Hello.
It’s 2023 and my legs are still secretly supposed to have a thigh gap.
Also, my body is supposed to carry and support and birth a full human, after which I am expected to keep both my body and my resume tight?
While raising the human/s?
Don’t tell me to be present for my kids, tell me how good I do or do not look for a mom of two at my age (??) – and then in the same breath, tell me how impressed you are with my work, before noting the gap in my resume and opting not to hire me because I’ve been "out of the industry for some time.”
You think I've forgotten everything I've learned up until I became pregnant? At which point all experience, academia, and acquired knowledge just... what, evaporate?? You don't get back on a bike after several years and suddenly forget how to ride it, why do you think that’s the WORLD'S MOST OVERUSED METAPHOR.
If anything, becoming a mom opens you up. It expands you. You gain lifetimes of perspective in a manner of months, weeks, days, hours. You are constantly growing new limbs and neural pathways, breaking and putting yourself back together again, over and over on repeat, like so many Wiggles songs you wish you'd never heard but have now etched themselves into your very existence anyway.
Being a mom forces you to figure out how to ride twelve bikes all at the same time, and also you're blindfolded and not allowed to sleep.
So please don't tell me how in awe you are of me and my range of experience, and then proceed to either dismiss me outright, or offer me less than I earned pre-child.
Yes, my body has done some incredible things.
But so has my mind.
Not to get all Rupi Kaur, but like:
Can you please just afford me the luxury
of untangling my body
from my body of work?
What kind of world are we telling ourselves we live in, where Thigh Gap gets you an illusory "leg up" in terms of optics and admiration, but Resume Gap pulls you right back down again?
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