Work exerts its own pull that fights against the pull of Nora and Milo. If I think too much about them when I'm at work, I start to wonder why I am at work. It seems so pointless. They're only going to be this small once, and nobody else can take care of them as well as I can, so why am I at work?
Oh right. The mortgage. And the health insurance. And the heating bills. And the groceries. And...
Okay, so I have to work. But when I'm at work and get pulled in, I remember that it's not just about the mortgage and the health insurance. I love what I do, and it's driving me crazy that I can't do it full time right now. I have about 60 hours' worth of work that needs to get done every week, but I sure don't have 60 free hours to do it. So I never get done what I need to, and I'm always about 3 steps behind, feeling like a giant ass because I haven't responded to that student's draft yet, or I haven't read through the reviews of this grant application very thoroughly, or I'm secretly contemplating skipping out on this week's useless meeting so that I don't have to saddle Jake with yet another morning of baby wrangling on his own.
I kinda thought I'd have more time to get work done with the babies in my life. I don't know what I was thinking. I thought it'd be no big deal for one of us to be home alone with them all the time, making room for the other to get work done. None of this would be all that big a deal if it weren't for tenure staring down at me. But tenure does loom, even if it's a few years away, and every month that goes by without me producing a new piece of research weighs on me. It keeps me up at night. I don't want to lose my job. And if I'm honest, I haven't produced anything really substantial ever since I got pregnant. When am I going to find time to change that? That's the piece of the puzzle I can't quite figure out.
My annual review went very well this year, in fact this year was the best review I've ever had. That's a bit of a mystery to me, but it might just be due to the fact that a lot of things that I'd produced over the past few years all happened to finally come out in publication last spring and summer. Everybody who read my file assures me that everything is fine. Famous Old Scholar even stopped by my office this week to let me know that he thought I was doing well, and if I kept it up, I should be a shoe-in for tenure.
It's the "keep it up" part that is tricky, because I'm not keeping it up. I get a year off my tenure clock for having these babies. The babies are only 4 and a half months old, but it's May now, and I consider my year up. This time last year was when I started getting sick, and when I started getting sick my productivity went down the drain. So, it's been about a year already. I somehow have to get back on track now, and I have to do it within the constraints of only having full-time child care two days a week. The pieces of this puzzle don't add up.
The director of the Institute of Health and Social Policy at McGill University, Dr. Jody Heymann, surveyed 176 countries on their parental leave policies. 172 of the 176 countries she surveyed this year offer guaranteed paid leave to women who have just had babies. The four that do not? Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and the United States.
So where does that leave me and others like me? Instead of taking a year or even just a semester off, I'm trying to cobble together times to get work done in between taking care of babies, cooking, keeping the house in just a semi-disasterous state instead of a fully disasterous state, getting the groceries, driving to doctor's appointments, and doing the other million things that need to get done every week. I'm making decisions between work and sleep every night, knowing that one or the other has to suffer -- well, sleep always suffers, but sometimes it suffers more than other times. And of course I'm one of the lucky ones because I can afford part-time child care, and because I do have a husband who is doing 50% of the parenting work, and because I have an extremely flexible job that does allow me to work in bits and spurts between, say 8 p.m. and midnight if necessary. What about the women without those things? What about the women who have to be on the job site from 9 to 5 every day? What about the women parenting on their own? What about the women who can't afford any childcare, but also can't afford to give up their jobs? What about the women who will get fired if they miss just one more day to take care of a sick child? What do they do?
The ability to have a family should not be something that only the middle and upper classes can afford to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment