We live in a time where meals can be bought, prepared or cooked in under an hour, both members of a household can work and an increasing amount of money is spent each year on leisure — a term unknown to our ancestors. In these respects, and many more, our society is advanced.

Not so fast.

All of the women, who, like me, hope to declare they are college-educated in a few years, must make difficult choices when it comes to having a family and raising children. We are able to make choices when it comes to raising our children because our degree will make us more likely to earn a higher amount of money than those mothers without a college degree. At some point though, you may find you can’t have it all. 

Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote an op-ed after leaving the Obama administration titled, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” explaining her decision to leave her job as the first woman director of policy planning at the Department of State to be with her two teenage sons.

Slaughter wrote about the struggle of raising her children in a high government position. She brought up an interesting point: “Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family.”

In high school, I said to many adults that I would probably not marry or have children because “I would not want to make the sacrifices it required.” Now that I am nearing my 20s and have come up to breathe, I realize I may want those things that men in power are fortunate enough to not have to compromise. 

Even for those women not interested in a highly stressful professional job, you may find you can’t have it all when you start paying the check for daycare. According to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, the average cost of center-based daycare in the United States is $11,666. At some point, if your job does not make enough to cover the cost, shouldn’t you quit to stay at home to raise your child? Maybe you can handle the cost of your first, but if you are paying for two or more, it simply does not make sense.

I will admit I have a negative connotation of “stay-at-home mom,” which is especially sad since my mom took time off work to raise three girls. I used to argue that since I do not remember being read to as a 3-year-old, or all of the other things she did for me, why didn’t she just keep working and pursue her own career goals?

How naive I was. Daycare and preschool do not come free or cheap and there is no doubt that the support my mom gave me in my younger years helped me get ahead of my peers when I did begin my education.

We may look at other time periods with disdain for how they treated their women, but most of the gender roles came out of biological necessity. For Israelite women in Biblical times, they spent most of their lives producing and raising children — if they were lucky enough to survive childbirth.

They raised the children because it was unsafe for them to be out in the fields while they were pregnant and once they did have a child, it was common for them to breastfeed until the child reached the age of 3.

What has changed is revolutionary: birth control. Because of birth control, we do not spend the majority of our lives having children. 

What has not changed is that the wealthier members of society can afford to have someone else raise their children for them in the form of nannies and daycare centers. Again, we can draw a parallel to Biblical times; well-to-do families could afford “wet nurses” to breastfeed their toddlers so that the woman of the house could give birth sooner or perform her other functions, many of which resembled those of a small-time business owner. 

As an NC State graduate, I have no doubt I will be in a better position to make choices when it comes to raising my children than most and I revel in the fact that women have gained more equality in the professional world. However, I have realized lately that what truly matters in life are the people in my life, especially my family.

And I may find I can’t have it all.