No Babies, I’ll Take A Master’s Please
If you’re a Latina and your family is anything like mine, people have been expecting you to be married (to a man) for a really long time. And, since you graduated from college, they’ve been looking at their watches every five minutes wondering when it’s going to happen. Luckily for me, though, I’m part of the third-generation of my Mexican-American family, so my relatives and I also value the importance of professional and educational evolution.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t totally reject these strong family values. In fact, I’m proud to be a part of my family and admire all the hard work that’s gone into growing, changing and moving up in the world as a family. A lot of that hard work was due to extremely strong values revolving around the family: You worked hard to support your family or to make life better for your children, siblings or parents. I respect that. I’m a product of those values.
But, one of the unintended consequences of all that hard work, is that for some of the people in my generation, starting a family has been moved to the back burner. We’re young and educated and, instead of focusing our energies on building a young family, we’re finishing our educations, establishing ourselves, going back to school or building businesses. Yet, I maintain that the expectations for women to marry and settle down continue to be heavier for women than men.
And it’s not that I don’t want to get married — I just don’t want to do it now. It turns out that, all that hard work and sacrifice, has allowed me to delay the very way of life that allowed me to get to this point in my life in the first place. Instead of finding a husband and making babies, I get to “find myself” and try several careers, earn a Master’s degree and work in a startup. Sweet deal. It’s an entirely different experience, one some tías and abuelitos may not fully understand, but one they all contributed to creating in one way or another.
It may be a curious contradiction, or chiflazón, but ultimately all the opportunities I’ve had were won by the same hard work and family values that expect me to settle down. And hopefully, one day, I’ll get to have both.
Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD
