In December of 2004 I was invited, by a senior tenured colleague at my department, to her annual holiday party. I had only taught one semester, and felt that my inclusion was a real sign that I was becoming somebody. My colleague good-naturedly penned the words “Bring your family!” at the bottom of the invitation, and so I did.
My daughter was 11 months old at the time, my son was 4 years old. My husband, also a professor, came, too. The house was beautifully decorated—I think appointed is the right word—and the Christmas tree was hung with what appeared to be hand-blown glass ornaments. Collectibles from around the world were tastefully displayed, and the guests were a well-traveled and fascinating lot. I would have loved to have spent hours mingling and talking with any number of them. Although my husband tried valiantly to stem our daughter’s destructive tide, I found it impossible to engage in any of the many conversations around me. But what sticks in my mind most about that holiday party is what the hostess—my colleague—said to me as we left. She hugged me briefly at the door, took my hand in hers, and shook it firmly. She urged me to “keep up with my job” by publishing and writing, and then said, squeezing my hand for extra emphasis, “don’t get too caught up in that mommy thing.”
And there it was. She had reduced my frustrating daily struggle between professional self and mothering self into one short phrase: that mommy thing. No matter how I look at it, my professional life and my life as a mother continue to run side by side, parallel in that tired old metaphorical way: two roads running together, and there I am on both, jumping and dashing from one to the other, always out of breath. If someone had told me when I entered graduate school in 1996 that I would still be working on my dissertation some 10 years later, through the pregnancies and births of two children, relocation to another state, and the first two years of a full-time teaching job, I think I would have crumpled up in disbelief right then and there.
When I was a graduate student I never felt the need to justify my desire to be a mother. My research at the time (on popular culture, women, and the history of childbirth and reproductive technology), jibed well with my own developing urge to get pregnant—to have a baby. I had a few graduate school friends who were newly married and also contemplating motherhood, and in the sheltered bubble of graduate school, I felt I could do it all. When I did become pregnant with my son (now six) I felt so proud sitting in the library, or heading off to teach a class, with my belly gently swelling under my sweater. I distinctly remember teaching a creative writing class the spring before his birth and feeling the flutters and rolls inside while I paced around the room. At home I would sit at the table in our eat-in kitchen, next to a towering stack of virtually unknown plays and novels by Upton Sinclair, my very pregnant belly pushing against the table’s edge while I read, took notes, and tried fervently to get as much of my dissertation done as possible before the due date.
After my son’s birth, I moved from pregnant graduate student to working mom. I taught one class and managed the college writing center on campus, a job which let me bring my son to work. As I learned quickly, separating my professional self from my mothering self was almost impossible to do. I also learned quickly that the academic world offers only an illusion of flexibility for women who wish to work in it and be mothers. Academia is a rat race like any other, with its own pecking orders and politics; women who are also mothers often become collateral damage in department disputes.
When my husband landed a tenure-track job at a small private college in North Carolina I had to redefine myself again. I was no longer any of the things I used to be: a teaching assistant, or a first year composition instructor, or the student manager for the writing program at my doctoral university. I was still a mother—that was a comforting constant—but I became a trailing spouse, a label I didn’t know existed when I was a trailing spouse. The academic side of myself proceeded to go dormant for about a year while I took care of our son, helped us all adjust to the move, tinkered (not very productively) with my dissertation, and slowly realized that I longed for something else, too—I longed to be back inside a classroom again, working with students, and being a part of the world in which I felt so comfortable.
In some ways I have successfully negotiated the divide between motherhood and a professional life in academia, yet in other ways I have not. I am one of the lucky few who hit the lottery twice: I not only moved into a full-time teaching position from an adjunct job, but also did so as a candidate with no dissertation in hand—yet. Some days I tell myself proudly that I have broken the mold, that I am successfully negotiating a career in academia while not compromising my family life, that I am teaching my children that a woman can be a scholar, a writer, a teacher, and a mother, too. Other times, though, I am caught in that classic working woman’s bind: I feel spread too thin, as if I can’t excel professionally or, sometimes, personally. The demands I place on myself, and the demands I feel from others, close in on me, especially on the days when I just haven’t had enough time to be a mom, a teacher, a counselor, a wife, a scholar, and, well . . . me.
My husband’s and my lives are unusually hectic, in large part because we “tag-team parent”—a phrase we coined early in our graduate school days, when we’d pass off our son at the bus stop like a baton. Six years later we continue our kid exchanges: Three days a week I race out of class at one o’clock and meet my husband in the parking lot of the college where he teaches. Then he’s off to classes while I move quickly from papers, students, and class plans to my daughter’s world of Franklin and an afternoon in the sandbox. The wonderful upside, of course, is that we both get to share in the parenting; our marriage exemplifies teamwork at its best, for otherwise things would rapidly fall apart. The downside is this type of schedule is difficult to justify to colleagues and is emotionally and physically exhausting. Juggling teaching schedules, meetings, and the needs of two children—all with little outside help—requires a strict amount of planning and can accommodate very few fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants changes.
Although I am in a small department in a small school, I still get late e-mails with last-minute summonses to impromptu department or division meetings, invariably at times when I simply cannot attend. Then I become the difficult colleague, the one who is constantly vetoing times suitable for everyone else because . . . well, I imagine the frustrated sighs between colleagues: “She has to pick up her son at car pool.” When the dreaded course-calendar time of the semester arrives, I hold my breath and steel myself for the battles I must fight to keep the schedule I both like and need. In the almost three years I’ve been teaching full time I’ve fielded the whole range of comments from colleagues, from references to paying one’s dues to “Why can’t you just find a day-care provider?” I’ve had to listen to stories from older faculty women who had to make great sacrifices in the family department in order to rise up the academic ladder, and I’ve felt incredibly guilty that my husband and I have managed to keep it all together. But inside I also rage at these comments, for I know that my job is one I can—and should—be able to do regardless of whether or not I choose to also devote myself to that mommy thing.
I’ve often thought back to that comment my colleague made that December evening. I have shelved it away in my psyche and pulled it out over and over again when I feel angry or vulnerable about my job and my professional capabilities. Yet I turn to the comment as a sort of affirmation of myself, of who I am and what makes me feel whole and happy. That mommy thing is really what I am about. Motherhood has affected everything I do, professionally and personally, and not getting caught up in it would be not only impossible, but damaging—to my job, my writing, and my life. And I remain eternally grateful to my colleague for helping me see it this way.
Alissa McElreath ’99 (MA) is a writer and teacher in Raleigh, N.C. This essay is adapted from one she wrote for Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. © 2008 by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. Reprinted with permission of Rutgers University Press.
