Cast of Characters, Intro and Ard

I have an awesome family.  The outcome of this, of course, is that I have all of these stories about all these awesome people, and I prefer not to use real names on the internet if possible*.  So, I want to start a series where I talk about how awesome my family members are and tell you what made-up fake names I'll be calling them.  I'll try to make it entertaining.  If it's not, you have my official permission to skip those posts, for what it's worth (SPOILER: not a lot).


My fiancé is a middle child.  Specifically, he is the sixth child out of a group of ten siblings.  Everyone talks about how big his family is and how hectic holidays must be for his family, etc., etc.


I, on the other hand, have only one brother.  He's awesome, in part because of his absolute dedication to (a) math and (b) playing the cello.  He plays cello metal in a quartet of flexible membership**, and I am going to coerce him ask nicely if he and his quartet will play cello metal for my eventually-upcoming wedding.  He's the second from the left in the video below, or if you are challenged in right-and-left department like I am, he's the one with the brightest cello and the long curly blond hair (that he uses for headbanging while playing).

We call him Ard when we're teasing him.  I think this is suitably anonymous.


Everyone assumes this means I have a nice normal family in terms, at least in comparison to his family.  They are incredibly, incredibly wrong.  See, my mom is Sibling Number Nine (out of ten), and my father grew up with three younger brothers and a younger sister.  Most of these siblings grew up and had more children, so I have a giant family full of aunts and uncles and cousins that's going to get even bigger when we finally get married.


The best part about our future giant combined family? I love almost every single person in it (some of you, I haven't met, or met so long ago it doesn't count). I am truly blessed.


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*Employers don't need to know about your personal life, and many Google your real name.
**As in, there are seven or so high school/college students who all learn roughly the same music.  When they actually hold a practice or get a gig, around four of these show up.

Why "Reluctantly Female"?

When I was seventeen or so, I had a minor epiphany.  "It's okay for guys to like pink," I had told someone.  A few days later, it hit me.  I had never liked the color pink: I had always considered it "too girly".  I had avoided this color for as long as I could remember, not because I didn't like it (I like pink as much as any single color), but because, subconsciously, I thought it wasn't okay for guys to like pink.  Except, of course, it is okay for guys to like pink.  This produced a contradiction, and I realized that I, too, could like to color pink without being a girl.

The problem* with this logic is that, biologically, I am a girl. I have all the female bits, and I'm generally happy with them, so why do female gender expressions make me so uneasy?

I hate filling out forms. There's always the space that asks for your "sex" (or worse, your "gender").  It's better now-- most of the forms I fill out have a "prefer not to answer" option, which I take whenever it's available.  When I was thirteen, I would always the blank with "YES" because I was oh-so-mature, but really, it's still the answer.  You want to know about my sex?  I like it, when it's consensual, and not otherwise. That's not what you meant? Is it really your business what bits I have under my swimsuit?

I'd never really thought of myself as a potential wife or mother.  Oh, I thought about getting married (and being a "spouse" or a "partner"), and I thought about having children (and being a "parent"), but I always thought about it in terms of a personal, concrete events (making and eating dinner together with my family, negotiating holiday family-sharing, teaching a child how to garden, etc).

A couple of things have come up recently that change that.

• I'm planning a wedding.  This makes me, to nearly everyone, a "bride", which is a hugely gendered role.  (Especially since I'm marrying a man.)
• I'm thinking practically about having a child, especially in terms of the impact to my career. Biologically, being pregnant and giving birth are exclusively female activities.
• There's been a lot of public controversy about reproductive health care recently, and reproductive health care tends to be a woman's responsibility**. The tone of the discourse (that birth control should be a special exception to federal healthcare mandates because of "religious freedom" and that an unborn fetus should have rights greater than or equal to the rights of its mother) is scary, no matter what I think about abortion and the individual mandate.

My reaction to all this has been, approximately, "Oh, I guess I am a girl after all! How do I go about being a girl, again? And can I be a girl without, you know, actually being a girl?"

The answer? I don't know.  I don't know what any of it means.

I hope to find out.
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*Problem for me, not necessarily a problem for anyone else.
**I don't want to diminish men's reproductive health or the role of a second parent in reproductive health care, because having a child is usually an important personal decision for two adults, but it is a biological female who bears the bulk of the risk and responsibility for a pregnancy and, by extension, birth control.

Who Will I Be When I Graduate?

I'm graduating from college in about five weeks.  It's terrifying.

I've been applying for jobs for the last few months, submitting resumes and writing cover letters in between homework assigments.  I've had some interviews.  (People tell me that this means I'm one of the lucky ones.)

Rewinding a bit, a bit after I started college, my career was my number-one goal. I had a written Life Plan, complete with basic theory of how the world worked and numbered steps.  It went like this:

1.) Finish two-year degree in business administration.
2.) Research and pursue four-year degree in some combination of business and technology/engineering.
2.5) Consider MBA or CPA, obtain if necessary.
3.) Obtain real-world experience and develop a nest egg in case of failure.
4.) Write comprehensive business plan.
5.) Obtain appropriate financing, certifications, etc.
6.) Launch business.
7.) Foster growth at a rate sustainable in the market.

It's not a bad plan, exactly.  I got my two-year degree in 2009, and I'm almost done with the four-year degree. I dutifully applied for, accepted, and completed internships. (I considered an MBA, and decided that it was not necessary.)

That said, I'm stuck. It's not that step #3 is impossible: I'll graduate nearly debt-free thanks to the internships and generous parents (hi Mom and Dad!), and my university has good job placement rates.

The problem is that, when I interview, employers keep asking me what industry I want and what I want to do, and I don't have an answer for them.  I don't know, specifically, what I want to do, and to be completely honest, I don't even care.  I want to find gainful employment for three to five years, get paid, save some money and then quit so I can start my own business.  Quitting after a few years is entirely normal for my generation, and I am completely capable of providing value to a company during the time range I want to be there in a variety of roles.  I have a broad skill set, and there are a variety of roles I can happily and competently fill.

The other problem is that there are a few things that I know I do want.  I'm engaged. I've been engaged for well over a year now.  I want to get married at some point over the next two years, in part because I hate saying the word "fiancé".  I want children (preferably, before I'm thirty).  These are all pretty new goals for me, and it's a little bit weird. 


I get the sense that the companies I've applied to want me to have a "dream job".  Specifically, they want my "dream job" to be the role I'm applying for.  They want to see me, five years down the road, still working for them. They want me to be willing to move anywhere in the country, at a time of their choosing, ostensibly because I love my job and their company.

Four years ago, when I wrote my life-goals, all of this would have been fine.  In fact, I did move for my internships (to Missouri and to Florida, respectively).  I'm not inflexible when it comes to meeting the needs of an employer, but there are things that I want now. I want to live close to my family.  Not necessarily same-city close, but "able to drive home for Thanksgiving" close (a six-hour drive to home is OK, much further than that is pushing it).  I want to make a major move (from one city to another) at most once in the next five years.  Travel is fine, temporary rotational assignments are fine, but I want a home*.  I want to live somewhere where I can volunteer, join an exercise class, and register to vote without knowing I'll have to start all over again in a year. I want to find work in a place where my fiancé can also find work.

I feel like employers don't think that these are reasonable things to want, especially at the entry level.  So, I'm conflicted.  How do I balance these different roles?  How can I be both an employee and a daughter?  Will I also be able to be a wife and a mother?  How can anyone decide what responsibilities of these roles to pause in the fulfillment of the duties of the others?

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*There are programs that start you out in City A for a year and then decide, after that year, where they want to permanently locate your job, without your input.