Having It All Is a Myth

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on the Michelle Obama podcast and as a big Michelle fan, I obviously had to listen to every episode. In the very first episode, her guest was no other than her husband, the former President, Barack Obama. In the podcast, they discussed the relationship people have with communities but there was something that really caught my attention in the discussion because of what I thought was its poignancy, especially in relation to the way we relate to the current times in the world. It is of course true that many are really struggling in these times to make ends meet and one of the ways we tend to encourage one another is to tell the one that seems overwhelmed by the avalanche of demands and responsibilities:  “You can have it all.”  Though this is usually meant as words to help the overwhelmed individual not to give up and to continue to push and be ready to conquer all frontiers and overcome all obstacles on the way to achieving multiple goals, it is also the case that we ought to know and realise that in spite of the exhortative value of this expression, it is essentially a myth that does not hold or perhaps more precisely that we should not expect to hold in human life that is defined intrinsically by imperfection and the limitations arising from this state of affairs. The Obamas talking about the expression and also disapproving of its becoming a popular fare of current culture and society got me thinking about what the saying really means and why it has somehow become so popular.

When I hear the words, “you can have it all”, I think of women who are doing it all, career and family, side by side. I think of all the women who have made it possible to aspire to a career even with children of their own. Then I think of the other side of it where that saying is literal, that you can acquire as many things as you want without losing out on the relationships that you care about. As a person, I have never really agreed with those words, I think it is a lie we perpetuate to make ourselves feel better about the choices we are making and to pressure others into making the same choices. Let us start with the women. I believe the idea that we can have it all is actually very damaging for women. It leads to women who wear themselves out trying to be everything at once. To successfully climb the corporate ladder, to be amazing wives and to be dream mothers: all at the same time. In fact, the fact that this saying is usually attributed to women speaks of the misogyny women have to deal with because they are being placed on an unusual societal pedestal, but that is a topic for another day. But by women trying to do it all, they get burned out and become unfulfilled and unhappy thinking that they have lost. I would think that the reality is a little different. To be a successful person, you have to be willing to make sacrifices based on what your priorities are and I know you might be thinking, are you saying that women have to start making all the sacrifices? No I am not. I mean every human has to make some form of sacrifice to be successful. It is the same in the family, husbands make sacrifices to make time for their wives and vice versa and when children are involved, sacrifices are made to give them all of the love and care they need. While there will always be working mothers, think of all the sacrifices that they have to make to raise their children that might never have happened if they did not have children. The beauty of an equal world is that it is not only one party making all the sacrifices, fathers also have to make sacrifices for their children. In that sense, are they really having it all?

The second phase of this saying that comes to mind feeds the materialistic nature of the world. The Obamas also made allusion to this  in that episode of the podcast. To have it all suggest depriving others of having anything at all. As a society, we have all become so focused on getting, getting and getting without remembering giving. Like Mrs. Obama rightly acknowledged in the podcast you are not supposed to have it all because then what would your neighbor have. In a world where we are all trying to get as much as we can, we start missing out on the relationships that actually make us human. You cannot spend a lot of time climbing the corporate ladder without losing out on time to cultivate friendships and build relationships. Imagine having it all with no one to share it with. Well, that would be truly sad. Materialism really is not what makes us happy, it is the friendships and the family relationships that we build that make us happy and by perpetuating this selfish path of having it all, we create a world that is less giving, less open and less happy.

One other important factor about sacrifice is the fact that many of us were raised on the value of it. As the Obamas noted, while growing up, a lot of parents helped each other out. Stay at home mothers helped working mothers out, they did not judge them for having to go out and work but rather they recognized their own privilege in being able to stay home and care for their families. They looked out for one another and disciplined erring children when necessary. This collective responsibility was born out of sacrifices and these sacrifices helped raise responsible children. Maybe in the course of watching our parents struggle, for sacrifices come with struggles, we decided not to be the same. We decided that maybe sacrificing so much is not necessary to build a community, maybe sacrificing is taking too much from us. So we decided to be different, to make ourselves happy first. Whether as mothers, fathers, sisters or brothers, we decided to put ourselves first and amass as much as we can. And we started to tell ourselves that it is possible to have it all especially at the expense of other people. We forget that we are only truly okay if we are all okay and it is by lifting others up that we ourselves can rise.

The lesson from that first episode of the Michelle Obama podcast for me was that our communities are what makes us who we are and by strengthening and giving back to our communities can we become happy ourselves. You really cannot have it all, you need others and giving to others require sacrifices. We need mothers and fathers, daughters and sons who give and who would not keep everything to themselves. We need to go back to teaching the value of sacrifices. Only then can we truly start the work of rebuilding as a family, as a people, as a society.

• Wale-Olaitan is an educationist.

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