Leaning out

11. March 2013 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

The Internet is abuzz about Sheryl Sandberg’s book and initiative Lean In. Critics are saying that her approach is unrealistic and supporters are saying that she’s right, women do need to step up more. I wonder if Sandberg has ever taken a Gender Studies class. If she has, then she would understand that all the leaning in in the world sometimes doesn’t get you to the top. And since when is the top the only goal. As someone in my last job once said, there aren’t enough of those spots to go around. If everyone in the organization wants to move up within the organization, then there’s going to be a lot of disappointment. That’s true more broadly. There’s a pyramid structure that exists in the work world. As far as I know, Sandberg hasn’t acknowledged that.

In the comments to a post by Penelope Trunk, someone called Sandberg’s book and books like it, career porn for women. I read The Feminist Mistake, and I’ll probably read this one just because I don’t like arguing against things I haven’t read. Many of the women I read on the Internet started out as career women. Some still are. Many, including myself, have shifted careers in order to balance their lives better. One thing I know in middle age that I didn’t know as a young woman is that neither the workplace nor the family structure have shifted enough to make an intense career plus family a real possibility for women. Nannies are often only possible after you’ve made it. Before that, you either take out a loan to pay for childcare or hope your partner can pick up the slack. If he’s in an intense career, that’s a nonstarter.

The workplace needs to shift before the family can. It needs to measure output not facetime, so that a parent can leave to manage a doctor’s appointment. It needs to allow that for men and women, so that women can ask their husbands to share the burden, knowing that it won’t harm his career (or hers, when it’s her turn). We need subsidized childcare so that women in their early careers, before the paycheck matches the hours worked, can put in the hours needed.

Alternatively, we need to place less value on work. I’m notorious for asking, “What do you do? ” to anyone I’ve just met. And despite having all kinds of anxiety of this question when I was in various states of transition over the years, I still ask it and still there’s at least some judgement. I’ll admit to being disappointed with friends who’ve stepped back from a career when I know we’ll that sometimes the sacrifices aren’t worth the paycheck. Part of me wants them to push for what they need to stay, but I know that often the organization will never give them anything because there’s someone without kids or with a stay at home parent standing behind them ready to take their job.

So maybe women need to work on some skills that will allow them to move up or take on more responsibilities (as if they don’t already have a lot) but we also need to examine our practices and prejudices to make things better for all of us in the workplace.

Weekly Update 3: Housework edition

16. June 2010 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

There have been many, many discussions around the interwebs about housework and being, specifically, a scientist.  Mostly, the discussion has centered around the idea that women more than men worry about balancing work and life, about an equal distribution of labor in the house, and therefore they write about it a lot and articles about work-life balance are often directed at them rather than men.  Janet, aka Dr. Free-Ride, has a nice collection of links as well as a write-up of her own.

I think about work-life balance a lot.  I think about housework way more than I should.  When I think about them, I recognize the cultural norms I’ve internalized that make me care about that stuff more than Mr. Geeky does. And while I’ve become more comfortable about bucking those norms, they’re still there nonetheless.  The shift to my being mostly in charge of the house, whether I actually do all the actual work or not, has been somewhat gradual, but is also an effect of two main things: 1) upbringing (both mine and Mr. Geeky’s) and 2) the job market.

In the area of upbringing, both of us have similar experiences.  Our mothers were responsible for keeping house and taking care of children.  In my upbringing, a couple of things happened that shifted my experience away from the typical gender labor distribution.  First, when I was born, my father was in law school and it was my mother who went off to work to support the family.  My father stayed home with me when I wasn’t being cared for by paid help or friends and relatives, which during the summers, was almost all day.  Though I couldn’t bring any of the details of that time to life now, almost 40 years later, it certainly had an impact on me.  Second, my mother hated housework so that, even once she quit her job (when I was about 7), she outsourced the housework immediately.  I have very few memories of her cleaning.  She did do all the cooking and grocery shopping, but she mostly enjoyed those jobs.  And my dad, in addition to the standard yard work and taking the garbage out, would often roam around the house cleaning up clutter.  In Mr. Geeky’s house, his dad didn’t do anything (as far as I know from what Mr. Geeky has told me) outside of the standard male chores: garbage, yard work, home repair.  He did spend plenty of time with the kids as did my dad, though my dad changed quite a few diapers while Mr. Geeky’s dad never did.

