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The Gen X 'stay at home mom' crisis is real, but what's the solution?

Some moms in their 40s feel like they were lied to about what their "resume gap" would mean.

40-something moms who stayed home to be with their kids are finding themselves in uncharted waters.

A few generations ago, parents had pretty clearly defined roles, with the dad generally being the breadwinner and the mom being the homemaker/stay-at-home mother. Then women's rights movement came along, empowering women in the workplace, ushering in the era of two working parents and producing an entire generation of "latchkey kids."

Now those Gen X latchkey kids are parenting Gen Z, with the pendulum of working motherhood having swung somewhat to the middle. We were raised to believe we could be anything we dreamed of being and that we didn't have to choose between being a mom and having a career. Gen X also became mothers during the heyday of parenting self-help books that impressed upon us the importance of attachment and hands-on childrearing, as well as the era of super-scheduled kids, whose activities alone require a full-time manager.

As a result, those of us in our 40s have raised our kids straddling two worlds—the one where women can have all of the career success we desire and the one where we can choose to be stay-at-home moms who do all the things. At first, we were told we could have it all, but when the impossibility of that became clear, we were told, "Well, you can have it all, just not at the same time."

But as many moms are finding as their kids start leaving the nest, even that isn't the full truth.

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What happens when you have a childhood dream to be a writer, but your test scores tell you it's not in the cards?

For Alexandra Penfold, she became a writer anyway — and a successful one at that. Penfold is a literary agent and the author of children's books like "All Are Welcome" and "We Are Brothers, We Are Friends."

In a viral tweet, Penfold shared an image of a self-evaluation she wrote in fourth grade. In scrawling cursive penmanship, it reads: "Writing. I love to write and I hope to become an athor [sic] someday."

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Barbie's had a multitude of jobs in her lifetime. Her latest career is inspiring kids to dream of a future in STEM.

She's been an architect and a teacher. She's been a firefighter, a lifeguard, and a presidential candidate. She's even been a Canadian Mountie.

But there's one thing that Barbie hasn't been — a robotics engineer. Mattel's newest doll is changing all that.

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Rudy Giuliani, personal lawyer to President Donald Trump, went off on Stormy Daniels in a recent interview.

Appearing at a summit in Tel Aviv, Israel, on June 6, the former mayor of New York City fielded a question about Daniels by saying she's not a credible person and suggesting she's lying about having had an affair with Trump.

"Because the business you were in entitles you to no degree of giving your credibility any weight," he says, referencing her work as an actress in adult films. "I'm sorry, I don't respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who ... isn't going to sell her body for sexual exploitation."

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