Susie Crowe, contributor
When I found myself halfway through my PhD and pregnant, I was advised by a few high-achieving friends and family members to resist the temptation to work throughout my maternity leave. “You’ll never get this time back…” lamented my obstetrician cousin, who submitted an award-winning conference paper while learning how to breastfeed. “Give yourself the space from your work to get to know your baby,” suggested another friend, who regretted not heeding her own advice.
“Don’t even worry.” I assured them. “I’ve got this.” For the first time in my life since I was 14, I was unemployed, unencumbered by school, and mentally free. It was liberating! I had nobody to answer to but my little 8 pound dictator. I went for long walks. I learned how to ‘babywear’. I joined Instagram and took endless adorable posed shots of my mini-me.
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And then reality set in – the two semesters of leave I had taken were coming to a close. Just in time, I might add, as my apparently insatiable thirst for knowledge had begun to leak over into the mommy-verse. Over-researching parenting choices and developing Very Serious Opinions about them was rather mentally consuming, and I started to be ok with getting back to some semblance of my pre-mommy life. It was time to re-acquaint myself with ecology research, and send topics such as ‘baby-led weaning’ packing.
As I settle into the simultaneous daily grinds of being a grad student again and being a mom to a young baby, I am struck by the unique challenges that accompany this overlap. Thankfully, I’ve also discovered a few distinct upsides to this whole ‘grad school mom’ arrangement.
Challenge: Having a flexible schedule. The thought “I will treat my PhD like a 9-5” has entered my head a few times. I’ve even declared it aloud, to friends, to my husband, in a half-hearted attempt at creating accountability. Then 9 o’clock rolls around and I’m stuffing a grumpy baby into her snowsuit after changing her diaper, AGAIN. Or 2 am happens, the house is still and the night is mine, and I’ve just discovered a review paper that I need to read Right Now. Fixed working hours would make that line between family time and work time so much clearer. But it’s just not the name of this game, at least not for me.
Upside: Having a flexible schedule. Other than TAing, lab paper discussions, and the odd meeting here and there, my schedule is largely unstructured. This means that I can tailor my workday around the needs of my daughter’s care providers (my mom and mother-in-law, yes I know how lucky I am), and base it on a schedule that optimizes our sleep.
Upside: Being able to work from home. With a flexible schedule and my main tasks being statistics and writing, occasionally working from home is a viable option. My mother can take care of the baby in the next room, I can save 2 hours of commuting and not be a slave to my breastpump. Perfect, right? Well, that brings us to…
Challenge: Doing a bad job of working from home. It’s early days yet, and I hope to get much better at this. But so far, about half of my attempts at working from home have gone something like this: “Since I’m home, I may as well put a load of laundry in. The washing machine does the work while I remain productive! Marvellous! Oh, the baby needs to be fed – breastfeeding it is! No need to pump, what a time-saver. Oh, she’s tired. I’ll just nurse her to sleep… for 45 minutes… finally she’s asleep, excellent, I’ll move that laundry over and then get to work. Wow, that was a short nap! I’ll go find her favourite books, for my mom. Gosh those two are cute, reading together… Ding! There’s the laundry – I better put it away so it doesn’t wrinkle.” Before I know it, the day is over and I’m annoyed with myself, wondering how I managed to accomplish so little.
Upside: A baby-friendly lab environment. This won’t apply for everyone, but luckily for me, I’m not the first person to bring a baby to our lab’s paper discussions.
Challenge: A less baby-friendly campus. The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could bring my mom and my baby to school with me on my busy teaching day, as finding a spot to pump was proving challenging and ducking out to breastfeed might be easier. Navigating a stroller through torrents of students was slightly less palatable than pumping in a bathroom stall, so I nixed that plan. I have one great spot on campus to pump, near my office. Unfortunately this is very far from where I TA, so this remains a challenge. When I inquired, breasts full, at the Graduate Student’s Association office about whether there was someplace I could pump, I was assured that there was “an initiative in the works”. Super. (I would have gone to the town hall meeting about it, but I was too busy pumping in a bathroom stall. Irony is funny.)
Challenge: Saying goodbye to ‘flow state’ productivity. Pre-baby, I relished getting into a good research groove. I mean a really good research groove. Sometimes I just want to read every single thing ever written on overwintering insects before my next shower, what’s the big deal? I’ve been known to work 20 hours in a row on statistics and not even realize how much time has gone by, and I’m sure I’m in good company among other academics. But now… no more wild stats overnighters, no more staying hours later at the office than planned because I finally hit my stride. Babies need routines, and create frequent interruptions.
