But months later I would wake up in Los Angeles, shell-shocked by the excruciating pain that he was gone, and that it had happened while I was drowning in graduate school confusion.  I reminded myself, that he didn't fight to stay.  Ultimately, he didn't want to stay, and he's with someone else, and he's happy.  And finally, finally, I am happy.  So I have to believe that it was for the best.

I have spent the last 3 years recovering and discovering and questioning and learning.  I've read books; I've looked inside myself.  I've thought a lot about what it means to be a woman, and what makes me happy.  I've thought a lot about my much more focused career goals, and how very important they are to me.  I've discovered what works for me, and what I'm looking for in a partner.  I've discovered that it's truly OK if I never find him.  Because while I am endlessly able to compromise, I am completely unwilling to settle.  And because I find my life, this life where none of my dreams have come true, satisfying and rewarding.  For me, it truly is about the journey and the adventure and the learning and the friendships that surround me.  It's about the love that I do find.

I think a lot about the women I know.  How hard they work, and how much they try to be better people and to understand and navigate their world.  I think about everything they bring to the table.  I think about what I bring to the table.  And what I want in a man, is a man who can bring it, too.  And I worry that my generation paid a price for the fruits of feminism.  Because the men of my generation frequently seem bitter and unable to navigate their world.  They seem ill-prepared to fight the good fight and succeed against the odds.  We are the growing pain of progress.

Feminists may judge me, ultimately.  I guess I failed them.  I tried to be everything, and I wasn't.  But I have been feminism's guinea pig, and I paid the price in heart and soul.  If you don't like the result, perhaps you should examine the experiment.

I, however, take comfort in the generations behind me.  The pendulum seems to have settled, and both genders seem to be learning and respecting and getting opportunities.  Coming closer together.  The people behind me, maybe they can have it all. 

Maybe I will, too.  I'll keep reaching.

tags:  feminism, Generation X, househusband