by Robin Romm
She gazes at me quietly, steadily, as she leans back in her swivel chair.
I force myself to be silent for a moment, and try again. “I know. I just need to get it done.” I try to put together a collegial smile, which she kindly returns.
As an eager college student, I became spellbound by the power of scientific research to understand human behavior. The ability to quantitatively capture abstract phenomena like mood and relationship functioning, and to apply that quantitative knowledge in a way that informed treatment, seemed like a superhero power accessible to the learned; I wanted to be that kind of powerful. Throughout my twenties, I industriously checked off tasks from the traditional to-do list of young academics. Research assistant in a well-known research laboratory: check. Admission to graduate program: check. Match to competitive internship program: check. Early career grant to provide a foundation for later, larger grant awards: check. Despite a few anxieties and predictable blips in my progress, I was on track to become the kind of academic psychologist that I admired—a successful one.
I had no qualms about having a family while I pursued my career. I knew lots of colleagues who did it, and while I knew there would be challenges, I felt confident that I would rise to them. I was all-in, had a flexible career, and had plenty of resources at my disposal.
Then I had my first baby. To my surprise, I discovered that the idea of being apart from my child for the full workweek felt intolerable. It wasn’t an issue of quality of childcare or of any other structural, policy, or even marital constraint. It was my own internal psychological and spiritual dilemma: it pained me to be away from his tiny body full of baby smells and sounds. I was familiar with the body of research suggesting that babies are not negatively impacted in the domains of social, cognitive, or emotional development simply because they have parents who work. So it didn’t feel logical to feel so torn up about not being able to snuggle that baby all day long.
I hadn’t seen it coming. Plenty of professionals, with far more power and prestige than I, had gone back to work after having babies. Among my peers in academia, I knew only of the brilliant women and men who managed to become loving, devoted parents while sustaining their commitment to productive careers. I had assumed I would be in that camp and had planned accordingly. I had no idea how to respond to the intense feelings that were throwing a wrench in my well-laid plans.
The gut wrenching toggling back and forth over what to do lasted about a year. I spent much of that time engaged in a tiresome inner dialogue about my core identity and values and asking myself, What should I do? Was it more meaningful to pursue excellence and make civic contributions, or to be devoted to raising one’s children? And then there were the practical questions: What would we have to give up as a family, and what I would give up in independence, if I relinquished my income? Would my years of professional training be seen as a waste—by me and by the many mentors who contributed to my professional development—if I backed out of my career? And what would that mean to me?
I’m a psychologist, so naturally I worked to gain insight and resolve my internal dilemma. I began to practice tuning out the pervasive cultural messages about what a highly trained woman in modern society “should” do, and tuning in to what made the most sense for my family and me. But as I sat with all of these thoughts and feelings, it became increasingly clear that there was no obvious answer. Instead, I detected a series of complicated choices, each accompanied by unavoidable costs.
Ultimately, I worked with colleagues to renegotiate my position to allow a much shorter workweek. I reduced my private therapy hours and shifted those hours to minimize the disruption to my family’s schedule. I curbed my ambition and got off the tried and true academic path and onto an uncharted path, which would lead to . . . I wasn’t really sure where.
No longer on the traditional road to success, I reasoned that surely I could redefine success for myself. I could restrain my ego and find professional satisfaction in a nontraditional way. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the brilliant colleagues who committed to their work full time. Instead, I reasoned that if I could carve out some specific roles for myself, I could still make meaningful, recognizable contributions, and I could still express my ambitious self in my professional life.
But it has become increasingly clear to me why part-time effort is a unicorn among those with my level of training and career trajectory. In academia and academic research, one cannot fit in—let alone achieve conventional success—without an all-in commitment to professional life. Staying abreast of and conversant in advances in research requires ongoing attention. Being available for conferences and talks and other hobnobbing events necessitates your physical availability. The concepts of “ambitious” and “part time” seem to be a schematic mismatch.
Into the discomfort of our awkward exchange, the rest of the research team soon enters Linda’s office. We begin reviewing recruitment issues and how well our study is working to link incarcerated women with alcohol problems to volunteers who are doing their twelve-step work. I nod along as we segue from one topic to the next. I’m partly paying attention, but mostly immersed in my internal hamster wheel of worry about my career trajectory and what all of my colleagues must think of me.
After the meeting finally ends, I return to the sex-trading paper, forcing myself to make progress before my coffee date with another colleague.
When I arrive in the hospital coffee shop, Janie is waiting for me, coffee in hand. As usual, she looks perfectly professional and polished, with a dark gray, ironed skirt, heels, and designer glasses perched on her nose.
“Janie!” I call out, and we give each other a warm hug. Janie and I did our postdoctoral fellowships together in the university internship program. But, since having kids, our lives have diverged. Janie also has two children, but unlike me, managed to stay fully immersed in her research career throughout her children’s early years.
