As a follow-up…

As a follow-up to a recent post I wrote about breastfeeding while at an academic conference, I was pleasantly surprised to see this in my inbox today:

“amalgamating parental and work responsibilities in the workplace: one recommended reading”

Imagine my surprise when I read that New York (state) requires that designated pumping areas cannot be restrooms.

The fact that no-restroom-lactation rooms has to be legislated–AND that it is only legislated in one state–is an (imperfect) indicator of just how far we have to go. Hopefully, pieces such as the recommended reading (above) will facilitate awareness of how US society places stringent demands on newborn mothers’ bodies (you should really breastfeed for the entire first year….) while also making it extremely difficult for working newborn mothers to comply with these demands.

A conference, an electric breastmilk pump, and me

This whole post feels like it’s going to be an “A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar” joke. Fair warning.

Last week, I went to my first academic conference since Baby was born. I was very much looking forward to giving my presentation and doing a little bit of networking, as I’m getting to the point in my graduate career when that is supposed to happen. I was also looking forward to catching up on some sleeping and thinking. As it turned out, I got a bad cold the night I arrived, which did a number on both sleeping and thinking, but at least I got to present a paper and, yes, do a little networking.

But this post is not about any of those things. This post is about how awkward and ridiculous the process of pumping breastmilk was while I was in attendance at the conference.

On Writing Draft Emails to Your Advisor at 5:00 in the Morning

It’s been almost two months of a series of two colds, then a double ear infection, then getting in a rut of waking up in the middle of the night for my little guy. Simultaneously, I have started my dissertation data collection (or at least tried).

This ‘morning’, when Baby woke up, again, at 4:15am and did not fall back asleep until around 5:30am, something inside me snapped. Exhaustion – full physical and mental exhaustion – finally caught up to me. It became impossible for me to see how I could carry out the level of thinking required to finish a quality dissertation while also being a mom. I also could not fall back asleep because I was so fatigued. Instead, I wrote a draft email to my advisor (which I did not, and will not, send him). I share it with you to illustrate what the phrase “wit’s end” actually means:

Separation

My intentions of writing more regularly have already come to naught. But it’s okay. I forgive myself.

Since I last wrote, I’ve done several things I never thought I would do as an academic-mom.

For example:

I changed my baby’s diaper on my office desk. Yes. That’s right. Why, you ask? Because the bathroom on my hall at my elite university does not have a diaper changing station. This is not something I ever noticed until, well, my baby’s diaper needed to be changed.

It went worse than expected, but he ended up with a clean diaper and a mostly clean bum. {And don’t worry, beloved undergrad research assistant who occasionally uses my office- I scoured the desk afterwards. In case you happen to be reading this.}

Reflections on Peer Review, 1

From the moment I started grad school, I and my student colleagues were repeatedly told that it is really important to be a good (upstanding, well-liked, respected) academic and that part of this process means being a good reviewer. In other words, if a journal editor emails you and asks you to blind review piece X, then unless you have no familiarity with the subject matter (which is highly unlikely since the editor emailed you), are completely unequipped to evaluate the methods, or have a conflict of interest (e.g. you know who wrote the paper and can’t evaluate it objectively), you should say, cheerfully, ‘Yes!’ And then you should follow through with your yes.

Blind reviewing some other scholar’s work is not required to get a PhD. It pays you nothing and, depending on how new you are to the whole review process, can take quite a bit of time. However, the argument goes, if you do a good job reviewing others’ work, you will make a good impression on editors in addition to doing the field a service. Yay for us! Being all helpful and stuff.

But the peer review process is notoriously difficult from an author’s perspective; a handful of journals in my discipline have a good reputation for timely feedback (as in, they give you a verdict within 4 months, or at least when they say they will), while many journals have a mediocre reputation at best for providing feedback…eventually. This may not be so bad for people who already have tenure, but it really, really sucks for people who don’t have tenure yet (assistant professors and grad students).

The Birth Story

There’s a whole movement these days for women to record their birth stories. No two births are the same, and somehow recording the experience is seen to be both helpful for other women and therapeutic for the (healing) new mother.

My whole idea about delivering a baby, prior to getting pregnant and in the earliest weeks of my pregnancy, was that it was an excruciating process in which one lost one’s control over one’s body. This sounded like something I wanted to avoid at all costs. So, on the very first visit to my ob/gyn, who is an amazing doctor and mother, I told her I would like to go ahead and schedule a C-section a few days before my due date. I had a schedule I needed to stick to, and unknowns about labor and delivery did not fit into that (academic) schedule. Please, and thank you.

She looked at me, then at my partner, who said, ‘She has some control issues.’ This was fair and true.

An Introduction, or Some Reasons Why I Started This Blog

Currently, I am a PhD student in a social science department at a prestigious private university. This means, among other things, that there are high expectations for my ability to not only complete my degree but also to land a respectable tenure-track job at a known (as opposed to unknown) university. These are expectations that I have embraced as my own, in a job climate that is less-than-favorable.

As you probably know, to complete a PhD requires more than smarts. It requires lots and lots of grit–determination, stubbornness, sacrifice. It requires putting one’s social life basically on hold for long stretches of time. In some senses, it demands a form of worship–as in, this is a sacred calling and thus you should put it before everything else.

To land a job (as described above) requires this, and much more: a well-padded CV in which peer-reviewed publications feature prominently.

In the midst of all of this doing/studying/working/writing/researching/publishing–all this ambition that I was channeling to be a force for social good–I found out I was pregnant. Let me be clear: my son (we’ll call him ‘John’) was not an ‘accident.’ I was fully on board with the idea of being a mom in pursuit of an academic career. But once It (pregnancy) actually happened, once It became a flesh-and-blood reality, I panicked.