Strategy

I recently got back from a trip to see members of my committee. I do this periodically so that they know I am still alive and planning to finish, although of course they heard from me in April when I found out about my dissertation fellowship. However, I wanted to thank them in person by giving them wine (both a red and a white) and also to have a conversation on strategy for the coming year.

What I like about my committee is that I receive different types of support from each of them. One of the main themes during the meetings was working while having children. The first one I saw was my outside member, who openly offers me advice on life. (It's a little embarrassing but I often end up crying a little -- not from hurt or anything, and not a lot of tears, thank goodness -- when I talk to her one-on-one.) She told me that 1) I shouldn't feel left behind even though it is taking me longer than some of my cohort and even the cohorts behind me to finish, and 2) I should consider my child as a credit when looking at my curriculum of life ("vitae") from a wider and longer perspective. She told me this from the position of someone who is retiring this year, who has had a long and fulfilling academic career, who has produced several books and many, many articles, and who has had two children to her credit -- and she took eight years to finish her Ph.D.! She and I also of course discussed the terrible academic market and my healthy attitude on the possibility of not entering academia. My takeaway was a sense of the bigger picture of where my priorities really lie.

Next was the co-chair from my department. From her, I got nitty-gritty tactics on where and how to apply, how to position myself in my letters, and a general sense of how to deal with the coming year in terms of job and postdoc applications while I finish writing the dissertation. I remarked almost off-handedly about how perhaps I should have waited until after tenure to have a child (that is, if I ever entered academia and got tenure), but she said very firmly that there seems to be no good time for women academics to have children, and that if one waits until after tenure, one may be 40 or nearing 40 and having children gets a lot iffier for women at that age. I must say that her perspective was surprising because I can't remember talking with her specifically about how having children affects women in academia. Besides the personal support and her reiteration of how pleased she was about my fellowship (apparently, of all that applied, I am the first of her students to get an AAUW award), the meeting was very helpful to me because of the step-by-step instructions on job letters, the reminder about formulating a cogent second project for postdoc applications, and the deadline she set for the end of summer. Yikes! But I'm on it.

Finally, my other co-chair and I had a long conversation about childcare and working-mother's guilt, specific job opportunities, and how to generally approach the upcoming year's challenges. I admitted that I had been feeling some guilt on putting Ben in preschool/daycare even though he is only 2. I know that, because of the truly dismal support for childcare in this country (especially when compared with other industrialized nations), many parents simply have to put their infants in daycare after 6 weeks. Moreover, at his age, Ben needs more than just me as a playmate and more regular contact with other kids besides what he gets at the play dates we schedule about every week or week and a half with local friends. Yet I still feel this guilt, inexplicable as it is, and my co-chair agreed that the guilt was something she faced as well but something that I simply needed to get over. Really. It is that simple. I felt both disappointed and elated to hear this. I think the disappointment came from the part of me that is afraid that once Ben is in daycare, I will have no excuse for failing to write and finish. I need to get over this fear, too. That was the main takeaway from this last meeting: I have no more excuses. I will finish this coming school year, whether or not it's in time for job applications starting in September. (We discussed that as well, the possibility that I might not be able to even selectively apply for jobs this fall but will have to wait until next cycle. Postdoc applications are a different story, however.)