Evi Pappa
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Milan, 25 March 2005
Today I remembered Katharine. She had just had her baby. We were facing a deadline to revise our paper. I asked her, since she was American, if she could simply read the draft and tell me whether the English was fine. She said no way. She told me she was overwhelmed and that, if necessary, I should remove her name from the paper. I was stunned. How could someone be too busy to read her own paper?
Now, two months into motherhood, I understand completely. And I thank God I was not enough of an asshole to do what she suggested and drop Katharine from the author list. Now Zheng is in the position I was in then.
And he probably understands too. But not really.
Because unless you become a mother yourself, you cannot fully understand. You are no longer just yourself. You move through the world as the mother of your baby. Hormones unsettle your entire existence. Add to that the insomnia, the weakness, the pain, and the bewildering realization that you do not know what to do with this tiny, fragile doll they have placed in your arms. You are consumed by one overwhelming objective: to make it work, to keep this little being alive and thriving. There is no time for basic things like cutting your nails. Reading a paper is out of the question. You barely have time to read the headlines of the tabloids.
Barcelona, 12 February 2006
The doctor laughed with me. Not politely. Not discreetly. He laughed openly, right in my face.
The blood tests were normal. No better and no worse than usual. Perhaps my iron was a little low. A slight vitamin B12 deficiency.
And the acute back pain?
And the constant exhaustion?
And the fact that I seem to be sick all the time?
“How old is your baby?” he asked.
“She turned one three weeks ago.”
And then he started laughing. When he finally caught his breath, he explained.
“The back pain? You spend your day running after her, lifting her in and out of the stroller, picking her up from the floor.”
“The tiredness? For the last year you have not slept properly for more than a few hours at a time. Your body is functioning on interrupted sleep, constant vigilance, and the kind of low-grade stress that never really switches off.”
“And getting sick all the time? That is a classic. The first year a child goes to daycare, the parents catch everything too.”
That was the diagnosis. Nothing is wrong with me. I am simply the mother of a one-year-old. A woman trying, largely on her own, with no help beyond daycare, to raise her child. A woman who has not taken off the other hats she wears. She is still an academic. She still wants to earn tenure. She still wants to succeed. And she is trying to do all of this at once.
Barcelona, 27 April 2007
I need to finish the revision this weekend. Otherwise my coauthors will think I am holding them back. I also need to finish the new paper and submit a decent version to the summer conferences, make sure my parents will be fine if I leave them with the baby for a few days in June, and buy the tickets to Greece before the prices skyrocket.
She looked well today. There should be no surprises, no phone calls asking me to come and pick her up because she feels unwell. After the meeting with the master’s students, I might even get one extra hour to work on the revisions.
It is spring. Life is renewed everywhere I look from the train window. Birds fly frenetically, trying to catch the bugs that are themselves trying to steal a free lunch from the beds of the blossoming flowers. I wish I had one extra day to surrender to this frenzy, with my little bud exploring nature and submit ourselves to it.
Tomorrow is Saturday. We could do exactly that. Instead, I have another kind of submission waiting for me: a resubmission.
Everything outside is green. It brings hope. One day, life will not be this hectic. One day, I will be allowed to enjoy motherhood properly—perhaps when I get tenure, perhaps when this resubmission finally works out.
Until then, I carry two heavy bags. One contains a tenure clock. The other, a toddler. Sometimes I cannot carry them both. I lose my balance, get tired, put one bag down, and keep climbing. But guilt makes me turn back and pick up the one I left behind. The constant back and forth makes the ascent exhausting.
Guilty for doing my job and leaving my baby behind.
Guilty for spending time with my baby and neglecting my career.
Guilty either way.
Bern, 7 May 2008
Finally, it has started to get warmer in the Swiss Alps. It was about time. There is nothing I truly like about this place.
On paper, my life has improved enormously compared with my previous job. I am an associate professor now. I have a large office and a secretary. I earn three times more in nominal terms. I live in an apartment with a garden. I have a brand-new car and a wonderful daughter. And despite having all this, I want to run away. As soon as possible.
In Bern, I receive constant reminders of the kind of mother I am apparently supposed to be ashamed of becoming. I leave my three-year-old at school from 9:00 to 17:00, just as I used to do in Barcelona. But here, whenever I arrive to pick her up, the disapproving looks of the Swiss mothers stop me in my tracks.
Their eyes seem to say: “There she is. The mother who does not even take her child home for lunch.”
I teach two courses. I want and need to do research. If I would follow their model, I would leave my daughter at 9:00, travel to work, begin at 9:45, leave again at noon, pick her up, prepare lunch, feed her, return her to kindergarten at 15:00, go back to work, and then leave once more at 17:00 to collect her. I cannot work like that. I need uninterrupted time to think.
Research is not a task that can be sliced into one-hour fragments. Just when the engine begins to warm up, I am forced to shut it down. By the time I restart, the idea is gone. Nothing meaningful survives constant interruption. The Swiss mothers do not understand this. Or perhaps they do, and simply made a different choice.
In any case, they look at me with disapproval and at my daughter with pity. Now that spring has arrived, picnic parties are being organized. We are not invited. We are never invited. The snow has preserved these women’s hearts remarkably well. I wonder whether the warmth of spring will ever reach them.
These are fragments from the diary I kept during those years, which now feel very far away. My daughter now is twenty-one and I am writing from the large, comfortable chair of a full professor (called cátedra in Spanish and κάθεδρα in Greek). I made it.
The revisions were submitted. The papers were published. The tenure clock kept ticking until, one day, it stopped. My daughter grew up. She survived long hours in daycare, childhood illnesses, and a mother who was often tired, often distracted, and frequently convinced she was failing at everything.
I survived too. The guilt never disappeared entirely, but it became quieter. The two heavy bags I once struggled to carry are still with me, but they no longer feel as if they are pulling me down the mountain. Looking back, what I remember most is not the exhaustion. It is the persistence. The stubborn decision, repeated day after day, to keep going. To write one more paper. To answer one more referee report, to prepare one more discussion. To pick up my daughter from school. To cook a nice meal. To dance and sing whatever rhythm she dictated. To read her a story in the night without falling asleep. To wake up the next morning and do it all again. At the time, it felt impossible. From here, it looks like a life. A very full one. And, despite everything, a very beautiful one.
I have never taken an extra year because at the end I did not need it, and I do not think it would have made a difference for the career path I have followed, but it may well have changed the scale of my ambitions. I probably lost two good publications. More importantly, I missed a small mountain of opportunities.
I skipped conferences where everyone else was exchanging ideas and future coauthorships while I was at home exchanging diapers and negotiating bedtime. I did less networking. I drank less conference wine. I asked fewer famous economists whether they had read my latest paper. Instead, I stayed home and took care of my daughter. Would my CV be better if I had outsourced a bit more motherhood? My value for happiness does not allow me to ask these questions.
Would my life be better? That is a much harder regression to run and definitely subject to the Luca’s critique.
What I can say is that to me six extra hours per day for the first four years would have probably be the extra time I needed. This is 8760 hours extra which coincidentally is one year! But as all of us know consumption smoothing is key for welfare.