Rosie's Daughters

A Response to the NYT piece "From Girl Boss to No Boss"

I read the Girl Boss to No Boss piece that was published yesterday in The New York Times (totally not lost on me that this as published on the Full Moon in Capricorn btw) and it felt like it touched on so many of the same themes as the Substack piece I wrote a few weeks ago called "The Ambition Recession."

If you are a millennial working women (or are married to one) and have the time and spiritual energy, I highly recommend you read both pieces before this one.

Let’s dive in…

Those of you who follow along may know that I'm in the process of writing my first book—a reflection on the early days of my journey building a portfolio career. For a few weeks, I debated long and hard with my writing coach whether to center gender throughout the entire book. While I've decided not to make it the “spine” of the work, I now have what my writing coach calls "the junk drawer"—pieces and pages of earlier drafts that won't make it into the book but are too important not to keep in case they inspire other pieces here on Substack.

I didn’t expect that moment to have arrived so quickly. But here we are!

So, if you will indulge me, I'd like to share one of those junk drawer pieces with you today. It's an integration that came to me a few months into my sabbatical. It’s about the weight of responsibility we carry as women to honor the women who came before us, and how, I believe, it subconsciously shapes our career choices:

I'm sitting in my kitchen at 2 PM on a Tuesday, still in my pajamas, watching dust motes float through the afternoon sunlight. I am now 60 days post-layoff. And I still cannot figure out how to just... be still.

In fact, I am sure that my body has not a clue what being still entails. Even now, unemployed and theoretically free, I'm mentally cataloging all the things I "should" be doing. And I find myself wondering: Why am I like this? Where did this come from?

I catch myself beginning to wipe down the counter for the third time that day and suddenly I see my mother, scrubbing grout with a toothbrush after working a fourteen-hour workday.

That’s why. Sigh.

I'm immediately transported to my inheritance—not the kind that comes in envelopes from lawyers, but the kind that arrives quietly, epigenetically, in the way we hold our shoulders at work or the speed at which we mindlessly move through our homes to get the never-ending list of mindless chores done. The kind that shows up in how we understand work, worth, and what it means to be useful in this world.

You see, some inheritances don't come with ceremony. They arrive as gravitational forces, shaping us before we're old enough to recognize they exist.

And it hits me, I think I learned to be palatable before I learned to be whole. And I never questioned what being palatable was costing me until everything I built upon that palatability came crashing down.

I thought about my great-grandmother. A stoic woman born in the era of the Great Depression. Both of her parents had died when she was young—one of illness, the other of a tragic accident. Because of this, she was thrust into adulthood at the age of 14, well before her body and her spirit were ready. She worked the family dairy farm, the only girl with five older brothers.

Survival marked her entire childhood and deferred her adulthood. She married in her mid-twenties—uncommon for the time but matching her circumstances—and built a Sears home from a mail-order kit to celebrate her neuptials Her home was sturdy and square, standing like a monument to years of effort on the farm. She raised my grandmother there—her only daughter. My grandmother never spoke about this herself, and I recognize this might be a bit of a projection, but I wonder about the weight my great-grandmother applied to her relationship with her only daughter to make up for those early life circumstances that shaped her.

My great-grandmother too was always in motion. Even in her 90s, her soft hands never stopped—folding laundry, wiping surfaces, adjusting doilies that hadn't been moved in weeks. Her restlessness wasn't anxiety. That concept didn’t exist back then.. It was her internal wiring. Stillness was negligence to her. She had no language for trauma, just tasks.

Then there was my grandmother who came of age in the 1950s, which was fitting because she looked like a taller, curvier Jackie O. She was "quite the looker," as my grandfather used to say, though she was never a braggart about it—I always found that humility endearing.

She left her small town in the Poconos, Pennsylvania in her twenties to take a job as a secretary in another neighboring county. A radical act for the only child of a coal miner's daughter. She married my grandfather—both her superior at work and eleven years her senior. She then left the workforce to raise three daughters and the family moved even further away from the rural town where she had grown up.

For nearly two decades, she stayed home to raise my mom and my aunts. But in her forties, she went back to work. I think about that decision—how she negotiated that space for her own progress within the confines of what was acceptable for women at the time. The age difference and social expectations always created an undercurrent of tension between her and my grandfather, something I could feel even as a small kid when I spent time with them in the Summer but didn't fully understand.

Now I appreciate how she was navigating something the women before her hadn't: choice. Limited choice, but choice nonetheless. How to honor both my great-grandmother's work ethic and her own quiet dreams that had been deferred but never fully abandoned.

