Lisa B. Kahn

University of Rochester

I had 3 baby girls in the span of 4 years. I was fortunate to have uncomplicated pregnancies, straightforward births, and, before that, very little stress in getting pregnant. Our babies were all decent sleepers. I “only” breastfed each of them for 6 months; I stopped when I was ready. I have an equal partner at home. We live in an easy town where our commutes are about 10 minutes. I was already tenured when I had my kids -- not because we waited for tenure but just because that’s how it worked out. And my girls are REALLY cute -- objectively speaking.

The stories from the incredible women in this series indicate that many women go through so much more. I did not have to be superhuman to have and raise my babies. But the struggles they mention -- outside of severe health issues -- are universal.

I too had sheer exhaustion and discomfort in the first and third trimesters. While I have a majority of wonderful supportive colleagues, students, I spent quite a bit of time in my first pregnancy convincing my university to provide parental leave. This process included way too much time spent on benchmarking research (helped by many fellow academic moms!) and having those oh-so-fun conversations explaining why I should get any leave at all — I am sure EVERY academic mom can relate.

Once a baby came, I too faced the disruptions every other hour or so to pump at the office. Even though you are just sitting there while pumping and maybe you should be able to still keep your brain, you can’t. And you’re thinking about what time you need to pump all day long and crafting every part of your day around it. I experienced a surprising) baby blues after I stopped breastfeeding each time, which added a layer of stress to the recovery. I did also concede to teach my most taxing class when deciding how to apply the newly offered teaching reduction, which didn’t help. It took me until my third baby to realize that was bs.

More generally, I had no time to get my life in order and let my body recover from what it had been through. Academics have full time jobs on top of our research and very little time outside of normal working hours to do it. It is a sophisticated game of Tetris to get all the pieces to fall together. The sleep loss, even though mine was minimal, still cumulated to 2.5 years of interrupted nights across the babies. These effects compound. Being honest, I probably had 7 years of at least partial brain fog.

It wasn’t until my youngest turned 2 that I came out. I have more energy now and a more organized worklife. I say no a lot, carve out large chunks of time for my “real” work, and leave a minority to the other work. I feel like I am back and I love it. And my kid are STILL really cute, objectively speaking. If I had experienced anything more difficult with any of my babies, if I didn’t have an equal partner, if I didn’t have a tremendous amount of help, if I didn’t have a great deal of autonomy in my job, if I didn’t have incredible role models from my own working parents who shared everything at home 50-50, I don’t know if I would be here yet, if ever.

I know that everything I am saying is dripping in privilege. But so is being able to have your job and your family without dealing with most of this. Did I HAVE to have so many kids so close together of it was such a disruption? Does anyone ever ask a man that? (And, yes! we very much wanted them.) I tried in this piece to only mention the aspects that a birthing parent would experience, even though many other aspects of parenting disproportionately fall to women. Is one year enough? There is no way to answer that. But gender neutral policies are not in effect gender neutral. The birthing parent experiences the disruption differently. All families -- however they come together -- are beautiful. And, we want policies that encourage involvement of fathers and all other caretakers. Still, there is no sharing the load of most pregnancy and new-born related disruptions, so why on earth isn’t there more compensating time? Even if women have varied experiences, there is no such thing as easy.

The length of the adjustment on the clock is only part of the point. The point is to take into account the path someone has been on. The point is to be a profession that does not punish disruptions that impact only one-third (or less!) of our profession, but to view the person as a whole. Any rational decision maker should be able to see the potential that hasn’t yet made it onto the page and put their thumb on the scale.