Writing is My Occupation. It's one of the ways I occupy myself on a regular basis with larger goals in mind from which I hope to build a career.
I'm not only a woman, I'm a former homemaker, military wife and homeschooling mom and I'm medically handicapped. I've thought a lot about the question just how does one build a career when it's simply not possible to make "career" the center of my life.
Currently, heteronormative culture conceptualizes a serious career in male coded formatting where your paid job is the center of your life and you regularly devote forty or more hours per week to your paid job with other things taking up scraps of time leftover after your primary obligation of working.
Last stats I saw, homemakers spent sixty hours a week on women's work and working wives and moms spent forty hours a week on such tasks. Men increased their share of the housework but by something like an hour or two per week, falling far short of making up for the hours no longer being done by the wife.
My marriage was a 1950s style marriage and at some point I realized my house wasn't a constant disaster due to my special needs kids nor due to my health problems but due to my husband. While stationed someplace where he was gone six months out of every year, I realized that if he was gone at least two weeks, I could get the house picked up the first week and then -- shock of shockers -- it STAYED picked up.
At least until he returned. The minute he was home, his possessions EXPLODED onto every available surface of our home and within thirty minutes it looked like a tornado had dumped a military supply store in my house and once he was home no amount of work was enough to keep up with the rate at which he made messes.
For this reason alone, I may NEVER remarry. I'm capable of having a life IF I'm not married to a troglodyte actively creating endless housework for me while pretending I'm merely lazy and incompetent.
So, first: Don't marry a man like that.
How you pull that off, I have no clue. If you figure it out, feel free to tell me your secrets because I got nothing. I thought I married a "new age, modern man." Silly me, NO.
Anyway, there are ways to cut back on the amount of time eaten by women's work without just ruining your quality of life, such as:
2. Follow a Nutrient Dense model for keeping people adequately fed without anyone being chained to the stove.
3. Pay for specific services that help free up your time. (At some point, I stopped laundering and ironing my ungrateful husband's military uniforms and just took them to the dry cleaners even though money was a constant source of stress in the marriage.)
But that doesn't really get most women to the point where they can compete with men on men's terms. In most households, no matter how successful she is, the lion's share of the women's work and child rearing duties will still fall to her, not him, and finding ways to reduce that burden still doesn't free her to make her career her highest priority.
For that and other reasons, a female coded career needs to intentionally flip the script and PLAN on establishing a career in the scraps of time left after other things instead of placing career first and life second.
I would like to see a world that supports that by having college degrees DESIGNED to be acquired on a part-time enrollment basis. That would help.
But this is the thing most women seem to not quite get: a career is something that happens over a long period of time and it's really not about you making it the lion's share of your hours THIS week. It's about devoting time to it consistently so it adds up to something over DECADES.
You CAN do that without spending forty to sixty hours a week on it during your youth when you may want or need to prioritize child bearing and child rearing and making nice to the husband so he will support you and your children.
There's a saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. If you work at it ten hours a day, six days a week for fifty weeks of the year, you hit 10,000 hours in three years and four months.
If you spend two hours a day, six days a week, fifty weeks out of the year at it, it will take five times longer but you will eventually hit 10,000 hours if you persist.
In reality, children are generally the most demanding in the years before kindergarten. I've known more than one full-time mom who had a third child after the second started school and my read on that is they had too much time on their hands but not enough to commit to full-time college or a full-time job.
In a word, they were bored. Instead of having another child at that point in my life, I began taking classes part-time and intermittently and I picked up hobbies, like watching HGTV and rehabbing found furniture.
So odds are good if you persist, it won't actually be just two hours a day forever. You will likely have more time to give it as the kids get older and by the time you're good at it, they may be in middle school or high school and you may be well positioned to start doing something full-time or nearly so at that point.