36 weeks today. In the midst of all of my discomfort it is important to remember how great it is that we have reached 36 weeks with babies still inside. I have been worried for the entire pregnancy about the pre-term labor that is so common with twins. Well, that is, once I got over worrying that they were dead. Given my size, and my age, and my troubles in the beginning, and my failure to gain the kind of weight I was supposed to gain (BAD pregnant lady), and all of the contractions, the possibility of early labor has been in the back of everybody's mind for months. But now I've reached 36 weeks, which is a good outcome for twins, and hopefully we will be able to keep going for a while longer. Every extra day is great and I'm finally starting to believe that we might actually bring home real live babies -- although I feel like I'm tempting fate just by saying that.
Not only that, but I was able to find the one medical practice in town that doesn't routinely prescribe bedrest for twins as a CYA measure, so I've been able to continue moving around and working and going through my daily life. 36 weeks AND no bedrest -- I couldn't have asked for more!
My ability to keep working is a real bonus considering everything that needs to be done by the end of the semester. Teaching is just a small part of that, and a tiny part of what I do overall. What I really need to get done involves finishing up two grant proposals, making final changes to a joint journal article, finishing up revisions for a practitioner-oriented book manuscript before the editor's head explodes, making sure the last round of data collection ends smoothly, completing a new-course-series proposal to present to a group meeting, and attending the roughly fifty thousand (or at least 10) meetings scheduled with various grad students and faculty members to discuss everything from dissertations to student projects to program adjustments. Ideally, all of this is supposed to happen before the babies arrive, so I should probably get cracking instead of pontificating about it all here.
But despite the pressure, I really do love my job. It is a dream-come-true job. There are lots of times when I am on campus, or walking to and from work, when I stop and marvel at the fact that I even have this job. Holy crap, I'm a freakin' professor! Being a professor is an incredible career, especially for somebody like me who likes to sleep in. In all seriousness the flexibility of a job like this is a wonderful privilege. I am responsible for getting a lot of work done, much of that self-imposed if I want to get tenure, but I have a lot of freedom in deciding when, where, and how I accomplish what I need to accomplish. I can work from home a great deal, and I do because I am much more productive at home. The students in my program are amazing, and spending time with them is one of my favorite parts of the job. I love teaching them and mentoring them and just being around them. I also have the rare advantage of being housed in a department that is actually supportive and helpful. I am at a high-pressure R1 university, but one of the advantages of this environment is that more senior colleagues really do take their mentoring roles seriously. I like all of my colleagues and feel fortunate to work in my department.
I don't know how all of this is going to change with having twins. There are some positive signs and some concerns. It's no secret that having a baby while on the tenure track tends to kill women's chances for tenure, while men's rates of tenure go up when they have kids. One woman in my department had two kids pre-tenure. When she was pregnant with her second, another professor in the department gestured to her belly and told her "so much for tenure, huh?" Although that is a disturbing story, she did get tenure -- starting a new trend as she was the first person to accomplish this ever. Our good friends in the department just had a baby recently, and they are both pre-tenure, so the trend continues. I'm the third one to get pregnant pre-tenure. So far the department seems pretty supportive, at least in the abstract.
This is helpful within the context of a university that generally does not support people having families. There are no tuition benefits for kids of professors, the university-based daycare is fine but not specifically for faculty and would cost 30K a year for two kids, and my institution does not have any family leave policy. So I can rely on the FMLA, and that's it. This means I can have 6 weeks of paid leave. 6 weeks leave doesn't do a whole lot. I'm pro-rating my 6 weeks leave to count for a course release in the spring, which basically means I won't have to teach but I'll still have to do all of the advising, meetings, service, and research tasks that make up the bulk of my job. I'm not sure how this is going to work out with two small babies. I am in the rare position of having a husband who is committed to equitably sharing childcare, which is a topic for a whole other post, and we'll have lots of family help for the first few months, which will make a big difference. I imagine we'll just find a way to make it work.
It'd be nice to take a full semester off, or in some Utopian world (i.e. Europe) even longer, but aside from the need to put food on the table and pay the mortgage, you can't exactly drop out of the work force for any length of time in academia. Plus, maybe I wouldn't really want to do that anyway. I do love my job. I'm just terrified that the decision to have kids will ultimately prevent me from keeping this job for life. Or, even worse, that having this job is going to make me a craptastic mom.
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