Today's Globe Essay

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Didn't we almost have it all?
While we may not have everything we once thought was our destiny, we have found another kind of perfect

EMILY MARROCCO

October 30, 2007

As young women wasting away hours at the campus pub, watching boys and cocktails come and go with alarming frequency, we talked of our plans to grow up and have it all.

In our dreams of glamorous jobs and power suits, we somehow seemed to be taller and skinnier, with better haircuts and perfect makeup, even though we were pretty sure we had stopped growing by age 25 and already started going grey.

We imagined strutting to the gym every day after work in tiny tank tops to tune up our movie-role-ready bodies, even though we could never seem to get there with only 12 hours of classes a week and already looked a little squishy in boxers and baggie T-shirts.

In our dreams of marriage, we had wed men fit for the 50-most-beautiful-people list, with high-powered jobs, friends in high places, biting wit and big brains - men who also met us at home at 5 p.m., cooked gourmet suppers and never yearned for golf getaways. We didn't notice that our then-boyfriends seemed pained to fit time with us in between the classes they were barely passing and yet another guys' night out.

But our dreams of children were perhaps the most sensational, as we all imagined the dozens of babies we could conceive and give birth to without effort or consequence: scores of beautiful, smiling accessories perched on our hips as we continued with our lives.

Fast forward 10 years as we all meet for play dates, comparing stretch marks, swapping viruses and trying not to spill the third coffee of the morning on someone else's kid (even though there's one we're all gunning for). Fast forward to talks about who's back from mat leave, how many days she's working, who's got the kids and, of course, how it's all working out.

And somewhere in the fragments that must count as conversation, as we peel toddlers off each other and extol the virtues of sharing the dump truck, we reconsider what it means to truly have it all.

Our returns to work were met with skepticism from all angles: from the old boys at the office who still aren't convinced they should have ever started hiring girls; from the stay-at-home moms who clearly don't believe that 10 hours a day of daycare is an important introduction to anything; and, of course, from our toddlers, who look at us like we have got to be kidding when we walk out after breakfast happily announcing that we'll be home in time for dinner.

Our returns to work have thrilled only the newly hired childless superkids, who bomb around the office sending e-mails at 11 p.m. just because they can. We were not met with any red carpets when we finally came back after being away for 365 days. There was no talk of promotion, only whispers wondering when we might be plotting to do this again. There were no congratulations for showing up having managed to take a shower, or for finding the way to the correct desk on five broken hours of sleep for the fifth night in a row.

There were no points awarded for managing to serve a dinner that did not start in a frozen state, for putting on an animated story time or for squeezing in an evening trip to the park that included a marathon round of hide-and-seek.

The criteria on our performance reviews were not reworked to include "fairly coherent" as an acceptable standard of anything.

We cannot believe that we forgot to include "ability and willingness to change nighttime diapers" as a must-have quality in a husband, one that should have ranked well ahead of "ability to move hips while dancing."

And while going to the gym is mostly a fantasy, we hope to get fit by some kind of osmosis if we just buy a lot of Lululemon wear in which to collapse on the couch.

But somewhere in the midst of clearly not having anything close to the everything we once thought was our destiny, we agree that we have found a different kind of perfect - in the belly laughs, munchkin voices, toothless grins and big, drooling kisses that just seem to keep on coming, even on the days we know that we are so not pulling this off.

And as we wipe the Zincofax cream off the BlackBerrys and load the minivans we swore we'd never buy, on some level we all agree: For now, at least, perhaps having all that matters is the same as being all that matters to a little tiny someone else.

Emily Marrocco lives in Toronto.