Once upon a time, almost a year ago, I jolted awake in the middle of the night, suddenly certain that my 23-year-old daughter had decided she wanted a baby. She didn’t say it outright. In fact, I’m pretty sure she steered well away from any topics that were remotely baby related in the days and weeks that preceded this realization on my part. But when the puzzle pieces finally slotted into place, I knew I was right.
A mother always knows.1
I then proceeded to have a little freak out and, like good mothers since time immemorial, my freak out was based on approximately zero information and a surfeit of worst-case scenario assumptions. Moreover, like a good 21st century mother, my freak out was conducted entirely by text message assault.
By my second message—sent with the rapid-fire rat-tat-tat of a machine gun—I’d raised the issue of PhD comprehensive exams and babies. Then the flood gates opened. Over the next several days, I texted intermittently with worries that she’d be seen as not serious about her PhD; worries that pregnancy might be an excuse to drop her from her program; worries that dissertations are difficult even without babies; and, of course, worries that the academic job market is terrible even without additional responsibilities. For variety, I punctuated the thematic monologue with non-academic worries, too, about loss of youth, the pressures a baby places on a relationship, and money. I don’t do anything halfway.
In truth, I was panicked and could have used advice. There’s lots out there about deciding to have a kid in graduate school, but substantially less for parents seeking advice on, “What to Expect When Your Daughter Is Expecting to Be Expecting.” It wasn’t the early child-bearing that got me (I don’t think). It was the realization that my kid—barely 23, scarcely a year out of college, and just finishing her first year of a PhD in Classics and History—was about to try to navigate parenthood in a system (academia) that, almost 20 years post-PhD, I am still not convinced I know how to manage. Serious stuff.
After days and weeks of pushback on my end, at one point my daughter asked why I was so against having kids young, when “everything worked out fine for you.”
Do as I Say, Not as I Do
I read advice about baby timing and generally it’s pretty good. As a population geographer, I read a lot about fertility, too. The personal and the professional intersect at this topic. I am fascinated how the individual, the societal, and the structural all combine not only to pre-suppose idealized family structures and timing, but also to govern how pleasant child-bearing and -rearing are for the people who give birth.
The general rule of thumb in academic circles, but more generally as well, is that there is no perfect time to have a baby. Do what works for you.2 The old-school “wait until you have tenure” advice is tarnished by the recognition that many in graduate school will never have a tenure-track position; that the timing of graduate school and the tenure clock tend to exhaust many fertile years, leaving folks “trying” for a baby in their late 30s, sometimes unsuccessfully; and that perhaps systems should have to evolve, not the people embedded in those (rigid) systems.
Anyway, in case you hadn’t heard, I’m going to be a grandmother.
When I tell people the news,3 I generally get two reactions. The first is whether I feel ready to be a grandmother, which is kind of funny. I don’t think my unborn grandchild cares whether I’m ready, at age 47, to be a grandmother. More than that, I am not sure I understand why I’m supposed to care. In point of fact, I will continue to love nice shoes, even after Baby X is born. I will still be me, only augmented.
The other question I get is whether my daughter is married or intends to marry, which is such an irritating query that I’m not going to waste any further words here on the topic, except to say that we like to think we’re so modern in our social outlook these days, but it’s still a struggle to imagine alternative ways of organizing a life or relationship.
What I am wrestling with is this idea that everything worked out fine for me, as my daughter put it. I want to be a good parent right now—offering useful insight and helpful reflection on my own experience—but to do so requires reconciling a number of ambivalent feelings about my own navigation of the PhD and having a child young.
Would I change a thing? No, not at all. But…
I gave birth to my daughter at 23. At the time, I was working in Chicago and had been married for a couple of years. I wanted a baby so badly. If I’d asked anyone for advice—which I did not do, because I am smart—I’m sure they would have raised valuable points about first building a career, or enjoying a few years of married life before adding a child, or, you know, being able to afford to buy a house before taking on the responsibility of a kid. I would have ignored it all. I have no residual ambivalence on any of those fronts.
In the months after my daughter was born, it slowly became evident to me just how challenging it would be to raise a child and also maintain an autonomous identity. This wasn’t only about career or profession, but rather about the potential for motherhood to be all-consuming, if I let it.
Here, I think my youth was an important factor: honestly, there wasn’t much in the way of career to balance out the motherhood part. I don’t know, but I imagine that this calculus is different for those who have their children after being more settled in the other aspects of their identity. I wanted to be home and raise my child but also not be home and do other things. Now that I think about it, this tug-of-war between motherhood (and domesticity) and independence has been the most enduring tension of my adult life.
