Grace Weishi Gu

University of California, Santa Cruz

There is a fundamental information problem surrounding pregnancy and motherhood in academia and more broadly. Precisely because every mother’s experience is so heterogeneous — different bodies, different complications, different support systems — it is genuinely hard to make policies, or even gather advice that applies to one’s own case. I remember walking into Francine Blau’s office as a PhD student, nervously asking about her experience, and quietly watching classmates who already had young children, trying to triangulate what my own future might look like. I was collecting data points the only way I could. I wish a blog like this one had existed then — not because it would have given me a single clean answer, but because it is only through collecting facts and data that we learn the true distribution, and that we learn we are not alone.

That information problem is also a policy problem. If decision-makers — department chairs, colleagues, and university administrators — never hear well-sampled experiences representing the full distribution, they are likely to default to priors. The result is a one-size-fits-all policy built on incomplete data. This blog exists to fix the information problem, one story at a time. This is mine.

Let me set the stage. I made a deliberate decision not to have children before tenure. I do not need to run any model to know that, for me, “double guilt” for having a baby before tenure — not giving my best shot at my career or my baby during the irreplaceable early years — would make the one-year tenure clock extension trivial. So I waited.

I got tenure. Then, freshly at 36, I had my first. Then, two years later, boom, twins. The universe, apparently, has a sense of humor (fact: older women are more likely to have twins).

The Physical Load: “Female Bodies Are Built for This”

When I described my physical discomfort to my father, he offered the following wisdom: “You will be fine, female bodies are built for this.”

He was half right. I am mostly fine now. The process, however, was something else entirely.

By my third trimester, I was 35 pounds heavier than pre-pregnancy, all distributed helpfully in the front, turning every movement into a slow-motion obstacle course. I waddled. Even when sitting, I could not lean forward to reach my laptop comfortably for a full month.

Then came recovery. My first delivery at 36 felt manageable. My twins at 38 felt like my body had filed a formal grievance. Hip pain, back pain, diastasis recti — my abdominal muscles had simply given up and separated. I have never felt more physically disabled than in those first 18 months. Sitting was painful. Walking, at times, was not possible.

The sleep deprivation deserves its own line in any honest accounting. In the first 6 months after the twins arrived, I had fewer than 10 full nights of sleep. The rest involved waking 1-3 times per night, each window lasting 30 minutes to 2 hours. My husband could nap during the day. I could not — I was either breastfeeding or pumping around the clock or working. The brain fog that followed has been stubborn. My short-term memory today is not what it was. I am an economist who now sometimes forgets what she walked into a room for.

And the milk. I was determined to give my COVID baby and my super-preemie twins as much antibody protection as possible, so I committed to getting them my own milk. But newborns don’t magically know how to feed themselves even when the breasts are right in front of them; the mother has to find the right way of holding the baby that works for the pair and help them to latch. I had lactation consultants, had my daughter’s possible tongue-tie released, and had painful mastitis from my breasts not being emptied. I don’t think I ever got it right. Then I switched to pumping; it was a relief. But what I did not fully appreciate is that to get enough milk for one or two little humans, I needed power pumping: 20 minutes on, 10 minutes off, for about 1 hour at a stretch, repeated every few hours, day and night. For 6 months each post-partum, I sat on Zoom calls and wrote papers with pumps attached. I would like to think this improved my multitasking skills.

The Mental Load: A Project That Never Ends

Motherhood is a lifelong research project that has many moving pieces as the project grows. The mental load to keep track of the regular moving pieces and to deal with the unexpected ones is much more consuming than any revise and resubmit.

The regular mental load is relentless: researching body changes due to childbearing and infant development, introducing solids, vetting nannies, finding preschools, arranging after-school programs, juggling school events, and planning summers. Especially in the first 5 years, just when you have mastered one stage, the project updates itself. New version, no patch notes.

Then there are the hormone changes nobody mentions until a nurse hands you a postpartum survey and you realize you have been waiting for someone to ask. After my deliveries, the estrogen and progesterone crash hit hard. Elevated cortisol kept me in a permanent state of high stress. People who knew me before described me as the most optimistic person in any room. Postpartum, there were stretches where life felt joyless, and my thoughts drifted to dark corners.

On top of the regular moving pieces, I learned to expect the unexpected mental shocks.

My first was born in July 2020, during the COVID lockdown, before vaccines. Daycare facilities were either for essential workers only or closed down--of course, we were also hesitant to send my first newborn to any daycare, worrying about her being exposed to COVID. Finding reliable nannies was a months-long ordeal. I still remember a male colleague — with no children — casually suggesting his wife had heard a daycare was open, so why hadn’t I sent my few-month-old there? I am proud of not flipping out right at that moment.

But the real shock came with the twins.

At 23 weeks pregnant, I developed cervical funneling. My doctor performed a cerclage surgery to extend the pregnancy, with an uncertain success rate: extension of anywhere between 1 and 9 weeks. Afterward, a NICU pediatrician came to walk me through the statistics: infant survival rate at a 24-week birth (65%), probability of severe complications including mobility and brain function (25%); then at a 25-week birth .... She noted, carefully, that I could still decide whether to continue, since I had not yet crossed 24 weeks.

I have worked with statistics my entire career. I have never found them harder to swallow than in that moment, when the numbers were about the babies in my own body.

I was placed on bed rest and scrambled to finish my parts in papers, write promised recommendation letters, and hand over my teaching material to the kind colleagues who took over my courses — all of it accelerated, all of it surreal. Weeks later, an ultrasound showed clear dilation. I was rushed into an emergency C-section at 26 weeks and 3 days.

The boys were born at 2.5 pounds each, each one the size of my hand.

They spent 3 months in the NICU. That stretch coincided with flu season. My toddler, freshly enrolled in preschool and apparently a highly efficient pathogen collector, brought home every virus in circulation. One by one, the rest of our family fell sick. I was the only one healthy enough to visit the NICU every day.

Every single day: pumping at home, pumping at NICU, taking care of the boys there, digesting their good and bad news, working, pumping at home again.

They came home on Christmas. Miraculously healthy (mostly, stories for another time).

Even writing this now, I feel the tension in my shoulders.

What Kept Me Going

My research. My coauthors. They kept me sane. In those months of pumping through Zoom calls, writing through brain fog, juggling between NICU and home, the work gave me back something I badly needed: a space where I understood the moving pieces, where the logic held, where I was, still, fully myself.

I love my children. I love my work. I did not want to choose between them, and I was lucky enough not to have to before tenure — but only because of delaying family.

The women coming up behind me should not have to depend on that.

What One Year Does Not Cover

Birthing mothers carry extra physical and mental loads that do not fit inside 12 months. Pregnancy itself can consume much of that year before the baby even arrives. Physical and mental recovery — real recovery, not “cleared at the six-week checkup” recovery — takes far longer, especially with complications, age, and multiples.

Many private companies already offer longer parental leave for the birthing mother than for the non-birthing parent. Why do universities, institutions that pride themselves on evidence-based reasoning, apply the same flat policy to a birthing mother of twins and a non-birthing parent of a healthy singleton? Non-birthing parents’ contribution is irreplaceable, but pretending the loads are equivalent and then offering one year to cover all of it is a policy that does not see eye to eye with the evidence.

One year is not enough. It is time to update the model.