So Mr. Geeky, while being a feminist, had as his learned experience within a household, the idea that the woman does the housework and the man goes to work and takes out the garbage.  Intellectually, he knew this was not always a fair arrangement, but from a practical standpoint, his muscle memory doesn’t automatically move him to do the dishes or laundry.  That said, when we were a young couple without kids, we did almost everything together–cooked, cleaned up afterwards, laundry, cleaning when friends came over.  It was only when kids got added to the equation that the work load got redistributed, and that’s where the job market comes in.

Everyone knows the humanities job market sucks and that was the market I found myself entering about a year or so before we decided to have kids.  Almost before I could plan a career, my career died.  There were no jobs for me.   And while, as I’ve said many times before and it’s the story of many an academic woman, I could have gone off to another place to pursue a different career, I opted to maintain my relationship with Mr. Geeky, take “just a job” and play it by ear from there.  Partly, too, because my career fizzled out, I was sort of adrift trying to figure out what to do.  I didn’t have enough information about my future to make any good judgements.  Many of the conversations I see that say, well, you (woman) should have put your career first or on equal footing with your spouse’s.  Well, if you don’t have any idea what career you want to pursue, that’s kind of hard.  Like economics, many of the judgements people make about careers and relationships and work-life balance assume completely rational behavior.  I’m only now becoming slightly more rational.

Individual couples make all kinds of different arrangements to make dual income situations work.  It’s true that sometimes those arrangements place more burden on the women than the men.  In our house, I stress way more about the housework than Mr. Geeky does.  I’m certain that some of that is internalized norms about judging a woman by the state of her house.  It is what it is and we just have to figure out a way to manage that.  Currently, this whole FlyLady thing is really working.  It requires no more than an hour of my day.  Because things are more organized, it’s very easy for me to delegate work when I need to.  It seems corny, but it’s true.  When I started doing this, I told my family, but didn’t expect them to do much of anything to contribute unless I asked them.  Here’s what’s really helping:

  • I keep the sink shiny, which means no dishes in it.  And when your sink is shiny, you feel like the counters need to be, too.  It just happens.  Mr. Geeky and the kids do kitchen cleanup after I cook and I’ve noticed a real difference in the quality.  When it starts out nice, no one wants to mess it up.
  • Unload the dishwasher every morning.  I do this while waiting for my coffee to brew.  It takes five minutes.  It means that I can stick dishes that accumulate throughout the day in (so they’re not on the counters).  If I’m not around, it means the dishwasher is empty and awaiting dishes from dinner, cutting down the work the kids and Mr. Geeky have to do.
  • Put in a load of laundry every day.  I do this after I’ve showered, which I now do shortly after Geeky Boy does or when he leaves at 7.  I put the clothes in while my second cup of coffee brews.  So far, there’s only been one day out of 14 where I haven’t had a full load of laundry to put in.  That should tell you something about the amount of laundry we generate.  I’m also able to easily ask someone else to throw a load in.  It’s great not to be doing six loads on the weekend and feeling like a martyr.
  • Fold and put away a load of laundry every day.  I do this as I’m getting ready for bed or have one of the kids do it.  Again, not having to fold and put away 6 loads or more over the span of a day or two makes it seem much less burdensome.

While I’m doing most of these things myself right now, it’s not burdensome, and it’s easy to delegate.  Things I’d like to delegate in the future include grocery shopping and cooking.  From my past experience working full time, I know that there are some nights that I just don’t feel like cooking and though I don’t mind grocery shopping, it would be nice to alternate.  So my hope is that we can come up with a plan so that at least a couple of nights a week, someone else is cooking and that Mr. Geeky makes every other grocery trip.  Aside from that, I really feel like the housework is manageable.  I took this on because it’s me that suffers most when things are not in order.  It was something I wanted to do for myself and it’s spread to the rest of the family and I will keep spreading it until I feel like things are equitable.  Philosophically, everyone is way on board with all of this.  Do I wish that Mr. Geeky was as passionate about making sure the house runs smoothly as I am? Sometimes, but I’m happy that he doesn’t work ridiculous hours, spends a lot of time with me and the kids, and does a reasonable amount of work around the house.  Nothing is perfect.  We do the best we can and when things feel out of whack, we renegotiate–and I am usually the one who has to initiate that since it affects me more.

