Choices, Sacrifices

Getting a haircut the other day, I was confronted with a statement I cringe at: “You must sacrifice a lot to be a mom.” It’s not the statement itself that makes me cringe, but the attitude and tone of voice that go with it. What my hairdresser was really saying was, “I can’t believe you want to be a mom. What a waste of time.”

No matter how often I am on the receiving end of this attitude, I have yet to succinctly, clearly, and politely express exactly what I think of it (if I didn’t want to be polite, I would probably say “grow up”—or, if I was feeling nasty, “I can’t believe you want to be a hairdresser”).

You know what I wish had happened?

“Dear sir,” I say, “What exactly do you think I’ve sacrificed?”

I imagine him floundering to say something polite. “Ummm… your career. What were you before you were a mom?”

“I was a copyeditor at a university.”

“Yeah,” he says, feeling on safer ground, “So you don’t do that anymore, right? You just stay home with your kids.” (I note that he tries not to emphasize the “just.” But he fails.)

“Yep, that’s what I do. No more nine-to-five job with a paycheck.”

“So that must be a lot to sacrifice,” he says, clearly thinking he’s summed things up nicely.

“I suppose you’re right. What about you—what do you do?”

“Ummm… obviously I’m a hairdresser.”

“Oh yes, I see. And what did you do before you were a hairdresser?”

“I went to school for a few years to learn how to do it.”

“And before that?”

“Mostly just hung out, lived at home with my parents.”

“You must have sacrificed a lot to be a hairdresser. No more just living at home with the parents. All that money you paid to go to school.”

“Nah, I like doing hair.”

“What about business school? Ever think about business school? Or college? Or writing books? Or working in a store? Or running for political office? Or running the local homeless shelter? Ever thought about any of those things?”

“Nope. I’m doing what I like.”

“Ever wonder if maybe I’m doing the same?”

Perhaps he pauses for a moment to consider this idea. Could I possibly enjoy being a mother?

“Yeah, but you already had a career that you liked,” he says.

“I still have a career that I like.” (Note how polite I am to refrain from slapping him upside the head.)

Now I think he is stumped. But he probably laughs a bit and says “sure” to appease me.

Or better yet, perhaps he had considered some of those other careers before deciding on hair:

“I actually thought about art school for a while,” he says. “It was hard to choose between the two.”

“So you sacrificed art for hair,” I say. “And you probably still occasionally miss the idea of art school. Maybe you even sometimes wonder if art school would have been more fun or easier or something. But here you are, happy with your choice most of the time.

“Look,” I continue, “I realize that being a mother is a sacrifice. I am indeed sacrificing a number of other career paths that I could be following. And sometimes, yes, I miss the things I left behind. But that doesn’t actually make me any different from anyone else. Every choice you make rules out hundreds of other choices. Say you go to college—that means you’re not going to beauty school or traveling the world or watching tv in your parents’ basement. You take a job as a waiter—so you’re not an office assistant or a dog walker or a salesperson. You choose something, you sacrifice something else. That’s the way it is.”

I’m not sure he believes me yet; he probably thinks religion has brainwashed me. So by now I hope my haircut is over because I am fed up with this man who cannot seem to accept that I made this choice. I am not a victim.

I pay for the cut before I leave (and I hope I’m not too stingy with the tip).

See, every choice we make is also a sacrifice. Some of those sacrifices are just plain hard. But in most cases, we decide to focus on what we chose rather than mourn what we gave up. Even when we give up things we really wanted, if we want to be happy we learn how to enjoy what we got instead. (And note that when we choose to be happy, we sacrifice being sad.)

Some choices are harder than others, and some choices have greater consequences. Some consequences are obvious immediately and some appear only years later. But every day we make choices and, by extension, we also make sacrifices. That is life.

So yes, of course I’ve sacrificed a lot to be who and what I am today. So did Donald Trump, the president of the United States, Nobel prize winners, Albert Einstein. And yet nobody mentions their choices or sacrifices with disdain or contempt.* The question is not whether you’ve sacrificed something—everybody has—but whether you’ve sacrificed the right things.

What have you sacrificed today?

*Well, except for the minor technicality of Donald Trump’s hair, but you get the idea.