The night before my first on-campus interview, I was in a hotel room watching a nanny throw a 6-month-old child around on Nightline. I almost flew back home.
I am a mother and an academic, usually in that order. Last fall, after several years as a lecturer in the city where my husband and I started our law careers, I decided to follow my dream and search for a tenure-track job. With my family's support, I threw geographic restrictions aside and applied for law positions through the national hiring conference, held every October.
As an academic, I was more than prepared for the challenge; as a mother, not at all.
I submitted my CV to the conference appointments register and watched in wonder as interviews began arranging themselves -- nearly 25 of them by the time it was over. I participated in a mock interview, and researched the names of every professor on every one of the hiring committees with which I would be interviewing. (The Internet is a blessing and a curse.) I made an elaborate schedule, complete with interviewer dossiers, room numbers, and other pertinent information. This was going to be easy.
Getting out of town proved more difficult. At the time, I had a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old. My husband finally admitted he was scared to death of being left alone for three nights with both children. We had no family nearby to provide him any support. Eventually, we overcame this initial obstacle: If I would take the baby with me to the conference, then my in-laws would drive five hours to meet us and keep the baby with them for the weekend. Grandma and Grandpa insisted that they were happy to make the trip to spend quality time with the much-ignored second child, and I did not ask any questions.
I then took a deep breath and survived the steady stream of interviews. I carried small photos of my children in my files for luck. During one interview, they fell out. Coincidentally, I never heard from that law school again. Some interviewers raised eyebrows about the time I had spent in Lecturer Land, while others showed genuine appreciation for my teaching experience.
The process of defending my career choices forced me to look back at the four years I had spent in teaching, writing, and publishing. All of my memories seemed to be framed in reference to the pregnancies and births of my children: The book I started writingwhen the baby still nursed every two hours. The article I wrote in a library carrel where I had to smuggle in food because I was pregnant and hungry all the time. The time I went into labor just a day after teaching my last class of the semester.
My last four years have been rich and full, almost too full. In one interview, a female professor I admired asked me, "How in the world did you have two children while maintaining a 12-month administrative job, teaching new classes, and publishing a book and two articles?" I started to craft an impressive answer in my head, but then I realized that she and I both knew the answer to that rhetorical question: I just did.
The baby and I had barely returned from the conference interviews when law schools began calling to invite me to their campuses for the "callback" portion of the interview game. However much I wanted those invitations, traveling posed very real logistical problems for me.
I was the primary caregiver for two small children. And my husband's law practice required more time from him than our children's preschool schedule could give him. We even toyed with hiring a live-in for the duration of the interview season.
Eventually, I began to decline invitations from law schools that were not serious possibilities for our family. I resigned myself to the reality that my husband's sophisticated law practice was portable only to a city of some size. Interviewing at schools outside major metropolitan areas was a waste of everyone's time.
So when law schools from quaint college towns called to schedule an interview, I apologized and declined. Although my mentors told me to go anyway to practice my job talk, I could not afford to waste my domestic capital. In the end, I made six plane trips in as many weeks, juggling my own classes, the holidays, my family, and the latest edition of my book. My family survived, and the investment produced four job offers.
The end was in sight, but my husband and I hardly felt the elation. In the beginning, our best offer (Option A) was from a law school 90 minutes away from a large city. My husband would need to find a job in that city, and we weren't sure if the commute would be feasible. Would our kids go to school in the university town? In the big city? In the small town we would live in halfway between the two? Did I want my children near my work, my husband's work, or our house?
Our next best offer (Option B) was from a law school 30 minutes away from a large city, and we had much the same questions.
With no relatives around, we tried to convince some good friends to keep our kids (and theirs) for a night while we flew to see Option A. They agreed, but then wavered. We ended up taking the kids with us on a very memorable plane and car trip. I quickly realized that I did not need to be in a car with my two children any more hours a day than absolutely necessary. Regrettably, I knew Option A was out.
While we were trying to devise a plan to fly to Option B, two more offers (Options C and D) came over the phone. Both were in large cities and suggested real options for my husband. Moreover, Option C offered to arrange interviews for my husband at local law firms. Facing another plane trip, this time with one sick child and one healthy one, I suggested that my husband go alone. I had already seen the city; he had not.
Meanwhile, the dean at Option B called to say that the faculty there felt I wasn't serious about the offer because we hadn't come to visit yet. I tried to explain our situation, emphasizing the words "small children," "holidays," "grading," and "ear infection," but I could tell he didn't believe me.
Fortunately, my husband returned triumphantly from Option C with his own job offers in hand. We politely declined the offers from Options A and B. The next day, my husband contacted a headhunter at Option D. That night, we realized we were exhausted. We did not have the energy to investigate one more option. Knowing what we did about Option C, we weren't sure what we would find at Option D that would be better. We felt drawn to Option C. We took it.
Maybe the interview process would have been more pleasant had I been able to explore each opportunity and make a decision based on the substance of the job alone. But with each option, I had to carefully weigh the overall happiness of four different people, and of our family as a whole. I was not Lone Candidate, I was Mommy Candidate.
As I ate at nice restaurants and slept in fancy hotels, I felt only guilt knowing that my husband was eating at McDonald's for the third time that week, bleary-eyed from handling nighttime feedings alone.
I know there are many other Mommy Candidates and Daddy Candidates like me out there, but I did not meet many of them. I met professors who were single and childless, those married to spouses who were full-time caregivers, and those married to spouses who worked from home. In fact, one reason that I liked Option C was that I met some Mommy Professors there who seemed a lot like me.
I can't help but remember that I almost abandoned the entire process. There I was -- in a plush hotel in a large city, grateful for the opportunity to watch a television channel other than Nickelodeon. But the first program I saw -- about mothers who unknowingly entrusted their precious children to uncaring and cruel caregivers -- left me feeling guilty for pursuing my dream job.
I'm glad I shook it off.