So I applied for a PhD at the University of Arizona, was accepted, and moved husband and toddler to Tucson. Looking back, I don’t remember planning beyond the PhD. That is, I don’t think I made this decision because I thought being a professor would provide decent long-term work-family balance. I think I simply thought that being in school would be manageable and flexible and paired well with raising a small person. At this point I was 25. What sorts of decisions were you making at 25?
(There’s a lot of thinking about thinking in the paragraph above. It may reflect poor editing on my part, but it’s also my desire to not impose an ex post facto logic to my decision-making at the time. I’m not 100 percent sure why I did what I did and I don’t want to convey sureness where there was none.)
“I love you!”
I was the only person in my PhD cohort with a child, possibly in my entire program, although that doesn’t seem possible. Most weren’t even married yet.4 A year into my program, I got a divorce, my ex-husband moved to New York, and I became a single parent.
When I reminisce about being a single parent in graduate school, I usually tell about the time my daughter’s pre-school was closed and she had to come to my winter session class5 with me. It was probably the 2nd or 3rd time I’d taught and she must have been about 4 years old. In these situations, I’d park her in the back of the classroom with a pad of paper, some markers, a juice box, and maybe a stuffed animal or two. She’d mostly occupy herself and I’d lecture, always with half an eye to what she was up to. One day, immersed in explaining something on the board, I must have missed that she had her hand raised, as if she were also a student in the class. The class was the first to notice and found the hand-raising (and my ignorance of it) amusing. There was the usual oohing and aahing that occurs when people see a kid doing something cute. I called on her, trying to be business-like, serious, and professional and not at all the sort of instructor who would be turned in by one of her students for being distracted—and, in an enormous stage whisper, she said, “I love you!”
This anecdote makes parenthood in graduate school sound so nice, so fun. It makes listeners say “Awwww.”
There are other stories I don’t tell so often, partly because they reflect less well on me and my capacity to succeed at both school and motherhood and partly because I don’t like to be reminded. Like how some weekends I’d bring her into the deserted department so I could get work done and ignore her until she slept. She’d parade her stuffed animals up and down the hallway, build forts on the office floor, and generally wear herself down, until—finally—she’d collapse exhausted onto a blanket on the floor. Other weekend days, we’d stay home and I’d show her how to rewind the video cassette on her favorite movie (Lion King II) so I could work.
At Arizona, preliminary exams comprised a series of day-long take-home essays. For these, I planned to drop my daughter at pre-school, hustle into the department and get the prompt for the day, go write, and then finish in time to pick her up before closing. The timing was very tightly orchestrated. The very first exam, an hour into writing, the pre-school called to say she had a fever and needed to go home. One of the department secretaries, bless her, hopped into action to find a fellow student with a car who could pick her up, only for everyone to realize that I had the only car seat. I don’t remember how this was resolved. I do remember the anxiety and the dependence on the kindness of others.
I spent 3 years in Tucson as a single parent during my PhD. Worry and loneliness are the emotions that predominate when I think of those times. Taking out a life insurance policy, in case something happened to me. Dreading weekends, where the days seemed to drag out forever, with no respite. Sorting out childcare so I could attend a conference or maybe go out for an evening. Bringing my daughter to parties, intramural sport practices, and department events and hoping she would be inobtrusive. Wondering if, at 26, single and with a kid, I was on the shelf and would never be partnered again.
It Takes a Lot More Than a Village
Advice on having children at any age often ignores the importance of structural factors, as if success in childrearing comes down to our own individual decisions: timing, choice of partner, grit and resilience.
Probably those all have a role to play, but we know there’s so much more to it. That I made it through is due in large part to:
Paid maternity leave: the law firm I worked for in Chicago as a legal assistant gave me 12 weeks paid maternity leave, even though I’d only worked for them for (ahem) 9 months, and even though they must have known the chances I’d return were slim.
Quality pre-school: Knowing my child was having a more interesting and enriching day at pre-school than she would have had with me at home went a long way towards reducing the guilt I felt about leaving her every day. Not just safe, not just affordable, but appealing. Thanks, Second Street School, in Tucson.
Student parent support: This one will seem minor. The University of Arizona offered childcare at the rec center, $1/hour. This was a lifesaver. Sometimes I’d go exercise just to get a break from the grind. I haven’t encountered a similar offering at any other university I’ve worked at.
Family and friends: We know this one; this is the village argument. Every conference I attended in graduate school required childcare coverage, usually provided by my younger sister in California. My grandparents helped me buy a car and made the payments for me while I was in school. Friends pitched in with emergency childcare coverage. I didn’t have parents who could drop everything to help me or provide financial support, but I did benefit from a large collective of folks in many other ways.
Department culture: This becomes clearer with hindsight. No one in my department ever told me not to bring my kid to the university. If my fellow students had thoughts about my daughter always being around, no one ever said a thing—I nursed my child in my shared grad student office and pumped milk in shared hotel room bathrooms at conferences. On Fridays I’d often duck out after colloquium talks to pick up my daughter before childcare closed and then bring her back to the bar for happy hour. We still own the shot glass one of my classmates gave her for her 2nd birthday…
S = {1, 2, Baby}
None of the above addresses an elephant in the room: from whence springs the desire to have children so young? In neither my case nor my daughter’s are we talking about an “oops” that is later rationalized into a Good Thing, Actually. There’s intentionality and planning here.
I can’t speak for my daughter, but I have given some thought to why a baby was an element of my choice set, even in my early 20s. The most obvious is that my mother had me at 19, so there was precedent. Other factors also contributed to a baby being an acceptable and even positive choice in my family. The first thing that happened was that my younger sister got pregnant in college. This served as a sort of baby ice-breaker: the next generation had been started, the world didn’t end, and it’s nice for babies to have cousins. I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that my sister had the most beautiful baby. I might have caught Baby Fever.
Something else happened that reinforced my decision, after the fact. When I was just a few months pregnant, my father was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, a cancer of the blood. Although persistently upbeat, his decline proceeded at about the same pace as my pregnancy and he died when my daughter was three months old. Through the last months of his life—and I know, because I was there, having gone to California with my baby to help my stepmother manage at home—he would say how happy he was that he’d gotten to meet two grandchildren and how lucky he was that it had all worked out so fortuitously. He was 45 when he died, and he was right: in the normal order of things, we were all too young to be partnered or have children of our own.
Counterfactuals
So, baby advice. The real question is whether one wants a child and whether one has a realistic sense of the inevitable impact6—but make no mistake, that impact will be felt, whether in your 20s, your 30s, or even your 40s. Did I miss having footloose 20s? Indeed, but I am very much enjoying my relatively footloose 40s and I will be an empty-nester by 50.
It is true that, in your 20s and planning ahead, it may seem that nothing exciting happens in your 40s and 50s so you may as well fill those years with children. I haven’t so far found that to be the case. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
My daughter didn’t ask my advice about having a baby in graduate school. (Maybe it’s because she’s smart.) I’ve thought about it though—not only the underlying drivers of my initial freak out, but also what useful insights I can offer from my parental-academic perch. One belated realization is that if it’s career security for her that I’m after, her current PhD position is as solid as most post-PhD jobs are likely to be. I also like to think that our academic institutions have evolved to be more supportive and that they certainly won’t further evolve without being pushed, so I’m proud of my daughter for taking the risk and pushing, in her own gentle but insistent way. Someone has to model these choices, and I think it’s great that she’s doing it.
The advice I offer myself is the following. Aside from trusting my kid to make her own decisions and offering what assistance I can, it helps to imagine the counterfactual. Really, what would I want her to be doing instead?
Also, in case the blades of my helicopter parenting are getting a bit loud, let me emphasize the most important: it isn’t actually any of my business how my kid leads her life. I can offer support and try to smooth the path, but the decisions are hers to make and I need to trust myself to let go.
Leaving all that aside: Hey, I’m going to be a grandmother! I get to introduce a new human to my favorite children’s books and sing lullabyes again. I get to help raise a new member of my family. I get the privilege of watching my daughter learn a new role and seeing my first grandchild enter the world.
It’s all pretty exciting and I consider myself lucky.
This is a joke. Moms are the last to know a lot of stuff, including, but not limited to, hotboxing in a friend’s car in high school and inviting boyfriends to sleep over the night of one’s Oxford interview.
Unless you are my kid, in which case I’ll have a freak out.
And I tell everyone. I work the grandmother news into all manner of conversations.
Yes, there are lots of other forms of household structure beyond marriage. I’m trying to emphasize here that most of my cohort hadn’t even transitioned to this stage of adulthood.
I was teaching Population Geography, no less!
Babies change everything: sleep, finances, free time, you name it. The professional impacts are actually relatively minor, compared to all the other ways a baby changes life.