The question I didn't get to ask

[rebeccmeister]

Edit: I locked this earlier, so only I could read it, but am taking off the lock now in reading back over it.

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Talking with my brother this evening reminded me of a question I didn't get to ask E, over the course of our conversation. I'm thinking about e-mailing her to ask it. The question is, if both she and her husband are hardworking academics, how do they manage family obligations? Basically, how is the household division of labor accomplished, such that they both have enough mental energy to do good work?

I made a mistake and asked a dumb question instead, the question she said she's asked often, which is about having children in academia. The first answer is that there's never a good time to have children. The second answer is that it is wonderful and important to have children.

There's something that's going to stick with me for a long time, and I suspect it isn't a completely fair portrayal of the situation, but it reflects how I feel about the situation. As I worked on my dissertation proposal, multiple people told me stories about how friends or significant others ensured that they were fed on those critical nights when the work became too consuming. Same thing happened with writing my dissertation - the stories. I can vividly remember having to go and buy a bunch of food for myself so I could keep going. Food was limiting. scrottie certainly kept me company and certainly feeds me on many other occasions, but he works and gets stressed out, too. More often than not, when I am hungry and need to eat something, dinner hasn't even gotten started. There have been points where it has taken so long to cook dinner that by the time it's ready, I'm not hungry anymore.

These days, I am ranting extensively on Facebook about having to spend hours mowing the lawn. People laughingly suggest all kinds of things, ranging from goats to fire. I'm really hoping that having a roommate will help, so I can at least share the work. Otherwise, in a year's time I might go back to looking for a smaller space without lawnmowing obligations.

I guess other people don't need to read this. It's kind of like what C was saying earlier today, about writing responses to things on Facebook and then deleting them. Just you and me here, LJ. Back to work.

Comments

[bluepapercup]

This is a really hard question.

I know some professors in my field who are in dual-career families with children. The way it most often seems to work is that a lot of duties end up farmed out. Kids are in childcare, daycare, or with a nanny until they're old enough to go to full-day elementary school. Often dinner doesn't happen as a family, and the partners end up tangentially supporting each other (as far as I can tell) as best they can, but everyone seems tired all the time, and honestly, a bit resentful.

I personally have no idea how dual-career academic families make it work without outside help.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

I can relate to the feelings of resentment, for sure. I think that's one of the biggest sources of resentment in my life. I wish I didn't feel that way, so I wanted to ask just to see if there's anything I can think about or do differently to manage those feelings.

At ASU, we had a number of different older female faculty come through to talk to members of the Association for Women in Science about their lives and experiences in academics. Most of them have lived and worked in a different social context than what we've got now, so their experiences haven't always felt completely relevant, but still...some of these successful women had to do things like take time off from academics, while still holding onto what little they could by squeezing in "pro bono" work in small pockets of free time. Others have done things like taken on joint faculty positions at less than a full-time rate (a cool example was an academic couple that each took on three-quarter time positions - still got to do lots of cool science, but not *quite* the full pressure cooker).

But yeah, I don't know, either. The faculty member in question is younger, so I was hoping she'd have more insights. She declared that it was hard, but that was the extent of things. I've also gotten to watch how my advisor and her husband have made things "work," but I suspect a lot of the "making things work" just happened by brute force, because her husband is superhuman and a maniac workaholic.

There's less space for these sorts of conversations at A&M, which is also very hard, because then I feel like I'm just one lone crazy person and somehow everybody else is making everything magically work in their lives. So I have to remind myself that that isn't true, and that it's okay to be imperfect and get frustrated and feel resentful.