As several people mentioned in the posts around the blog world, attitudes surrounding parental leave and household chores really need to change before there will be real equity.  Society still looks at housework and childcare as women’s work and that makes men reluctant to take it up wholeheartedly, even men who are in many respects, feminists.  Those societal pressures are bigger than all of us.  Equal pay for women would go a long way to make it possible for people to outsource housework and childcare.  Flexible work schedules, too, without repercussions, would be helpful as well.  And those are things that can be done politically, both at the national and local level.  And if men don’t want to blog about these issues, they can certainly vote and serve on committees and generally advocate for change.

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The To-Stop List

27. April 2010 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Design Mind magazine’s latest issue is dedicated to work-life balance.  I haven’t read all the articles yet, but so far my favorite is Matthew May’s “Elegance and the Art of Less.”  Besides espousing my own theory that working more does not necessarily make one more productive (backed up by research in this article), it appeals to the artsy side of me by suggesting that paintings, novels, etc. are all better because of what those artists left out.  In fact, when I teach writing, the hardest thing to get students to do is to cut things.  I encourage them to cut entire paragraphs.  They shudder at the thought.  But I know it’s often for the best.  In my own writing, I’m a pretty ruthless cutter, even though I could always cut more.

So back to May’s less is more work-life balance theory.  He illustrates this idea with an assignment given by a professor to an overworked and stressed student:

Imagine that you’ve just inherited $20 million free and clear, but you only have 10 years to live. What would you do differently? Specifically, what would you stop doing?

So what would you stop doing? I think I’ve already stopped most things, though I would add some minor volunteer things to the list that have added to my stress rather than being fulfilling.  One thing I’d definitely add: stop feeling guilty!

One Size Does Not Fit All

19. April 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

One of the things that the comments on my last post made clear–as should reading anything about parenting and work–is that no one work situation works for everyone.  Some people thrive working at home.  Others need the activity and external motivation of an office setting.  Some need a combination of both.  Some people would be happy working part-time.  Others want a strict full time schedule of exactly 40 hours.  Others are willing to work much more.  And all of those people have different preferences for the specific hours they’d like to work.  And yet, most work places and certainly the general culture still wants to squeeze everyone into the 9-5, M-F box.

In one of the many conversations I’ve read on this topic lately, I recall someone saying that the reason jobs like teaching and nursing are primarily female is that their schedules are more flexible and conducive to a family schedule where children are in school.  And of course, many people try to wrangle a flexible schedule no matter what field they’re in.  Some are successful, but many more are not and are often not just unable to get the schedule they want but see their careers suffer just for having asked.  We need to get past this.  We’re a country that supposedly prides itself on some concept of individualism and yet, we continue to punish people who seek to be individuals.

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Working from Home

16. April 2010 · 7 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

On Motherlode today, Lisa Belkin raises the question of whether working from home really allows parents to spend more time with their kids.  I often tell people that I “work from home,” though that’s a bit misleading since none of the work I’m currently doing am I getting paid to do.  And, unfortunately, that means I let household chores and childcare take precedence over doing things that might actually earn me money.  But that’s been my choice and I’ve been keenly aware of it.  And sometimes, I do manage to crack down and do a lot of work.  The last two weeks have been like that for the most part.  Back when I worked full time, I often brought work home with me.  In theory, because I was staff and not faculty, I could shut down at 5 or 5:30 and not think about work again until 8:30 the next day.  After all, there were no classes to prep or grading to do.  Even before I added teaching to the mix, there always seemed to be things to catch up on. I would check email because I hadn’t been able to all day or I’d tweak a web site or check on a Blackboard account.  And that made me miserable.  At first I did those things because I was still interested, fascinated by my work and so I’d continue doing it when I got home.  But I think doing it eventually led me to burnout, and people started expecting me to be available 24/7.  And when I was available to them, I wasn’t available to my family.  It sucked all the way around.  I eventually instituted a no-checking email at home rule, to the point of even having to email people the next day and say, “I’m sorry I couldn’t respond/take care of your issue, but I don’t check email from home.”

