SAHM thoughts

There are a few blogs that I follow that are SAHMs.  Some have been Stay-at-home-moms forever, some are newly resigned from professional careers.  All offer me a window into a world I don't inhabit.  But I do really like to visit.

I love the weekends.  I love the long weekends.  I love pretending to be a SAHM from time to time.  But mostly, I love it because it is temporary.

I really, really loved my maternity leave.  I got to pretend to be a SAHM for about 6 months, and then a part-time SAHM for another 9 months.

In fact, I had a ridiculously awesome maternity leave situation.  Professor-life has its serious perks, and at my university maternity leave is perhaps the best one.  I got two semesters off from teaching, full pay, but had to participate in service stuff, and research productivity was supposed to be the same.  Given how my teaching schedule works and that I have tenure, I backed way the hell off from work for about 6 months beyond my formal maternity leave as well.  Yep, that's almost a year and a half.

For the first few months after M was born, I did email every few days, but only answered the emails I felt like answering.  When M was about 8 weeks old I started holding office hours in a local coffee shop once or twice a week to meet with my graduate students.  But, I spent most of that time organizing pictures of my baby.

By the time M was about 5 months old I was kind of ready for a little bit more work.  On my longer days at school, I would drop her off at daycare around 9am and pick her up around 3:30pm or 4pm, Monday through Friday.  Some days I would drop her off later and pick her up earlier.  That flexibility was a perfect amount of time at each of my "jobs".

This fall has been so much harder.  This was the first semester I was back to my regular time demands, teaching a very big lecture course with a lab and all the associated graduate teaching assistants, a pretty heavy university service load, and significant dept service tasks, a lot of graduate students in my lab at the point where they really need my attention, a couple of manuscripts that had to be submitted/turned around, etc.  And then my husband hasn't been so well.  He got a hernia and hasn't done well with the recovery from surgery, so I have been almost a single mom in terms of all the parenting duties since September.

But this is still the best job for parenting, from my perspective.

I used to complain like mad about how hard and stressful my job is.  I worked about 10-12 hours 7 days a week every week of the year from 1996-2009.  I spent 3-6 months each year in Africa.  Stressful, hell yes, but it was mostly self-imposed.  I then cut down to about 10 hours 6 days a week for a couple of years, and dropped down to taking weekends off for the most part once I got pregnant.

I did work my ass off in those early years.  There were definitely afternoons when I laid my head on my desk and cried from all the stress and pressure.  But it is good that I made all that effort b/c I would not have this awesome job had I not. Someone else who was willing to work such ridiculous hours would have my job instead.

While I would not really recommend my path to parenthood, given all the uncertainties and tears and sadness, and feared regret, now that I have my baby this is a wonderful age and career stage to do so.

Career-wise I have a lot of projects and collaborations.  I find it easier to come up with paper ideas and I have graduate students and younger colleagues very motivated to do the heavy lifting in exchange for the ideas and support.  I teach classes I've taught many times before, so prep time can be more variable rather than always requiring a huge effort.  I have enough gravitas that I can get away with being a bit more remote with students, including my own graduate students.  That sounds bad, but hopefully you know what I mean.

And on the personal side, I have a lot less to prove these days.  I kind of feel like I accomplished some of the big things I wanted to do, or at least I am close enough to realize that they don't matter as much to me as I thought they would.  So I am comfortable falling into a SAHM role from time to time, and rather enjoy the perception of being in a low-stress job (as if SAHM is a low-stress job*).  I don't care about meeting people through my husband and being seen as "just his younger wife who takes care of their little baby."  That would have driven me nuts 5 years ago and really pissed me off.  But now, I honestly don't give a crap if someone doesn't know about my academic position and accomplishments.

* Honestly, I think it would be incredibly stressful to be 30 years old and staying home with small kids.  Not only are you responsible for them 24/7, but you have to teach them stuff like manners and using the potty.  AND, if it were me, I would have constantly felt like I was missing out on my career options.  I still had shit to prove to myself and everyone else.

Anyway, all of this just a really long post to say that I am really grateful for having an awesome "early childhood education program" where my daughter learns things like manners and sharing and all kinds of other cool things I never would have thought to teach her if we'd been hanging out at home together all the time.  I don't have to feel so guilty about letting her watch Elmo on the weekends b/c she doesn't watch any TV during the week.  And I am really grateful that I have a solid career with really good pay.  I can afford to pay someone else to clean my house and change my sheets every week.  And I can buy cute little crafty things like this that make me feel all crafty but don't take much time.  I get to pretend to be a SAHM with essentially none of the stress/hard work/monotony that comes along with it.  Not a bad situation, not bad at all.

Me is very, very lucky.  :)