by Robin Romm
That was unlucky, but I was even less lucky in my next job. Though I had plenty going for me—my second book came out to critical acclaim and I’d started writing regularly for the New York Times Book Review and other places—there were startlingly few jobs. I landed only one: a tenure-track position at a far-flung university in the middle of a hostile desert. The department was embroiled in a battle over ego and position. The hostility felt alive, like the hallways were teeming with beasts. My partner Don and I couldn’t make the friends we’d always made everywhere. The impoverished city didn’t have the small luxuries we yearned for—bookstores, restaurants, ways to relax if things got hard. And it was at this point that I started to realize how badly I wanted a baby. Everyone around me waited until tenure to have them and I was thirty-four. I had three more years of tenure-clock ticking to wait out. Then I would be thirty-seven.
Eventually, with so much job misery plaguing us, Don and I threw caution to the wind and tried for that baby anyway. If I got pregnant before tenure, whatever. Maybe I’d still pull it all off, despite the fearful chatter of all the junior women I worked with.
But the baby didn’t come. We were both so deeply miserable, the kind of miserable that doesn’t fit in an essay, that is too dark and saturated and fucked up. My ambition had led us straight into a snake pit. We were barely getting along. Who am I kidding? We were not getting along. The job stress had put a crack right through our long relationship. Who could blame a baby for staying away?
It took a couple of years for that crisis to work itself out, but by thirty-seven, I’d left the job for a much less stable life of freelancing and teaching part time. Don and I reconciled. We moved first to Portland, then to Iowa City where Don got a fellowship. We lived in a darling house by a creek and I wrote and he taught and we fell back in love and ate big meals and hung out with our dog and made friends. My career looked nothing like I had wanted it to—that life of a professor teaching in a university with her pens and her papers and her purpose, but we had the happiness, time, and sanity to try again for a baby. My mother might have shaken her head at my formless days, but my mother had been dead almost ten years. Still, though, no baby came. The doctors bowed their heads. Thirty-seven, they said. Poor, misguided dear with her books and jobs and no baby.
I began fertility treatments back in Portland one year later. They failed. For two years, we cleaned out our savings. We spent any extra money we got on attempts. Over and over again, doctors explained to me, their voices soft and stern, as though talking to a wayward child, that my ovaries basically belonged in a nursing home, spitting out their geriatric eggs. My chances of success, every day, were diminishing.
When I was thirty-nine, we took the big financial leap and tried IVF. I floated on a sea of hope. My baby, my baby—what did it matter if I got to her on a raft of cold cash and colder doctors? If I got to her, it wouldn’t matter. But all the embryos were abnormal. Seventeen thousand dollars later, I was back where I started, but instead of hope-tinged desperation, I was filled with terrible, unending grief.
It turned out that it was not my age or my geriatric eggs causing our infertility. In fact, after years of feeling like my career had ruined my chances of motherhood, our problem turned out to be a rare genetic abnormality, unrelated to my eggs. How many times had my age been blamed and, covertly, my ambition? Thousands, it seemed. We made substantial adjustments to our plan. We got creative. Just after my fortieth birthday, fifteen weeks ago, I got pregnant through a more elaborate version of IVF.
When I got the voice mail with the blood test results, I was walking through downtown Portland during a break in the rain. December, the world out shopping. “You’re pregnant,” the voice mail message said. I began to laugh, the tears of relief hovering inside that laughter the way my tears often do. I collapsed against the brick wall of a building. A woman in a fake fur coat shot me a look like I was insane.
I had it all, didn’t I? Sure, I still mourned for that lost vision of myself as a professor teaching creativity with intelligence, deadpan grace, and warmth. But if you couldn’t have it all all the time, then you could have it all in moments, and I felt lucky.
Then, at thirteen weeks’ pregnant, I was offered yet another academic job, a one-year visiting appointment in Eugene, the city where I was born, two hours south of my home in Portland. I’d been wanting to return to a stable teaching job and had been eyeing this program for a few years; it had a solid reputation and was nestled in a familiar and beloved landscape near family. The catch, of course, was that the position began in September. This baby, my baby, my hard-won happiness catcher, was due August 31.
That really seemed impossible to pull off. What if the birth was hard? What if I had a cesarean? Who would I be right after her birth? Who would the baby be? I drove to the university and spoke with the chair, a man in his seventies in the traditional university attire: rumpled shirt and plastic glasses. I explained my concerns about the possibility of surgery, a hard labor, and he barely met my eyes. But he had three children, daughters, and though he seemed a little exhausted by the effort, he offered to move all the classroom teaching from the first quarter to the third. So, though I’d still have academic duties, I wouldn’t start the majority of the classroom teaching until the baby was four months old, and then, to make up that early modification, I’d need to teach a double course load when she was six months old. At that point, I’d be so frantic at work that I’d barely see her. But my potential cesarean scars would have healed.
What did I want to do? Did I want to teach and hope to make a good impression, to be able to compete for the very competitive full-time position that would open the following year? How much of the baby’s development would I miss, and would it affect her ability to form healthy attachments? I could afford to keep living the makeshift life I’d constructed. But the job would mean a year of security and benefits and a deeper sense of purpose. I would get to do what I felt I was meant to do all those years ago: teach creativity, while simultaneously having the blessing of actual creation in my arms. It involved compromise, but what in life didn’t?