Working at home is only the answer if you can draw the line between work time and family time.  And that’s hard to do for many people.  So what do you think?  Can we gain work-life balance by working more from home? Or are we kidding ourselves?

Speaking of going back to work

08. April 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Here’s a really interesting article in the WaPo about an over 50 lawyer’s struggle to find work after being out of full-time employment for 17 years.  It is both sobering and uplifting.

Work vs. Family

02. April 2010 · 6 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Laura at 11D points to a slate article about the “mommy-track,” which suggests that it’s not as stigmatized as it once was and that, in fact, it’s not always just moms or even just parents that seek flexible work.  The discussion at Laura’s centers around how much of choice the mommy track really is and about the financial stability of the family and the non-working parent.  I titled this work “vs.” family because I think that’s really what happens most of the time.  They’re in competition with each other for time and attention.  And work almost always wins, for a lot of reasons.  We need money to live off of.  In this economic climate, many people fear that taking time for family is a red flag that will get them fired.  And work, not family, is generally what’s valued by society.  So we’re drawn to more time into work for its financial and cultural rewards and out of fear of losing financial stability.

But the family needs time, too.  And it needs time in lots of different ways.  I laughed at one commenter who mentioned a woman taking off during the early years of her children’s lives and finding herself with not much to do once they’re in school, especially middle and high school.  Every new mom I talk to, I tell to work through those early years when there are more public services for kids–good daycare, afterschool programs, even care for the times when school randomly closes for in-service days.  In middle school all that ends, and the bigger fears begin: drugs, sex, the kinds of things that aren’t just worrisome but could literally ruin a kid’s life. Someone needs to be there to not only make sure kids avoid those things, but to help them navigate the broader social sphere of middle and high school, sometimes to just be a positive force in their lives.  I don’t think I’m being a helicopter parent here, just acknowledging that kids need guidance during these years and sometimes the best guidance comes from a parent.

And then there’s the other things that can happen.  A parent or other family member can get ill or die.   Family members might need other kinds of help–financial or emotional support, for example.  It’s just a good thing to be able to be there for a family member in need without having to worry about your job being taken away. In my own case, I’m the only child of divorced, aging parents.  And though I think it will be many years before I’m having to worry seriously about their health, anything could happen.

Mr. Geeky wants me to return to work within the next year or so to shore up our financial situation for the kids’ college education.  And I do want to work, but I need work to be flexible and it makes it hard to consider certain types of jobs.  Geeky Girl hits middle school next year and we’re headed into some major parts of high school life–driving and dating are soon to be a regular part of our lives.  We both need to be able to juggle the needs of our family and our work lives.  Mr. Geeky tries, but he has, as one commenter called it, a job that is a calling.  Literally, the work almost never ends for him.  Before I quit, I was on a similar track, but it was impossible for both of us to have our heads that much in our work and have our kids not suffering.  Maybe certain families can make that work, but we couldn’t.

There are certain careers I’d pursue–teaching in either high school or college, continuing technology consulting work, writing–that I think would be fun and interesting careers and could potentially offer me the flexibility I need, without, in most cases, my needing to even ask for it.  When I return, I plan to get more serious about generating an income.  But I need to find a way to do it without pitting work against family.

Labor, Stress, Leisure, and other thoughts

18. January 2010 · 6 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

I’ve been thinking about labor for the last couple of days as I’ve tried to settle into a routine where I can get my work done for my course, keep a couple of other balls in the air, take care of a household and children, and still find time for down time.  It feels lazy to say this, but I don’t like working all the time.  I’ve tried in my life to find work that doesn’t feel like work.  I feel completely lucky to have the education and skills to pursue that kind of work as opposed to resorting to manual labor (which may not feel like work to some people, but would to me).  For whatever reason, as I’ve gotten older, the pressure of work, even enjoyable work, leads to major stress.  Twice in the last couple of weeks, I’ve endured massive headaches brought on by stress, exacerbated by my TMJ condition, which was itself brought on by stress.  A vicious cycle, to be sure.  I hate that this happens and as I’ve said before, my energy is just gone when these things come on and I don’t feel like doing anything and then I feel guilty for that which stresses me out and thus we start all over again.