She went back to work against my grandfather's wishes. She still had the posture of her generation: quiet, agreeable, proper. But deep inside, I think she was always negotiating space for her own dreams.

My grandfather had always wanted a son but never got one. So he raised his daughters to do “men’s work”, teaching them how to fix broken things and keep up the homee through manual, visible labor as a way to earn their keep. And he was unrelenting with his engineering precision when he assessed their toils.

My mother, the eldest of the bunch, absorbed both of her parents' examples: the expectations of my grandfather's exacting high standards and my grandmother's generational subservience. It was a heavy legacy to inherit as a deeply sensitive child.

My mother then went on to college to became a medical technician, being the first college graduate in the family. (We discovered as a family on my grandfather's deathbed that he had not, in fact, graduated from college—that he was actually a college dropout. Also full of surprises, that one.) I think about how my mom stepped into a role she may have unconsciously thought was expected of her very quickly. She unfortunately never went on to medical school—my grandfather’s dream—not necessarily by choice, but because she got pregnant with me.

She divorced my father when I entered the fifth grade. And remarried a construction worker. I have these distinct memories from my teens of observing her re-teaching herself blue-collar skills: painting, drywalling, remodeling homes. She was fascinating to me, she was a woman who could transition from laying a tile floor to making dinner to talking about the sciences to hemming a pair of pants without flinching all in the same day. She was the embodiment of a renaissance woman.

But, if there was one area that I could critique, it was how we never productively talked about feelings in our home as a family. Instead, I felt them, humming beneath every spotless surface and every suppressed, then expressed, passive-aggressive turned aggressive fight between her and my stepfather. Or me. A reaction, I believe, to how my grandmother managed conflict with my grandfather.

My mother never expected me to be perfect like her father had. But she didn't need to. Perfection was the air we breathed—unscented but thick. Her currency was cleanliness and competence, and she paid for it in periods of deep yet not fully expressed dissatisfaction.

This was deeply confusing to make sense of this as a kid. As a middle aged (cringe!) adult, I now know her perfection was a form of self-protection and not expectation. And though she never meant to pass it down to me, I inherited it anyway. Not as a directive, but as that gravitational force.

Because my examples at a young woman were women holding it together quietly.

So I unconsciously chased that same perfection myself for twenty years.

Straight A's. Magna cum laude. Fancy finance degree. Jobs in glass towers.

Only later would I see that my ambition had been shaped by scarcity, not sovereignty. My overachieving was a love letter to ghosts. I wasn't chasing success. I was fulfilling the legacy of a lineage of women who had never given themselves—or been given—permission to stop or fully exercise their own choice.

I stared at the spotless kitchen counter in front of me. Not a sploch or scratch in sight.

We were told as millennial women we could be anything when we grew up. But what they didn't tell us was that we might lose ourselves in the process.

Our grandmothers entered the workforce armed with shoulder pads and silence. They became fluent in patriarchal systems. To survive them, they made themselves small and palatable in some way or ways. And in doing so, they created possibility—for us.

Or so we thought.

And we took the chance. We built corporate careers and became high performers.

We chased after excellence. We ruthlessly pursued progress.

And because of it, we exhausted overselves.

Because the work structures themselves did not change to accomodate or support the multiple forms of our labor or our layers and contradictions. Only the superficial optics of work did.

There's a strange kind of grief that hits you when you are forced to slow down and realize your life, your choices, may not have consciously been yours either. When you realize you have spent decades building a career that was never really reflective of your own hopes or dreams.

That you borrowed someone else's definition of success and wore it like armor.

I threw the washcloth in the sink, salty. I felt myself suddenly mourning all those years of my life that I felt I had lost. The years of my career that I had spent trying to earn safety through validation.

And suddenly, that same profound grief which subsumed me softened me. It became a bridge to my mother. And to my grandmother. And to my great-grandmother. I could see now how much they had given up. Not just for their families—but for the illusion of progress we as women had all bought into. I could see how they too had been handed scripts written in someone else's handwriting and told to memorize them.

I found myself feeling tender for us all.

This is how we break cycles: not by rejecting our lineage, but by loving it enough to actively, consciously choose differently.

Building with you,

Brie

If you're navigating your own transition toward a portfolio career, I invite you to join the community at Build with Brie, where we're supporting each other through this evolution. For those interested in my personal journey through this territory, my three-part essay series which I am calling "Portfolio Career Love Letters" offers an unfiltered account of my own 20-year path toward my own professional reclamation.