Bad Feminist?

Sometimes I feel like a bad feminist. The kind of feminist that feminists hate because of my desire for marriage and motherhood. Lately, I feel as if I've become more familiar with uterine pangs than professional ones. And I wonder what the hell that's all about.

After all, I am dropping $70k per year to become another lawyer potentially making an obscene amount of money. (In the interest of full disclosure).

I am ambitious, but I recognize that my ambition is not limitless. I want other things for myself. Traditional things. Things that would make my late grandmother proud. I've always defended feminism as an opportunity to make certain choices for oneself, and I stand by that. But what of the choice not to want to conquer the world single-handed?

I know the contours of singlehood very well now. At times sharp edged, other times curvaceous and round. Sometimes I collapse into her arms for refuge from the frustration of dating. Other times I lash out at her for keeping the right side of my bed cold at night. It's a comfortable relationship. But I'm a fickle person, and I need change.

I've been told that I should be grateful for my life. There are many others who would give anything to be in my position. While on an abstract level I do not doubt that, such reasoning does nothing to assuage a nagging dissatisfaction with everything.

So few people do what they love. And I wonder whether I will fall into the majority that simply works to pay the bills and take care of family. There are expectations that need to be met (including my own). There are people who are relying on me. There are big dreams to be fulfilled, even if those dreams aren't my own.

My dreams exist in fashion magazines and art galleries. My dreams are expansive and creative.

Oftentimes I see children on the street and wonder what their dreams are. Who they wish to be when they are my age or older. I also look at adults and wonder who they were as children; what they yearned for themselves. Whether there is any congruence between their past and present selves. Whether, at some point, they had to tell themselves that such ambitions were silly and unrealistic. That it was time to put away the sugar-coated fantasies and squeeze themselves into that new pair of Dockers. I wonder whether that is me. I'm still in school, so it's hard to say, but I feel myself moving towards that disconnect. And you can only do so much do stop yourself when you have over $200k waiting for you at the end of your educational career.

It is hard. It is all very hard. So, to what extent should anyone be surprised that many female law students will joke (but not really) about finding sugar daddies to take care of them. That they would be happy taking care of their babies in an Upper East Side penthouse, while hubby brings home the money (and the new Hermes tote because he loves you). I wonder whether this difficulty is what is making me look at stay-at-home moms with a kind of sick longing. Plausible, yes, but I think this is too facile an explanation. At least for myself. I can handle three years of crap.

As a very brief aside (because this topic deserves a separate entry), I do not think it is mere coincidence that so many black women at my school voice a desire to find a sugar daddy while the media and Tyler Perry movies lampoon the professional black woman, and drive a stake into the possibility of her maintaining a stable, nuclear family unit. While definitions of family expand in this country, I still think many of us feel like it's an elusive reality. It's certainly there waiting for us, but we can never quite reach it.

How much do any of us want what we've been taught to want? I can't say I was taught to want motherhood or marriage. I was taught to get good grades. I was taught how to succeed. I was taught to go to college, and then to grad school. I was taught to want more than my mother was able to do for herself. And it's not that I don't still want those things (at least those that are now relevant), but what if I want a family more?

I don't necessarily think it's because of a maternal instinct or a putative desire to be a Stepford wife. For me, it is uncharted territory. Exciting and terrifying in so many different ways. Beyond the obvious benefits of companionship, part of me wants the challenge after so many years of either casting relationships aside or running away like a madwoman.

I know how to be driven. Now I want to be vulnerable.