'You can have anything you want...just not everything.'
As a young writer/PR type in the early 1990s, I first heard this phrase at a training/development course in New York City. Catchy and impressionable, isn't it? I'd say so. After all, I intuitively adopted these very words as my mantra of sorts over the subsequent years.
Hence, whatever job I took -- media specialist, consultant, assistant director, director -- I was darn good at it. Ultimately, it was my 'anything'.
Everything else I wanted had to wait: becoming a columnist, a novelist, a cartoonist, some type of broadcast journalist, an agony aunt, and so on. And that was just my career list. What about the personal one? A handsome husband, some cherubic children, three mischievous dogs, a big house etc.?
Fast forward 30-something years later. I haven't done too badly on either front, but I still have a long way to go, particularly if I am still hanging onto my mantra. It takes time, and lots of it, to do anything that is worth doing and, relatively speaking, I am running out of it. And at least one thing on the personal list is past its use-by date.
Not that I'm a model for modern-day women, but let's say I am. Does my experience of not having everything mean that a woman can't have it all?
Last year, while on a book tour in the US with friend and colleague Pam Oliver, to promote my debut novel, The Barrenness, in the heat of the moment, during a national talk radio interview, one of us said that, 'you can't have it all'.
'Oops!' said my publicist and a few other listeners. Pam, who doesn't have children, is a National Football League (NFL) sideline reporter for Fox Sports, and works hard for her money most days of the week, and almost every Sunday of the year. For 18 years, she has worked every Thanksgiving. Though she didn't plan it, in retrospect, she admits that it would have been hard to fit a child into the equation.
And I, with my transatlantic lifestyle, went on three multi-state book tours in 2011, and if there is another one going in 2012, send me! I'll go. This is not a lifestyle for a woman with children. Or is it?
There are many women in demanding careers, some of them celebrities, who do have children. Actress Tracee Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana Ross, said, in a BBC interview last year, that her mother was always a mum first. Did she make any career sacrifices? Certainly not any that meet the eye. Or did she have it all?
Quite frankly, one thirtyish acquaintance, who is well on the way to becoming a mum, answers 'no', although she's not speaking directly about Miss Ross or her daughter. Her opinion is that a woman simply can't have it all:
Both career and children mean sacrifice: one means giving up weekends and evenings for key meetings and phone calls; the other means dropping any and everything on a whim, to do whatever is necessary, whenever. The tricky thing comes when both elements demand sacrifice simultaneously. Which do you choose? How do you choose?
Something has to give. Where have I heard that before?
Some say, 'Yes, women can and do have it all. It's all about balance, not about choice'. For instance, with help from a nanny, be she hands-on or virtual, such as Contented Baby guru Gina Ford -- hailed by some and criticized by others, including Deputy PM Nick Clegg -- many women appear to be striking that balance.
Others without such help, although they find support from family and other avenues, are doing it too. Opponents argue that these women don't have it all because they're, regrettably, not spending quality time with their children.
So many women beg to differ, if only demonstrably. One acquaintance has three young, happy children, a rising career, hubby, you name it. Another practically runs her Fortune 500 company and has a lovely teenage son, and the list goes on.
'Ask the children', opponents insist. 'They must suffer in some way.' Maybe, but that is another matter entirely. This one is about women and, having asked a few myself, I've concluded that it's a grey area; one for the individual to clarify.
Meanwhile, one thing is crystal clear: women in both camps are getting their 'anything', even if it is not everything.