I flew to New York for a trip I’d planned with the job offer in hand, uncertain how to proceed. On the plane, I sat next to a mother and father and their four-month-old baby. I watched the mother (who told me she had stopped working to stay home) nurse the baby, watched her kiss her head and coo. The baby nestled into her. The baby smiled at me. The baby grabbed my finger.
I can’t feel my baby yet, but she’s there in all the ultrasounds, the beginning of life. When the baby on the plane grabbed my finger, I felt a pull so intense, like God herself was in the air right around me, like my dead mother was hovering with all my grandmothers, with all the dead women I hail from. Could I leave a tiny baby to go teach for a chance, a tiny chance, of making it a career again? Could I leave a helpless baby, a baby I worked so hard to bring into this world, when all that the baby wanted was to be held and nursed by me?
“Take the job and put the baby in a childcare service,” said a friend of my father at dinner in New York, a man without kids.
“You should take the job,” said my father’s girlfriend. “I was a doctor full time when my kids were babies, and I don’t feel like I missed out on anything.” Nothing? I thought. Huh.
“You’ll go crazy staying at home with a baby all day,” said a friend.
“I wouldn’t do it,” said my friend Maud, the mother of two. She gave up a job as a therapist to stay home. Her kids are the most well-adjusted kids I know. “Those first years are precious. I mean, I see what people are saying—people put their kids with sitters every day and their kids are fine. But do you want that? I didn’t want that. It’s a personal choice—and obviously not everyone can make it. A lot of women have to work. But, I mean, if you can do something else that requires less moving, less commuting, less stress, I would.”
“That job sounds like hell, honestly,” said my friend, Dahlia, the mother of two. “The only job worth having
with small kids is a job that is flexible, where people fall in love with you and get the job to work for you.”
I couldn’t sleep. Night after night I lay in bed, staring into the dark. Should I take it? Should I let it go? Would they really give me a shot at the permanent position the following year if I excelled at the juggling act? Or was I just a convenient one-year fill-in who would get tossed out for a sexier candidate with a fancier book after I’d potentially missed out on major motherhood milestones? There wasn’t a way to know. Everyone really wanted me to come, said a young woman in the department. They had their fingers crossed.
Finally, I decided to send a note asking for reduced duties and reduced pay, a schedule that would be lighter and allow me to teach while also spending time with my baby. I still might miss her painfully when I was on campus, and we’d still need to live in some kind of temporary arrangement two hours from our house so I could make it all work. Don would need to compromise his work life to help pick up more slack. But I’d read Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg cautioned women to stop dropping out of their careers: “Career progression often depends upon taking risks and advocating for oneself—traits that girls are discouraged from exhibiting,” she wrote.
I crafted an email that explained what I was asking—a 75 percent appointment, fulfilling all the most important duties of the job, but avoiding that crazy, overloaded spring semester when my baby would be six months old. Why not ask? The worst thing they could do was say no, right?
You’d think a former civil rights investigator would be less naïve.
I received an email back asking if I would still do all the university service duties for the reduced pay (give a lecture, a reading, advise students, give exams), and noting that such a job might be categorized as just a hair over half time. I wrote back, saying that I would do the service duties, of course, but that I thought the job I proposed was 75 percent of the listed job and should be paid closer to that. “But let me know what you think,” I added. Also, I mentioned that my book on gender and ambition (this book) would come out in the spring of that teaching year. I suggested that it might be of interest to the larger academic community and be a nice perk for the department, and maybe even the deans, as universities always like it when faculty publish.
That night, a male professor on the search committee, a man about my age who’d been keen on hiring me before he found out that my pregnancy meant I might need adjustments to the workload, sent out an email. The email wasn’t supposed to go to me. It was yet another accidental reply all. It said:
I am not very encouraged at all by this email of hers. This is not really my sense of the person I thought we were dealing with. If I were in her position, I would realize that we are not dealing with a buffet. She cannot expect the salary to exactly track the amount that she wants to reduce the job. . . . It’s great she has a book—she told us that already. But she seems to suggest, by bringing it up in this way, that we should cut her a better deal because she has a book coming out—about gender issues . . .
I think we need to move on right away.
I felt ill. Of course, the department had the right to say no to my request for the ideal accommodation to nurse my newborn and balance my life. This is the United States, and, unfortunately, maternity has no protection under the law. But I wasn’t prepared for such hostility to go on behind my back simply because I requested what I felt would be a win-win. It felt like a joke, like a too-extreme example from Sheryl Sandberg’s book.
I wrote back, apologizing for being misunderstood—apologizing! Ugh. I’m embarrassed I did something so gendered, that I let myself be bullied into that behavior. I reiterated that I was only trying to find a way to make the job work with a newborn, that my motives were completely pure. I received a response from the author of the ugly email. The note had a cursory apology that ended: “I have some concern that with a new baby, a new book coming out, and maybe still teaching at [your part-time job], this job might be too much for you.”