From a financial standpoint, we don’t need for me to have a fulltime paycheck for us to survive.  We’ve made enough cuts now and the little bit of extra income I’ve brought in and that Mr. Geeky has earned through grants and service activities have mitigated much of the gap that existed in our spending and income right after I quit.  But, of course, there are things like remodeling projects, travel, and the looming college education for the kids that have more than once raised the issue of my going back to work.  Not in a desperate, “omg, you have to find a job now kind of way,” but in a “well, if I went back to work . . .” kind of way.

And that brings me to another kind of labor, the labor of keeping up the house and taking care of the kids, a majority of which falls on my shoulders whether or not I’m working.  Added to the general stress of my former job in and of itself was the stress of trying to manage all the kids’ activities, keep up with laundry, keep the house relatively neat, cook meals, buy food for said meals, etc.  And this goes back to the “I don’t want to be working all the time statement.”  I get most stressed when I feel like that’s the case.  So, for example, I leave for work at 8:30, get home at 6:00, prepare a meal, supervise homework, mabye a break for tv or a game or something before having to supervise bedtime.  Yes, even with tweens and teens, we still have to make sure that the kids go to bed in a timely manner.  Because there’s so little time during the week, shopping, laundry and other housework fell to the weekend, meaning that a chunk of it was taken up with work.  And, often, Mr. Geeky does “paid” work–grades papers, does research, performs some kind of service–on the weekend.  I’ve read the academic blogs; I see you out there trying to say you’re not going to work on Saturday or Sunday.  You almost always fail.

All of my self-improvement projects also start to feel like work.  Exercise, decluttering, educational activities.  It’s enough to make you go crazy.   Tim Burke’s post about the declining value/open sourcing of cultural products gets at the heart of some of my dilemma:

If the 1950s-1990s were a highwater mark for the commodification of culture in the United States, it’s partly because they were also a highwater mark for the sequestration of leisure time from labor time. For the last three decades, working Americans have seen that leisure time slowly clawed back for the sake of work or for the sake of a productivist temperment even outside of work, towards a belief that the things we do should somehow always be generating value, towards a classically bourgeois construction of virtuous leisure. . . .

Productivism again reigns as a supreme bourgeois virtue. Time spent just listening or reading or viewing, if you can’t recuperate it as time getting educated or improved in some tangible way, is shameful time, not a shared triumph of the middle-class milieu.

Tim uses these points in a larger argument about why cultural products have lost their value.  In part, it’s because we don’t have time to engage with them.  And in part, it’s because there’s an attitude prevalent now that says if you spend an afternoon reading a book or catching up on The Wire, you’re wasting your time, maybe even “our” collective time.  Tim doesn’t mention this, but there is a kind of “omg, Americans aren’t making anything, aren’t as productive as we used to be; the Chinese are going to eat our lunch” panic out there.  As I recall, though, productivity has actually been on the rise.  Anyway, this is part of my problem.  My decision to work or not work, work part-time or full-time, spend time doing household work or writing that may or not pay off, spend time when most “normal” people are working playing video games or watching tv or reading a book is getting all caught up in this productivism mentality that I have internalized.  I keep thinking not about how I “should” be spending my time based on what’s best for me personally or my family, but thinking about how spending my time looks to the outside world.  (Go ahead, send in the psychoanalysts.) And honestly, my family, even my immediate family, are part of that outside world.  I feel the need to justify what I’ve done all day, detailing the laundry that’s been done, the writing that got done, how many hours I spend prepping for class.  And that’s not coming from them, believe me.  They never look at me weird if they come home and find me in front of the tv or playing WoW.