Upside: Learning how to be productive like a normal person. Though it seems like a lifetime away, someday soon I will finish grad school, become a “real person”, and will have to get used to being productive at normal times and within smaller intervals. The sooner I figure this out, the better, and having a baby while in grad school is nothing if not time management boot camp. Procrastination is no longer just a waste of my time, but a waste of my mom’s time, my mother-in-law’s time, my husband and daughter’s time. My PhD is now a family undertaking, and I refuse to disappoint them, so my only option is to learn to work harder and smarter than ever before.
Thank you for this story. I too am a grad school mom and this story definitely resonates with me. It is very hard to find a balance when you have a “new career” as a mom which takes precedence over everything, including finishing your Phd and yourself! I am about 3 years past my original completion date. Luckily I had finished all my experiments, teaching duties, etc. and just needed to write the papers and dissertation. However, we moved to a different country once a year and the readjustment and finding appropriate childcare was not easy or affordable! I will be able to graduate this year after publishing five papers so my extended time not graduating was not wasted. However, this has only been accomplished by periodic living with the in-laws so that I could focus entirely on my writing. As much as this has been difficult, I am so happy that I have been the main person raising my child who is now 3 and when I move on to my career, he will also be moving on to school and be a lot more independent. I also realize how much harder this would have been had I had him during a first post doc, when there is so much more expected of you and you do not have the leeway of working at home, etc. Motherhood is underestimated, how much it changes you and your mental facilities (due to loss of sleep and hormones changing your focus). People have no idea how hard it is to take care of a baby and a household unless they are in the trenches doing it themselves. I think working women are expected to be perfect at everything, their career, their family duties, etc. I have the utmost respect for women who work and raise children but I have no idea how they juggle everything. I think mothers who are busy with work or school must be able to allocate small tasks and jobs to other people and be ok with asking for help, because we cannot do it all. If you try to do it all, you will run yourself down, be full of stress and angry. I think it is important to take this time period in stride, enjoy your baby and the early years, don’t stress about the writing. You will finish, maybe not in the time period that others expect. If you force yourself to be too productive and you are in baby mode, you will feel guilty for not working and guilty for not being with your baby. I also totally agree with the working at home scenario, it just doesn’t work. I was constantly doing laundry even grocery shopping because it was easier to do alone without the baby but I was not getting any writing done and felt very guilty about it. Other countries which allow up to a year for maternity leave know what they are doing, they understand how challenging it is to raise children. Luckily I had really understand PIs and I am really close to finishing. Good luck to you.
Marti, thanks for commenting and I’m glad my story resonated with a fellow grad school mom! I suspect there are many silent would-be moms who are afraid to start their families while still in grad school because it might be frowned upon, or because of the many financial hurdles, particularly childcare and a lack of paid maternity leave options. This is such a shame, because most PhD students are around the perfect age to become pregnant, and many people who wait until later in life find it to be too late to get pregnant easily. I agree that being able to ask for help is so important; I am very lucky to have a great support system and several people who are willing to give me so much help.
I am in Canada, so only taking 8 months of leave was a bit of a deviation from how maternity leave is usually done here (most people take a full year). I chose to go back early because I felt ready to get back to my work and I just wanted to get on with things. And to be honest, being a stay at home mom is just such thankless, hard, hard work!! It was fun for a while, and a nice mental break. But I am much less exhausted at the end of a long day of marking or data analysis compared to how I used to feel, when I was on leave, by the time my husband walked through the door!
Good luck finishing up!
Hi Susie,
My university didn’t have a maternity leave. I was lucky that I was at the end of my PhD that it didn’t matter that I was there or not. I actually had to remove myself from the program.. There isn’t that much support for university mom’s in the US, that I am aware of. I guess it depends on the individual universities. There is hardly any support for working mothers, some mothers only get 2-4 weeks maternity leave so there is next to nothing for students. It’s definitely not an easy path… taking care of a baby takes almost every second of your time. I remember expecting a post-doc to help me after he had a baby and when he was at home, he couldn’t do anything else. I remember not understanding why he didn’t have the time. I just tried to apply for a job the other day while my son was watching some cartoons, he kept on bugging me to lay with him and watch cartoons with him! I also find it very hard to switch to my different identities, mother, PhD student, person-I-used-to-be. I think many women wait until their children go to school to start feeling ambitious towards their own career goals. I didn’t actually plan to have this child. But it worked out relatively well.. a time in my career/life where I could not be present but still continue my life goals but also be there for my child. Good luck to you too! Thanks so much for this article.