What I’ve Learned from Women Choosing a Life Outside the Box
They have more in common than you might think
Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All
In September of 2023, I wrote an essay called “Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All: Discerning “work-life balance” for women who don’t like living in boxes.” In it, I wrote about the trends I see amongst the women I work with, as well as in the online discourse around work, home, career, and having a meaningful life. I shared how it’s not only new mothers who are wrestling with whether or not to “stay home”: plenty of single women I know are unhappy with a 40+ hour/week career. (Men might be unhappy too - but anecdotally, at least, I see it less.)
I suggested that the (largely Boomer) model of starting with one company and moving up over the course of a lifetime, building a ‘successful’ career through devoting a significant portion of (wo)man hours and energy to it, no longer seems appealing to many. Nor does it have to be. Thinking about what you want out of a career, or no career at all, is important. You don’t have to want one. It’s not one of the ten commandments.
I proposed instead thinking about a ‘portfolio’ life, of which paid work is only a part. Most women find that over the course of their lives, they will want to dip in and out of paid work, child-rearing, other forms of care-giving, and just being a person with hobbies and time to volunteer and pray and be in this world.
Life Outside the Box
After seeing how well-received these ideas were, I wanted to do more. I wanted to showcase the lives of women who were actually doing this: opting for a life lived differently. Because even though it’s important to get our ideas right, ideas can feel overwhelming without seeing them in action.
I spent the next year interviewing women who were gracious enough to let us get a peek into their lives “Outside the Box.” (If you haven’t read these interviews, they’re all right here.) There were former academics, mothers, business owners, single women, and even a present-day Beguine. Each of them had lots wisdom to share and I was grateful to be able to soak it in.
Why Elite Women Struggle with Marriage and Motherhood
Recently, I published an opinion piece over at Fairer Disputations: Why Elite Women Struggle with Marriage and Motherhood. In it, I explained another related trend that I’m spotting both in my work and in the online discourse: professional women are finding that pulling back from a successful career and stepping into the world of domesticity is surprisingly difficult.
“Surprisingly” is the key word here. No doubt influenced by Betty Friedan, our culture has held onto a narrative that women’s domestic work is low-value, and therefore easy, work. After all, it’s not a prestigious partnership or tenured position! As a result, many women feel like the problem is with them, rather than with society’s expectations.
But the truth is, domestic life is difficult, even if a different sort of difficult than professional life. And, there is no one-size-fits-all way for every woman, or every family, to figure out how to deal with it all.
There are plenty of women who are choosing to embrace domesticity and professional life. There are women who are opting out of one or the other entirely. There are women who are choosing to do one at a time. There are women who are getting a lot of help: from their spouses, families, friends, or even paid contractors. And there are a lot of women who are trying to figure it out as they go along.
What’s Common in a Life Outside the Box?
In light of these essays published before and after the series, I thought it would be interesting to read back through the Outside the Box interviews and see if I could spot any trends there. What can we learn from women who are choosing more than a one-dimensional-job-title kind of life, even if their own lives are all very different from one another? Are there any clear commonalities?
It turns out, the answer is yes.
The first thing I noticed was that each of these women had a blend of rootedness and courage which enabled them to step outside the box.
(1) A Rootedness that Leads to Confidence
Each in her own way decided that the societal box of “job-title-at-successful-career” was not the most meaningful box that life had to offer. Each chose to root her identity and self worth in something deeper. As
said:“But I am not a box, and I am not a word on a label stuck on a box. I am a person, a beloved child of God. That's my identity. Not the title on my nametag.”
This kind of rootedness bears the fruit of courage: courage to step aside from blindly embracing societal expectations as normative, and courage to take seriously one’s own gifts, talents, and desires.
challenged the idea that productivity is the measure of our self-worth:“I think a confidence in one’s own hopes and aspirations (tempered with reality checks and practicalities) is important. It can be all too easy to worry about how others see us, and whether we are being productive (I am amazed by how much this word is used, even in response to asking how someone is/how their day was, as though our first thought must be to measure our productivity!).