What I’ve been thinking about, then, is what labor and how much of it I really should be doing, not from a perspective of whether or not that labor “looks good” to the outside world, but from a perspective of what makes me feel good–and by good I mean, relaxed yet stimulated.  In other words, though I like my leisure time, I’m not one who enjoys spending all day every day doing nothing but leisure activities.  Even though it’s work, I like writing.  I’ve spent an hour writing this damn blog post and I have no idea where it falls on the work/leisure spectrum.  It feels like work, but it feels like leisure too because it’s not connected to a paying job.  Getting paid to do something alters my relationship to labor, of course.  If I followed my “feel good” argument to its logical conclusion, I wouldn’t evaluate my students’ assignments this afternoon.  Instead, I’d either engage in some other kind of unpaid labor or I’d use some of my leisure time.   And honestly, I get a good feeling about evaluating student work that has nothing to do with getting paid to do it.  It’s almost like a community service.  I feel like I’m helping them improve something about their lives, which will, in this case, pay off for education as a whole when they enter classrooms.

I honestly don’t know what my answer is to this dilemma.  I just know that I need to find something that works for me, and get over my anxiety about whether or not I’m working “enough.”  The funny thing about this whole dilemma is that it comes from my freedom.  If I had a full-time job, there’d be no real issue.  I’d just do the work that was necessary.  As I’ve said a million times, I like where I am, but I’m realizing it’s more challenging in many ways that it seemed at first.

Women and Children First

27. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

I was just reading through the comments on this IHE post about having kids or not in graduate school and one commenter says the following:

From my perspective, I find many (not all, not even most) of my female friends and my grad students can’t articulate what they want, what will help them navigate the difficult process of completing a PhD, landing a job and keeping it with a child or children in tow. For these people universities can never do enough, there’s always something more they need that will help more, that will be the magic bullet that makes it “easier” to have a child (never easy) and do their job. What I find among these women is an insufficient appreciation that everyone faces challenges about work/life balance.

She goes on to suggest that we all need to understand and appreciate work/life balance and work to make institutions appreciate that as well. The idea that there’s not enough support for parents is a common one looked upon quite often with resentment by those without children. “Suck it up,” is often the common response to the whining of mothers about how hard it is to juggle both raising a child and going to grad school or working. I’ve seen this so often lately that I’ve been trying to puzzle over why this is so common for women to feel this way or to have this perspective put on them. And I think I have part of an answer.

The default for women is still get married and have children. That’s what you’re “supposed” to do. Decades ago, that would have been it, the pinnacle of your life. Now, it’s still the default but with the added dictum that women can do that *and* pursue a career. Don’t worry, people say, your husband will pitch in, your workplace will be supportive, your colleagues will understand. When those things don’t happen, new mothers are often thrown for a loop. Too often, women don’t pay attention to the way other mothers are treated in the workplace. And that’s often not their fault since many mothers are often made invisible in the workplace. Having an honest conversation with a chair or a dean feels risky since there may then follow a stigma about one’s seriousness toward work. So a lot of moms find themselves with kids, without a plan because what they thought was going to happen didn’t. They’re left saying, “Now what?” and don’t know where to turn. And let’s face it, if we’re talking grad school, some people are young and idealistic and immature. Speaking even for myself, one doesn’t always make the best decisions when you’re young and idealistic.

I had my first child while working a corporate job that I took to fund my husband’s grad school education. We decided to have a child because my job had insurance that would cover much of the cost of having a kid (though it didn’t cover it all), which we didn’t have as grad students. I had my second in grad school, so I completed a master’s and (eventually) a Ph.D. with two kids. In fact, what postponed my Ph.D. was not my kids but my husband, who left his job and dragged me across the country. There was nothing we could have done about the timing of that. But I had some advantages that some people may not:

  • Income. Mr. Geeky had a real job that paid for the majority of our needs, including full-time daycare for both kids. I don’t recommend having a kid when you’re *both* in grad school unless you’ve got family or something that can substitute for what may be costly daycare.
  • Flexible schedules. Both Mr. Geeky and I had flexible schedules. If a kid got sick or their school was closed, we could usually manage juggling. We made this even more flexible by making sure that our class schedules did not conflict. If I got a MWF class, Mr. Geeky made sure his were on TTh.
  • Other mothers in the department. I shared an office with a women who had a preschooler. She had breastfed as well, so she was very supportive of my doing so and gave me plenty of advice, both about parenting and about jugging life as a grad student.
  • Supportive faculty. Everyone just assumed I would continue working as I had before. No one thought I was less serious than before I had my second child. In part, I think this was because they knew I had another kid at home that hadn’t slowed me down.
  • Less intense program. I think it’s fair to say that the program I was in, while good in its own way, was not in the top 10 programs in the country. I knew this going in, and I didn’t choose it for that reason, but it was definitely helpful to not be in the kind of program that was a hothouse of competition.
  • Affordable daycare. My kids only overlapped daycare for one year, so that was the most expensive year and even that year only cost us about $700/month. After that, we paid around $400/month.