It was so nice of him to help me see my limits, wasn’t it? It’s great when men do that.
Maybe it infuriated him that I advocated for a salary that matched the duties. But wouldn’t a man stick up for himself with regard to salary? Wasn’t that basic self-respect, Negotiation 101? I felt well within my rights. And why should asking for something—a pay reduction to spend time nursing and establishing a bond with my newborn while still maintaining most of the duties of the job—mean that my character got called into question? I wanted to do right by this baby, this baby I had worked for years to bring into the world, this Hail Mary pass. But I also wanted to work a meaningful job, doing one of the things I love best. I owed it to myself to try and make it work. That is all I had done, and yet there I was again, marveling at an awful email. This guy was in his forties. He wasn’t supposed to be a chauvinistic old fart. My young, plucky self had nothing to say to my older self; this dude wasn’t about to die.
These two emails from white men in positions of power happened about fifteen years apart in very different fields, but they both exposed the sexism many men—even educated, “feminist” men—feel toward women but wish not to say to them directly. Yeah, she’s good at her job, but it makes her less appealing. How dare she try and honor motherhood with a request for fewer duties and less pay? What does she think this world is, a buffet? She’s not the person we thought she was.
Well, who did they think I was? What was I supposed to be? A doormat?
No woman should be a doormat. And yet, to try and do well, to try and achieve—even to achieve balance is seen as suspicious behavior and opens women up to scorn and discomfort. That’s a sad reality. For all the work we’ve done, for all the education women have received, for all the degrees we’ve racked up and books we’ve published, no matter how polite and self-effacing our emails, we still wind up dealing with acres of crap.
Thanks to the powers of genetic testing, I happen to know that I am pregnant with a little girl. I don’t know who she will be become. My sole hope right now is that she will be born healthy with all of her brightness intact, that no ill befalls her before she can grow into a young woman. Will she have ambitions? Maybe. Will she be a mother? I can’t see the future. I want to be able to tell her that I did fight the fight toward making the world a place where women could thrive and be whole in all ways—as creative people, as smart people, as professional people, as activists, as mothers, as any combination of those things. I may not have won this fight for her. I may not have gotten it all right. My own mother fought, too. She made plenty of mistakes—sacrificed way too much, leaned in too far. And we both got burned along the way—several times.
But what choice do you have? You have to try and do the fulfilling things, all of them. You have to try and fend for yourself. You have to be strong but also openhearted, willing to take risks. And though I am tempted to curl up in a ball and obsess about how I might have played my cards differently, the truth is, I played my cards fine. The game is rigged, and not in women’s favor. But at least I tried to play.
Baby girl, if you want to play the game, any game involving your mind and talents, then I wish you the strength to withstand the bullshit that will sometimes come back at you. Because along with great rewards, there will inevitably be bullshit. I wish you the strength to dust yourself off and stare back, to understand that you did nothing wrong by aiming high, by taking risks. I wish you the courage to know the world is unfair and not to take it personally, but not to be complacent either. I hope that with your bravery and guts and gumption combined with the bravery and guts and gumption of all the women who came before you, we will make the roads for your daughter, if you choose to have one, a little less fraught.
Nature and Nurture
MARCIA CHATELAIN
Lately we have been having rousing conversations about the “nature vs. nurture” debate in my house. What makes us who we are? Are humans the sum total of cellular material and endless strands of DNA? Or, are we all simply blank canv
ases when we are born, stamped by how well we were cared for in our formative years and colored by our experiences?
My husband Mark and I don’t usually engage in such deep thinking at the dinner table, but it’s a new season in our life—we are in the waiting period of an adoption of two girls. A major part of our adoption preparation included parenting education classes, and the curriculum can take your mind and heart to a number of places. I’ve read about rare pediatric diseases on medical websites, with tears streaming down my face. I know of every food additive and preservative that exacerbates a child’s behavioral problems. I have become an Internet-credentialed child development expert on attachment disorders and discipline. When I can’t take any more worst-case scenarios, I have to soothe my anxiety borne out of overeducation via the parenthood dark Web. I turn to the fantasylands of the Internet, where I can put virtual pins on pictures of ironic onesies, mid-century modern baby furniture, and endless lists of parenting life hacks. Yet, regardless of how many articles I read or outfits I organize in online folders, I think about what my children will take from me—what is my nature and how was I nurtured?
Everything Mark and I have been or done or felt or seen feels like it needs to be named, processed, and categorized as either valuable for our future family or incompatible with being the parents we want to be. In this cataloging of who and what I am, I think about my ambition, and I wonder if its origins are subcutaneous or if it is rooted in my subconscious. I wonder if my drive—my relentlessness that has gotten me so far from where I started—is something that must be passed on, like the carefully crocheted baby blanket my husband’s grandmother made for us before she died. Then I worry if our accolades—the external proof of two ambitious souls in one marriage—will make our children feel stifled, unable to define themselves apart from Mark’s business success and my academic achievements. I again can’t keep thinking about all of it, so I retreat back to the comfort of articles that provide “26 Ideas for Traveling with Kids,” order some feminist storytime books, and I convince myself I’m just overthinking it again.