(2) Honesty, Humility, and Embracing Limitations
This kind of courage also goes hand-in-hand with humility in the discernment process. There’s a temptation for all of us to care too much about what other people think, or even what a previous version of us would have once thought.
shared with beautiful honesty how pride was holding her back from letting go of her editing business:“For several years after my husband took over his family business, I tried to make that the thing I said no to. …It was just another thing to squeeze into a too-full life, and I was resentful of it. It took a silent retreat and a candid conversation with a trusted priest for me to finally recognize how much my pride was coming into play. I didn’t want to work for my husband. I wanted to continue running my own business. I hated the thought of people mistakenly thinking I was his secretary. It was pride and stubbornness at its worst.
“…Editing was the right path for me for a time, but I’m glad I can close the door on that chapter and walk toward whatever is coming next.
It was hard for her to let go, but she had wisdom and humility enough to realize that life is seasonal, and just because something was once a good fit doesn’t mean it’s a good fit forever:
“I genuinely thought that because God had answered my decade-old prayer to make editing work out, and because God had given me the skill of editing, that I had to keep doing it forever. Once I started believing that God cares about me as a person, not just a tool, everything changed.”
God’s care is often manifest in and through circumstances that initially appear limiting, as
found out:“Three years ago I had to stop driving for medical reasons. We were living in an isolated, rural area. We had to move so that we could be close to a church community, get my husband his own home shop, and allow the kids and I freedom to walk to parks, the library, etc….All of this was a huge leap of faith. We did not know if our plan would work out. There have been tight times and there will most likely be more, but we feel so blessed to be living and working together as a family.”
The limitation of not driving led to them choosing a home where the family business could grow, and the family could thrive with walkability. They even ended up next to an orthodox monastery which offers opportunities for growth in faith. They had the courage to ‘lean in’ to the limitation, rather than fight it, with beautifully fruitful results.
(3) Recognizing Trade-offs in Light of Priorities
Choosing where to live was a serious discernment for
and her family, too. Like many of the women I interviewed, Taryn prayed about her life circumstances, but also got really practical. She and her husband considered the shape of their family life: what weight did things like paid work, children, and hospitality carry for them?also spoke about the trade-offs she and her husband were making in order to prioritize their family life, which included sacrificing some career goals in order to be near family who could help with their children.“It took a while for my husband and me to discern that I could quit working full time. The discernment process involved a lot of number-crunching and prayer. We make sacrifices financially to make it work (for instance, we bought a lovely house outside of the city, which is sometimes inconvenient but also costs less)....
“It’s important to us that we have a home that has room for our family to grow, if God gives us more children; that has room for us to host family and friends; and that has a room for my husband to work from home, so that he can work near us…If we’d had different priorities (for instance, if my husband couldn’t or preferred not to work from home, or if we prioritized living near city amenities like museums and the symphony over having space to entertain), we may have chosen differently.”
“My husband and I said yes to living closer to our parents for the sake of having their help (and so they can see their grandchildren grow up!). We are now saying no to jobs and opportunities that would disrupt our children’s lives. This is not the ideal of individualistic independence that our secular society has set as the ultimate goal, but it works for us, and it’s made us peaceful. I’m not ashamed to admit that I constantly ask for help looking after my children; I need breaks like every other mother out there.”
(4) Intentionality and Trust
Intentionality in discernment was a consistent theme in every interview. Like many of the others,
shared how reflection on her own childhood led to the intentional choices she and her husband are making today.“I should also mention that my Mom was a workaholic. I don't say this disparagingly, she would have described herself this way. But she was a tenacious, incredibly smart, determined, entrepreneur who ended up being incredibly successful…I don't think anything was wrong about this and in many ways I had a lovely childhood, but I just knew I wanted a different situation for my own children.”
While every woman I interviewed was intentional in her discernment, the need for trust also came to light: being intentional doesn’t mean always being in control of every last thing. As
put it,“Sometimes in life you just pray for a gift, and then you gratefully accept the gift, even if sometimes it doesn't even look like a gift you wanted or imagined.”