Janie talks as quickly as she thinks: “I’ve barely had a moment to breathe in the past couple of months,” she tells me. “Florida was recruiting me for a new director position in the research division of their anxiety disorders clinic, so George and I decided to bring the kids along on the interview and make it into a family trip. But, of course, the interview was grueling, and then we needed to rush back so we could have a day home before I headed to a conference in Michigan. A week later I had to go to sit on a review committee in DC. And between all of that, I got word that another investigator had done a small pilot study testing a social phobia intervention similar to my approach, and I needed to get my pilot results out before theirs. I ended up doing several long writing nights after the kids went to bed in order to get that paper out. It just got submitted earlier this week, so I’m relieved it’s under review.”
I nod with appreciation and murmurs of disbelief at all that she’s managed to accomplish. Hearing about the life she leads gets my blood pumping.
She tells me she received an attractive offer from Florida and was being aggressively courted, but that our university was working hard to keep her.
Why are we so different? How is she so prolific and impressive? Would I—could I—have become just as impressive and impactful as she is if I hadn’t backed down? Am I a better parent than she is, even though she clearly outshines me in the professional world? It’s more important to be a parent than a professional, right? Right?
Humorist Tim Kreider writes in We Learn Nothing that “it’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people’s lives, island universes, unknowable.” I knew Janie’s life, because at one point I was living and breathing the same air. But now we live in distinctly disconnected island universes. Yet, as I remind myself not to compare (especially because I know her to be an excellent parent), it is hard not to feel a little inferior.
“What about you? How are things?” she says.
I describe h
ow my five-year-old has turned into Forrest Gump with his passion for running and how my two-year-old has picked up some choice phrases from his older brother. We laugh. And then I confess to her that my productivity has been lacking, but that I feel ready and motivated to start to pick up my pace. She nods empathically. “Well, it’s hard to be productive when you’re only working part time.”
There is no judgment in her voice, yet I feel sheepish, so I turn the conversation to a new project we’ve been piloting to engage couples in a brief inpatient intervention. Research on couples’ treatment has been my particular joy since the start of my career, but it’s only recently that I’ve returned to it. Although I had submitted manuscripts throughout my childbearing years—albeit at a much slower pace than I had previously done—I haven’t submitted a grant proposal in almost three years. Since she’s far more practiced at it, Janie talks me through some of the grant application bottlenecks that are likely to arise. Soon enough I realize it’s time for me to wrap up loose ends and head out of the hospital. We hug good-bye, and I head back to my office.
It’s now 2 PM. Still early by most standards, yet my workday is about done. With the meetings I’ve attended and the tasks I’ve managed to check off my to-do list, I want to call this day worthwhile. And yet, I’m feeling pretty deflated. I shut down my computer, stuff it in my bag, and head to my car.
My older son’s pickup is in an hour, and it takes about that long to get to him. As I turn on the engine, I call my husband to let him know that we are going out to dinner—I am in no mood for cooking. He picks up on the first ring.
“Hiya.” I say. “Today stunk.”
My husband listens to me recount the day. After a pause he says, “I don’t understand why you do this to yourself. No one expects you to keep up with them when you’re part time. You decided you wanted to be home more with the kids. It’s amazing and lucky that you’ve been able to make it happen while keeping a career like yours alive.”
I silently curse him for not indulging my self-pity.
“I guess,” I say. “But I just can’t figure out how to feel comfortable with being so much less successful than people like Janie.”
My husband sighs. “You are successful. You are successful at what you’ve decided to do.”
“I know, I know,” I say, cutting his lecture off. “I definitely don’t want less time at home with the boys.”
When faced with the option of choosing to increase my work effort and reduce time with my kids, I unfailingly land on the side of restraining my professional goals. But then why can’t I stop agonizing?
My five-year-old needs to be picked up by 3 PM. I give up on NPR and change the station. Top 40 hits it is. It’s about ten seconds of my trying to unwind and relax before my mind drifts. What should I order for dinner tonight? I’m famished already. Is that traffic? How was I going to get this stupid paper done this week? Maybe a doughnut would make me feel better. I should have enough time to hit EZ-off doughnut shop now that the traffic is moving.
By the time I pull into the preschool parking lot, I’ve downed a chocolate-frosted doughnut and a Diet Coke. I quickly put the car in park and race in. Three o’clock on the nose.
I chose this school partly because it has an optional extended day. Today, as often happens on my workdays, my kid is the last one to be picked up. Seeing me in the doorway of his cheerfully decorated classroom, my towheaded son bounds toward me, but before reaching me, he turns on his heels and runs in the other direction. “Ha!” he says, “I’m Flash Gordon! You can’t catch me!”
His teacher smiles patiently. “Time to go home, buddy.” She is clearly ready to be done with her day.
“C’mon, sweets,” I coax him. “Let’s go to the park and swing until it’s time to pick up your little brother.” He loves to swing, so he bounds back, gives me a big wet kiss, and grabs the latest additions to his paper airplane fleet.