Things really got tough for me after we moved here when the cost of daycare skyrocketed to $1000/month for one kid. I needed to work part time to cover those costs, often with a 1/2 hour to 45 minute commute, which cut into my time to work on my dissertation (as did the grading and class prep). Had our daycare costs been cheaper or non-existent, I might have been able to forgo the jobs and finish sooner. I’m actually glad in a way that that didn’t happen as I liked the dissertation I ended up with better than the one I started on. (I switched topics and advisers).

I think there are so many unknowns both in grad school and when having children that it’s very easy to find yourself in the weeds quite quickly. I think women should assess their own situations and do what’s necessary to make the balance work. I dropped a class in the fall after my daughter was born. I worked very intensely from 9-5, trying my best not to have anything to do in the evenings, which were often unpredictable in the early months. That year is certainly a blur to me in many ways and I remember when I got my first full night of sleep six months after my daughter was born, I was amazed that I’d been able to function at all. I felt so amazingly good after that, I couldn’t believe what a walking zombie I’d been before that.

In many ways, I did “suck it up,” but I was able to, in part, because of the support I felt surrounded by. No one said that I seemed like a zombie all those months. And most grad students are surviving on little sleep anyway. I never tried to make my own lack of sleep a special case, never asked for extensions, trying to plan papers well in advance. But had I really needed one, I knew I could ask for one without any repercussions. And that’s where I think institutions can do something. Because it’s often the attitudes, not the policies that get in the way. So parents can try to anticipate what parenting is going to be like and put support networks in place beforehand, but institutions can try to make sure some of those are there as well. Faculty and student parent groups might be helpful. Childcare benefits are good. But fostering a general attitude that parents are perfectly capable of graduate work can go even further than many official policies.

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On Schedules and Projects

21. September 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Last week, Laura at 11D had a minor identity breakdown. Vast stretches of time lay before her with no clear path of what she was supposed to fill them with. I can totally relate.

So, I have a business and I do want that to possibly be successful. Just this morning, I came up with a potential project that might work well for it. For a while there, I was spending time on something to do with the business every day. Now, though, it’s gone to the back burner. With this new idea, it might move back up again.

In addition to the business, however, I’m also working on a book project, something I started years ago, but which I’m hauling back out again. I’ve pretty much thrown out what I started with except the core of an idea and have been working away at it every day for the last two weeks. I’ve spent at least an hour every day on it and sometimes two. I was feeling bad about this lack of productivity. Shouldn’t I work for 4 hours, 6 hours? So I Googled for information about the writing habits of famous authors. It’s all over the map. Some authors go for a word count, some work in a certain amount of time (anywhere from just minutes to all day, with the average probably 2-3 hours). It kind of gave me the idea to go with my gut, and my gut says I’m doing okay, though I should probably aim for at least three hours. And yes, you can laugh at me for trying to compare my work habits to people like Stephen King and Dan Brown. Dan Brown writes all the time, even on holidays. If my book gets made into a movie, maybe I’ll do that too, but for now, no way.

And then there’s the walking piece. I’m up to walking 3 miles a day, which takes about 1.5 hours. I’m walking mid-afternoon, which is a good time, both for my schedule, and for the weather, as it’s usually quite warm and pleasant by then. I have to be back by 4 since that’s when child number one gets home.

In theory I could put in another hour of work of some kind after that, but that would put me, believe it or not, over an 8-hour day.

If the business picks up, what will likely go is housework, which has got to be the most boring thing ever invented, but at the same time seems more pressing than anything else and its neglect gets noticed more than anything else.

So I’ve settled into a routine that gives my days a shape and a purpose that I’m happy with for now. The nice thing is that it can shift as necessary, though I must admit, that as it does, I can feel the identity shifting with it. Funny how that works.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure
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