Sara Boehk spoke about how needing a “grand plan” had been paralysing to her discernment, but letting go of that need was incredibly freeing. When she asked someone she admired how she got where she had, she was told,
“‘By doing the next thing.’ It’s hard to describe the profound relief that unpretentious phrase gifted me.”
(5) Allowing Life to be Blended
Finally, most of the women I interviewed shared how the various aspects of their life were blended, rather than separated out into rigid boxes.
shared how she allows her days of homeschooling and writing/ editing to be a fruitful co-existence,reflected on the giftedness of being able to live a blended life, in part due to the intentional trade-offs they made to live somewhere affordable.“I stopped teaching part-time because it didn't fit well into my life; and, in the hours that opened up thereafter, I gradually noticed a keen urge to write. I responded to that urge with a passion that surprised me, and now am able to do part-time work as a writer and editor, work that gives me immense pleasure and exercises my mind in new ways without preventing me from being the mother and homeschooling teacher that I want to be.”
“Put simply, if I were not married and/or if we did not move somewhere this affordable, I'm not sure we would have been able to pull this off as a family. Homeschooling and spending so much time with my kids while they are little is a beautiful, wonderful luxury. Being able to just freelance and write for joy is a luxury. Yet more gifts to accept with gratitude.”
And
spoke about how pursing a PhD was actually a wonderful preparation for motherhood, with its initial period of intensiveness followed by more freedom and relaxed possibilities:“For me, graduate school was a kind of preparation towards living “life outside the box” in its demand for commitment and self-governance….
“Motherhood follows a kind of similar pattern: you have a number of years in which to raise a human being. At the beginning, you’re on a stricter schedule—babies need to eat quite often! As your child gradually becomes (somewhat) less physically needy, you’re left with a problem of self-governance. Sure, there’s no “taking the day off” entirely anymore, but you can get through parenting with various levels of attentiveness.”
I’m sure there are plenty more commonalities to be found in the lives of women who are living outside the box, but these struck me as foundational for anyone who might want to step off the career-as-the-only-thing track. It’s not easy to have the humility or the courage to buck popular trends, but rooting our identity in being a beloved child of God rather than a productivity robot is a good place to begin. After all, we aren’t machines.
So tell me, if you’re living outside the box, what contributed to you getting there? As you read through these interviews, what struck you?
And finally, if you’d like some help in discernment - whether it’s exploring how you might step outside the box, or something else - maybe you’d like to schedule a free 30 min chat to see if working together 1:1 is a good fit?
I loved these interviews. You had quite a prolific period of publishing on here!
The variety was appreciated. One thing that seems to be common in this genre is the high achieving, academically trained, career-oriented woman who realizes she actually wants something different for her life than that box, and figures something out. I suppose you had a bit of those and I loved hearing them! But I was thankful for some women of other dispositions and backgrounds. I say this as a lady who was *never* very academically high achieving or career focused. So for me, motherhood has been a time of realizing I desire the same end goal of not being in a box - but approaching it from the opposite spectrum than the ladies with PhDs or career expectations or whatever. Like, I'm trying to reverse engineer this thing. haha Coming from non-achievement-oriented-background where I actually *only wanted to be a mom* and have just held a series of okay jobs before becoming a mother, and currently trying to figure it out as I go... been an interesting perspective to read this series from. Anyways! This is a ramble! But this whole series has been so fun, and I'm heartened by each interview (and all the wisdom you generally share here).
I appreciated this so much. I relate very much to this “out of the box” life. For me, it wasn’t really a choice, but as I reflect back I feel grateful for the way God has led me on a different path. I was on track towards an academic career, high achieving and highly motivated when a sudden, unexpected, and debilitating chronic illness hit taking away my ability to do traditional work, perhaps forever. Along with that it took away my future plans for motherhood (not definitely, but likely). But now, five years down the road, I think I live a very purpose-filled, full life. But, it takes constant practice of returning to the confidence of rootedness in Christ as you described. Because, it’s not a life that is valued by the world around me since it does it look “productive” in the way they expect.