As we head to the playground across from the school, we see his friend and his mother at the swing set. “Jason!” my son squeals. Without another word, they begin a game of tag, which soon transitions into a game of racing paper airplanes. I watch the two boys with Jason’s mom, who has become my friend during their year in preschool.
Belinda, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, looks like the traditional 1950s images of the stay-at-home mother. Of course, she is far more than this two-dimensional characterization, but she looks so effortlessly cute and happy in the mother role.
We sit together on the swings talking about our kids and what we are having for dinner, and it occurs to me that in this moment I’ve automatically morphed back into my mother self.
I imagine that Belinda has overlooked the fact that I haven’t devoted myself fully to motherhood today until she chides me: “Yael, you know I could have picked up your little man today so you didn’t have to rush over here!”
Somehow, her generous offer triggers the same twinge of deficiency as Janie’s description of her academic prowess. Our achievement-oriented world recognizes and rewards those who are extraordinary at one thing, not those who are pretty good at many things. A wider focus might be more rewarding, but it will likely go unrecognized. For someone who wholly bought into the culture of excellence before kids, being part time everywhere and highly successful nowhere has been an unexpected challenge.
“Oh, that’s ok.” I shrug. “I look forward to picking him up at the end of the day.”
As I hear myself say these words, I feel the meaning resonate in my chest. I got to wear both hats today. Perhaps I’m imperfect in each role, but in this moment, I can appreciate being blessed to take part in both. I wouldn’t give up either world because there is, indeed, satisfaction to be had in the balance. If I can just slow down a little more often and allow myself to appreciate it.
Am I lucky, or nuts? Intense engagement in the joys of both motherhood and professional life is a gift that only the truly privileged are able to access.
Still, I have to wonder: If I worked full time, would I feel greater satisfaction? Or might I feel more fulfilled if I gave up on my professional life and wholly devoted myself to motherhood? Despite years of deliberating my best course, I have consistently chosen not to close the door on either world. They each matter too much to me.
Even as I may be less accomplished in either arena, I cherish the exquisite blessing of having a fuller and richer life resulting from being so deeply invested in both.
And that, I believe, is pretty extraordinary.
No Happy Harmony
ELIZABETH COREY
At least once a semester, a young female student will come to my office with questions about an assignment, and after we have finished our official business, will mention her concerns about the future: whether she should apply to medical school or take the less demanding physician’s assistant route, or whether she should marry right away and move with her husband for his job. Often she is the one with the better opportunity, and she wonders if she can expect her fiancé to follow her as she pursues graduate education at a prestigious East Coast school. Even if she isn’t in a romantic relationship, she wonders what it will mean for her goals when she is in one. Inevitably, she confesses that she is worried about the difficulty of pursuing both family and career.
The decisions are not simple. “Why,” asked Taylor, a former student, “if I believe I have a professional vocation, should I not pursue it? Failing to do so would be like burying my talents in the ground.” Her insight is perhaps the one unproblematic and entirely admirable legacy of feminism: Because women are human, they should be free to pursue excellence, just as men do.
Another student quoted a line to me from the post-communion prayer of the Anglican liturgy, in which the congregation beseeches God for the grace and assistance to “do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” She confessed that she has always loved this prayer because she sees herself as blessed with multiple talents but has never been quite clear about how to pursue them all.
These sorts of conversations weren’t common when I graduated from Oberlin College in the early 1990s. Nobody talked of marriage or children. The very idea of marriage was considered odd and old-fashioned, although most of my friends did marry eventually, after a period of experimentation and cohabitation. Perhaps this is still the case at Oberlin and elsewhere, but my students at Baylor worry about marriage and family.
They are no less ambitious than women in any other American college and most are as focused on success as their male peers. But many come from conservative Christian backgrounds, where the natural differences between men and women are celebrated and mothers often stay at home. They appreciate that a woman’s role in the family is something unique and valuable, and they are not persuaded by radical feminist arguments that marriage and motherhood are mere oppression. How then, they wonder, can the longing to have and care for children be combined with a sincere desire to achieve something of value outside the home?
Thus, they ask a question at the forefront of popular literature about women and work: How can women “balance” professional interests and family? Like countless other women, I’ve had to juggle my obligations as a mother and wife with the demands first of graduate study and then of teaching and scholarship. But I’ve slowly come to realize that this quest for balance, the desire to reconcile radically conflicting demands, is misguided. Work and family evoke from us two distinct modes of being and of relation to others. The conflicts between these modes cannot, if we are honest with ourselves, be wished away or ignored.
I’ve never had much interest in academic feminism. At Oberlin, I was inundated with the most radical varieties of feminist thought and practice. Words that are now mostly laughed at—“herstory” and “womyn”—were used in earnest. The Women’s Studies Department, as it was called then, brought in feminist activists as lecturers, and the library routinely featured poster presentations about the objectification of women on television and in print. There was one single-sex women’s dormitory at Oberlin, intended as a haven for self-identified lesbians or for those who were “seeking.” All of this was foreign to me—another world from the one I had left behind in conservative south Louisiana.
