Mama, PhD

The title of this post comes from a book that came out a few years ago that I read both with interest and with a fair amount of annoyance.  It's a discussion of/by mothers who are also PhDs, and what struck me at the time was how many of them chose not to pursue academic careers, or, more generally, who saw academe and motherhood as incompatible.  When I think about my own grad school cohort, I know of very few who have the trifecta of kid, book, and t-t employment.  I can think of women who chose to follow spouses straight out of school, and I can think of women who put off childbearing until it was too late.  (Of course, I don't know how many in my entering class actually wanted kids, but I can think of multiple women for whom fertility became a major issue.)  There's a lot of stuff here that involves personal choice as well as the academic job market, partnership, and so forth that I don't want to get into at length (at least not in this post).

But as I'm coming off maternity leave (ack!) and as I just read a great post at Dr. Crazy's (http://reassignedtime.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/on-forgetting-to-have-babies/), I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a productive, balanced academic mother.  I'm not talking about those women who chose to go back to work two weeks after giving birth and put their kids in full time daycare immediately and basically chose not to raise them (many disclaimers:  I do realize that depending on one's work situation, this might be the only option, as if one is a grad student, has no maternity leave, etc).  Nor am I talking about those women who decided to ignore their PhDs and become SAHMs (though, again, that can be either by chance or by choice).

In many ways, I'm an odd duck, so to speak, as I chose single motherhood not as a desperate my-clock-is-ticking measure but actively, at 27 (well, I made the decision at 27, acted on it at 29, and had LG at 31).  Then I left a "family friendly" job at a SLAC for my current R1 position (better living situation, closer to family) and spent the first three years overwhelmed with the demands of the job.  I'd planned on having kids 4-5 years apart and spent LG's fourth year wondering if I'd actually go through with it, as my third year review left me demolished (it was a good outcome, but the process was completely demoralizing and stressful).  Then the review was over and I found some semblance of balance and decided to fuck it all up by undergoing fertility treatment (and thus the story of Something Remarkable begins).  Gosh, this is a long set up.  Anyhoo...

Here I am, with Tiny Boy going on an hour asleep, typing frantically, wondering what things will be like when I'm really back at work.  Like, in the classroom full-time.  A single mother to two kids?  When will I get my work done?  Will I sleep?  And what do I actually want my career to look like, now that Tiny Boy and tenure lined up so neatly (not, I'll remind you, what I wanted--if my uterus hadn't rejected the baby I conceived in a relatively timely fashion, I'd have a two-year-old--but professionally it does have its advantages)?  While these are personal questions about my priorities and qualities of life issues, I do think there's a bigger conversation that needs to happen (not just in the blogosphere) about what it means to be an academic mother and to do both successfully and be sane throughout the process.  I don't want to be like my senior colleagues who stalled out at the associate level because they had their post-tenure kid and then became saddled with both motherhood and service/administration and didn't write anymore.  But after spending something in the vicinity of 60K to have Tiny Boy, I'm not really inclined to stick him in daycare any sooner than I absolutely need to.  I'd like to mother him, even if I have no desire (not to mention the finances) to become a SAHM.  And that might mean it will be another few years before I teach a grad class, as ours are exclusively taught in the evening, and I'd like to have dinner with and put my kids to bed.  And there are many other choices, small and large, that I will need to think through, now that I have the luxury (and believe me, I am grateful beyond words to have the job I do in this economic climate) to do so.

Squawking boy.  It's milk time, folks.