We each have our familiar circles of agony and mine has always been: want to have kids/must make money.

When the kids were babies and we lived in poverty the need for money was louder but never louder than my need to not hand the babies off to strangers---almost but not quite louder. We carried a lot of debt to get through. Over time I've had various jobs for money, working only when my husband was home, yet none stuck. Probably because our financial needs were filled as my husband got through graduate school and began drawing a salary. The things extra money covered never outweighed the cost of stricter scheduling demands with both parents leaving to work. And never outweighed Always Being On, for both me and my husband. Down time is a physical reality. You can try to live without down time but eventually the need of it will tilt and consume you. In any case, even in the face of obvious plenty, my psychological need to earn money has never been silenced. Nor my need to spend, come to think of it.

Since walking off the farm, I've been officially "unemployed" for a week and 3 days. This morning I sat weeping with coffee on the couch, next to my husband. He's heard my concerns before. His response has been level steady and pitch perfect from ground zero: "I've chosen a career, no matter what you choose. I support any choice you make. The work you do at home matters. Being a parent is a full time job, if that's what you want."

Yet, I feel a very deep sense of shame at being nearly 50 years old without a career. My skill sets are all insanely specialized: talking to toddlers, assisting birth, milking cows. I do not know what I'm going to do with myself 5 years from now. Something, but what? Please don't suggest I go back to college. I could. I would rather be a waitress. And maybe that's exactly what I'll end up doing.

Something crucial finally hit home this morning. There is nothing I could have done differently.

Other than finishing a college degree in my 20s. *Mark me, children.*

This is the dilemma of women in our society. Every parent I know has faced the same and we all find different solutions according to our own values and needs. But we are the richest society in the world and we spend the least amount of time with our children. What children need to thrive may be the biggest taboo subject in American culture. As a taboo subject its bigger, even, than men who get raped. We can talk all day long about choices for men and women. Just don't let anyone suggest children might have needs. That there might be conscriptions of a sort to parenting, beyond gender or money, for God's sake.

There is no way my husband and I could have raised our family the way we wanted, and could enjoy the relationship we have with our kids, if I had also simultaneously run a career. Smaller piddly jobs, hardly worth the pittance of money they bring, might be what I do for the rest of my life. If so, the lack of income was worth it. Priceless, even. But the bigger point is, our society generates this dilemma. Women are expected, or expect of themselves, that we should, in fact, do it all. When the truth is, all can not be done. Only some can be done.

I don't know. No one is going to solve the worlds problems on a blog, least of all me. But the realization that I couldn't do anything but what I did, or else we would all have had a very different life, calmed me down. It made me stop crying and I felt slightly less guilty about not being able to step neatly and nextly into some new, high dollar high status high reward, job. Maybe I can now approach these next transitions with less angst? Without turning to discussions with Salinger in my mind, for comfort. Without making my husband hold me while I cry over our good fortune. Just once, Buddy, and maybe this time without showing up on the corner of Broad and Main in a Goddamn housecoat offering positively anyone who even looks my way a tangerine and a prayer?

What society asks of families is impossible. If all can not be done, who loses? Usually, the children.