Giulia Rivolta

eCampus University

Trying to be productive during motherhood is like attempting to climb a mountain while walking backwards: dangerous, excruciating, and with a sheer drop right in front of you that sometimes looks more appealing than continuing the ascent.

That mountain’s slope changes every five minutes, the weather is unpredictable, and at some point you are left with a guide who, instead of helping you, just looks at you and cries.

The truth is, no matter how much you’ve trained at the gym, your glutes will never be ready. Sometimes, instead of moving upward, the only thing you can manage is not sliding down too fast. And people who have never worn hiking shoes will think it’s just a matter of organization.

My journey into motherhood began even before I got pregnant, when we discovered infertility. Eventually (and unexpectedly), I was lucky enough to conceive naturally, avoiding a medically assisted reproduction path that would have likely wiped out my productivity, which was already low at the time due to this unexpected difficulty.

During pregnancy, I was always sleepy, hungry, and afraid. In my seventh month, I was hospitalized for threatened preterm labor, and soon after doctors realized my daughter wasn’t growing as she should. From that point on, I was put on bed rest. Even sitting triggered contractions, so I worked a few hours a day from home, half-reclined, in increasingly creative positions, because my belly had taken over the natural place of my laptop. I could have authored a new Kamasutra.

My daughter was born at the beginning of June, small but healthy and strong. I thought I had reached the summit only to realize there was an Everest behind me, which, facing backwards, I simply hadn’t seen. At least my legs had finally stopped swelling.

The first three months passed in a blur of crying (hers and mine), a two-week hospital stay for a severe ear infection, during which I caught gastroenteritis, and the discovery that my daughter had gastroesophageal reflux.

Reflux in newborns is usually considered physiological. My daughter, however, didn’t care about pediatricians’ opinion and spent her days inconsolable, unable to sleep from the pain. That’s when I discovered babywearing, which is essentially like being pregnant again, except now you also sweat.

When I was asked to return to work in mid-September, I agreed but I was exhausted, physically and psychologically. I was a postdoc at the time, and in Italy, if you have a child during your postdoc, only five months are officially counted for career purposes (another piece of evidence that Italians have a sense of humor). In reality, almost two years had already passed since the beginning of my journey.

When I tried to start working again, I realized I couldn’t remember anything. Along with my daughter, it felt like all the knowledge I had accumulated over years of study and research had simply exited my body. Not only did my mind feel empty, but my memory simply didn’t work anymore.

Motherhood had changed me completely. Professionally, it’s not just a drop in productivity, it’s the loss of relationships and opportunities, with effects that compound over time, especially at the beginning of a career.

And yet, none of this shows up in any CV. There is no line for “kept going under impossible constraints”, no metric for “did not slide all the way down”. But if productivity is about output, motherhood is about survival, and for a while, survival should be the only meaningful indicator.

What remains visible, however, is a gap: a couple of years with fewer (or no) publications, fewer conferences, fewer collaborations. The mountain disappears from view; the gap stays on the record.

Whenever I apply for academic positions, I never know whether to mention that I had a child. Will it be taken into account? If so, how? In practice, here in Italy, some application procedures ask candidates to report parental leave periods, while others do not. The treatment of motherhood is often left to individual committees, with little consistency across institutions and selection processes.

The result is that motherhood becomes simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible: visible in its consequences, invisible in the evaluation criteria. Everyone can see the publication gap, but whether the reasons behind it matter depends largely on who is reading the CV.

My impression, admittedly anecdotal, is that the people I most often see succeeding in academic competitions are men, or women without children. I hope that one day we will have systematic data allowing us to measure whether this perception reflects a genuine structural bias. Until then, many academic mothers are left wondering whether the most consequential years of their lives will be interpreted as evidence of resilience or simply as a lack of productivity.