The Right Is Falling for the Lie That You Can Have It All at the Same Time

Back when Oprah was culturally relevant and had an interesting show, she once said that “you can have it all, but not at the same time.” Who knew such a lefty feminist would get something so right and, all these years later, some of us would still be peddling something so wrong. 

At great risk of angering the pro-life movement that is exclusively female led and committed to promulgating the “empowered” notion that babies don’t get in the way of a woman’s career ambitions and dreams, I am here to exhort that they should.

Or maybe a better way to put it is that they become the dream and ambition. 

This stance would probably shock those who knew me in my younger days because I, too, wanted both all at once. I was so ardently both a Christian moralist and a feminist; and if you asked me what I wanted to do, I would have said conquer the world with baby in tow. A “Catholic” Queen Victoria if you will—because if you want something done right, you often have to do it yourself. I was naturally mesmerized by strong female characters growing up and with seeing women as multifaceted or even a contradiction. 

Just four years ago, I lauded the appointment of Catholic Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and gave underacknowledged credit to her supportive husband in a piece at The American Conservative. A judge and mother of seven with “the dogma living loudly within her” harked back to the days of Sarah Palin for me. Remember that outdoorsy hockey mom of five from Alaska who ran for vice president and became a feminist icon on the Right? She inspired so many young women of my generation to pursue politics, including myself. I think we can now see how that turned out. 

But throughout my twenties, I started to see up close what conquering the world meant: often going along to get along as to not upset the applecart (which I am incapable of); selling your time and soul to a job in a myriad of subtle ways to “climb the ladder” and attain more power, prestige, money, and fame; and sacrificing a healthy, private, and simple personal life. Extending yourself beyond your own world—your home, your husband, your kids—ended up looking exhausting from the outside rather than balanced. 

My single friends and I are already burned-out just running the rat race for ourselves, so much so that we’re trying to escape it. But many on the Right “do it all” in the name of “saving the family,” or the West, or the country, or the culture, or some other purpose beyond themselves. But what they—especially Christian conservatives on the Right—don’t realize is that their primary vocation is their particular family, not their secondary vocation, their “calling” to save the generic family.   My single friends and I are already burned-out just running the rat race for ourselves, so much so that we’re trying to escape it.Tweet This

A few months ago, I attended a gala where former Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was the keynote speaker. Now, I get it, you make a lot of money giving speeches in these circuits. But at what cost? Not only does it cut into family time on a weekend, but you’ll often end up saying something that makes you look bad in an effort to make another look good. 

In her speech, she talked about getting the call from President Trump asking her to serve as press secretary after literally just having given birth to her daughter, Blake. She beamed with pride, telling the audience that she gave an immediate yes to him on the phone without hesitation…without consulting her family (who would be involved), her husband (who is a professional baseball player), God, or herself, nor considering what that would mean for her baby. In fact, in her story it was Trump (the twice divorced, thrice married New York City billionaire businessman) who questioned her workaholic nature on a Saturday flight to campaign. He wondered why she was with him and not watching her husband pitch at his game and with her family. 

Which brings me to wonder why President Trump has picked another brand-new mother to serve as press secretary, 27-year-old Karoline Leavitt. I am not questioning whether either of these young women deserved this post. It’s not a matter of ability. But I am questioning if it should’ve been offered to them to begin with, considering that their prime role as nurturer should take obvious precedence over any possible secondary role, especially when being offered from someone who supposedly knows what priorities are eminent.

This is not a flexible, work-from-home for a couple hours a day gig. Watch The West Wing; White House staffers—or anyone in D.C. for that matter—live and breathe the 24/7 geopolitical news cycle. Staying in the office until 9 or 10 p.m. isn’t abnormal; it also might be why Washington, D.C., has so many singles and the nation’s oldest marriage rate. 

What does it say of our society that we praise a woman skipping maternity leave to go back to work and partially abandon her infant child? Or that we applaud a mother dragging her baby with her to her high-powered job, like an accessory to her life, rather than making that baby the center of her life (after God and her husband)? Dare I say, the reason we applaud these working mothers is because they are working privileged, status careers that give them identity; they’re not in low-level service jobs because they need to provide for their family. If that were the case, our side would be outraged for the poor single mom having to go back to work out of necessity, or outraged that our economy can’t make it easy for a husband to support his family on one income. 

What it says is that if you can do something more interesting than just stay home with your children, you should keep working. If you can make good money at your job, you should keep working. If your husband doesn’t make enough to buy a house, you should definitely keep working. Even if your husband does make enough to afford a home, if you don’t have kids, you should keep working (even if you hate working). Basically, in almost all scenarios that have plagued my own friends, we (including a lot of men in the culture) love to see women in the post-industrial workforce, despite the fact that, by and large, a lot of them don’t want to be there. 

Common sense tells us that children need their mothers and that the first three years are especially critical for proper attachment, as has been recently reaffirmed and argued in the conservative podcast space by Dr. Erica Komisar. When mom isn’t with baby, who is? Typically, they are at the mercy of daycare, a nanny (aka “substitute mommy” as I concluded in my podcast episode interviewing nannies), or if they’re lucky, Grandma. 

And before I run the risk of being labeled sexist, this is also a problem I’ve noticed with men who want to paint themselves as family men but pursue big and overextending careers themselves. On October 31, 2021, at the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Josh Hawley admitted in his introduction that his two little boys had been trying to convince him all week to come trick or treating with them. Instead, dad chose to spend Halloween speaking to donors, politicos, and journos in person at an event in Orlando when he could have just sent his speech via video.

Or I think of conservative commentators like Michael Knowles, who recently admitted to a crowd at Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Homecoming that his wife was rather annoyed he returned fairly fast to the organization’s campus to speak for a second time. But who can turn down another weekend of collecting speaking fees and college kids’ starstruck admiration?

All that is to say, I don’t know how we are supposed to persuade a swath of the country’s electorate to be more open to life and children—and convince them that raising children is life’s greatest work—if our own side can’t value that in and of itself as enough at the highest level. We push women to look toward the outliers and exceptions, when all that’s doing is making it the standard expectation and robbing them of precious moments to bond with their young children, moments they’ll never get back no matter how “historic” their job is and becomes. 

[Photo: Kayleigh McEnany (Credit: Getty Images)]