Many Gen X women, overworked and in debt, take a pass on parenthood
I see them downtown, these women my age who have no haunted look of sleeplessness in their eyes. They don’t have suspicious stains on their clothes. They aren’t picking smashed Cheerio bits out from between their BlackBerry keys. (We working moms live in a world of perpetual BlackBerry outages, constantly explaining the latest apple-juice incident to the IT dude.) My first thought when I see these women in their 30s and 40s is, “Right on, sister.”
Nearly half the women who make up Generation X — 43 percent — have no children.
Attribute it to more opportunities in the workforce, relaxing social pressure, advances in contraception or watching women such as myself slip into an increasingly disheveled state of hysteria for years after childbirth and vowing not to follow suit.
We represent the first generation of women who truly, honestly have a choice about whether to be society’s incubators. No longer are we expected to pop out 10 young’uns so the odds are good one or two will survive to help till the fields.
But then I think about what it means to be Gen X, the forgotten generation of folks between the ages of 33 and 46. We are a 46-million-strong latchkey, Scooby-Doo-educated, divorced-scarred, Pop-Tart-fed statistical valley wedged between the peaks of 76 million boomers and 70 million Millennials that are the “E” Generation….