For better or worse, I think I’ve become a legend in my department amongst graduate students. I’m in my 7th year of a graduate program. I met my husband a week or two before it started and we were married the following summer, while I was preparing for my comprehensive exams. If that wasn’t enough of a whirlwind, I’ve now had two children as I’ve navigated my way through oral exams, research, dissertation writing and teaching. No wonder I’m tired!
I submitted final grades the morning my first was born and I was back teaching two weeks later. I will forever be grateful that she came the first day of spring break. My adviser taught my class the first week, but I didn’t feel like I could ask her to do it again week two, even though my body really needed a few more days to recover. (Later, I found out she would have been willing, if she had known. She has since designed our university’s TA maternity leave policy.) I only taught once a week and I brought my daughter to campus for office hours. That summer I passed my oral exams. My second daughter was born at the start of a fellowship year two and a half years later. I worked until the day she came and then took most the first quarter off. I am very pleased to be in graduate school, and also to have chosen to have a family now. These decisions seem to be at odds with each other often, and finding a way to reconcile them has not been easy.
When pregnant with my first child, I ran into another student, who was graduating. She and I had never before met, but she was so emphatic about being willing to share her experience of having a baby during our program that I ended up emailing her a long list of questions. Her very thoughtful responses helped me make some important decisions about how I was going to allocate my time once I had a child. I remember her writing very bluntly that the choice to have a baby and stay active in her program had negative consequences on her health and her marriage relationship. What her comments really did for me was to force me to see that I was going to have to prioritize. And here is roughly what I decided:
- My family relationships
- My health and that of my family
- My work
- Housekeeping
The honest truth is that my work has suffered because I have finite time and energy and capabilities. I am not willing to have my marriage or my relationship with my girls come behind my commitment to work. My husband is very supportive of my academic pursuits and a very engaged father. I enjoy time with my family and find satisfaction in doing many of the everyday things with my kids that mothering involves like going to the park with them, or putting on dance shows in the afternoons. I’m fantasizing right now about taking time off this summer and spending every morning at the beach with my girls. On the health front, I spend a lot of energy shopping for and preparing food to keep us all going, and it has to be an extreme situation for me to sacrifice sleep in order to work. I’m one of those people who needs a solid 7-8 hours a night. I don’t work well at night (I fall asleep if I try to read for school after 8pm) and my kids are up in the 6am hour.
I do work hard at school. The quality of my work is still high, but the scope of what I am able to do is limited. I haven’t played the game as well as I should have, or could have if I had different priorities. I am not able to go to all the talks and events I want to that are related to my work and research. These decisions will impact the kind of job I will get after graduation. Certainly, I’m mastering how to get a lot done in the two days a week I work, but still, I only work two days a week, with Saturdays thrown in when needed (lately, quite often).
Graduate school is a strange place of collegiality and competition, since the people you know the best are hoping for the same fellowships, awards, honors, and eventually jobs. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m not on the same schedule as my colleagues and I only need to compete with myself, not with them. But, this is difficult for a chronic over-achiever. And there aren’t any prestigious awards to honor women who are simultaneously mothers and scholars. I recently had to make the decision to take another year to finish my program, which means I’ll be the last of my cohort to graduate. In the face of sprinting to the finish that may have been possible (but most definitely would have involved a massive increase in hours away from my kids and ended with me in poor physical and mental health), I was very relieved to learn that I did have the possibility of extending another year. It may be the best choice for me not only to finish with a stronger dissertation, but also to position myself on the job market. It was clearly the best choice to match my priorities.
When I was contemplating becoming a mother while in graduate school, I talked with a professor who had small children. She gave me the advice that I often share with other women: “There is no good time for a professional woman to have a baby. Figure out what works best for you and your husband and work around that.” What I try to add to that advice is a conversation about not being able to do everything the way you could before kids. Priorities are necessary, and something will suffer or give. For me, what gives is the attention and depth I’d like to give to my work. I don’t consider that a good thing or a bad thing, just the reality of the priorities I’ve set playing out as I try to juggle the extraordinary experience of parenthood with the other exciting and demanding aspects of my life.
-Submitted by Laura Redford
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I really enjoyed reading your perspective, Laura. One thing that struck me is that the focus on each priority can shift around a bit within the couple if both have some flexibility in their work. For example, I spent a lot of time with our son the first year he was born. Later a research opportunity came up for me, and we shifted so that my husband was spending more time with our son than I was. This kind of flexibility is a great thing when you can get it, and really can make a difference in each partner’s involvement in educational and career opportunities. However, I realize that this is not always feasible, so in some cases families just have to do the best they can with what they have.
Remember that many of your collegues are going to go through the same thing but only when they are on the tenure clock. Many of the professors in my program are recommending to married women in the program it have their kids in grad school where they will be more flexible with their time and their is no clocks. Quality of disseratation and showing the ability to publish are far more important than time in program.