~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I have a lot of friends who’ve stepped back — stopped working while their children were small, or moved into a less demanding role. One of the most insensitive things said to them, repeatedly, is: “Why are you wasting your degree?”
Anyone saying that should stop and consider what it actually means.
Three assumptions hiding in that question
That a degree is only justified by paid work. Education isn’t a machine you feed money into and extract salary from. It changes how you think, how you argue, what you notice, how you raise children and how you run anything at all. None of that switches off when you leave a payroll.
That the decision was casual. People step back for all sorts of reasons: a child who needs more, a parent who’s failing, health, cost of childcare, a partner’s job, or simply preferring it. Most of those reasons are nobody else’s business, and most were arrived at after considerable thought.
That there’s one correct path. There isn’t, and the question implies there is.
Life goes other ways
This is the part I’ve come to believe most firmly. Life goes in directions other than the ones we want, or the ones we assumed it would.
People plan careers in their twenties based on a version of their life that doesn’t arrive. Then a parent gets sick, or a child needs something unexpected, or an industry changes, or they simply discover they want something different. Adjusting isn’t failure. It’s the normal experience of being a person.
Someone asked me this week whether I felt guilty about how my own path has gone — the turns, the businesses started and sold, the years spent on things that weren’t the plan.
I don’t. Truly, not at all.
Women need to stop feeling guilty about this
And men do too, though they’re asked about it less.
The guilt is manufactured. It comes from an unwritten scoreboard that says your worth is your job title, and anything else is a diminishment. That scoreboard is wrong, and it’s remarkable how many capable people organise their sense of themselves around it.
Women get judged for working and judged for not working. The only escape is to stop treating the judgement as information.
For the record
Nobody wastes an education. They use it on the life they actually have — which might be a company, a community, a classroom, a household, a board, or all of those at different times.
If you’ve stepped back, you haven’t wasted anything. And if someone asks you that question, “it’s working well for us, thank you” is a complete answer.
You don’t owe anyone the reasoning.
