By John Lemuel

"Hi, I'm calling for Mrs. Lemuel?"

"Umm, she can't talk now. She's busy."

"Whaddya mean, she's busy?"

"Who is this?"

"I'm her husband!"

"Where are you?!?"

"About an hour away."

"Well, drive safely, because you're not gonna make it."

So was my second child was fatherless for her first 45 minutes in this world.

The two-body problem—when academics meet and marry in graduate school, then find the job market not conducive to subsequent cohabitation—has received ample attention in these pages and elsewhere. But I'd like to offer my experiences with the "three-body problem," which comes when you add offspring to the mix.

I had accepted a one-year position 300 miles from home. We were already expecting before I started the job; otherwise the pregnancy might not have happened at all. Two bodies require a certain proximity for such activity, which takes a hit when you're gone half the week. But the balance of pros and cons tilted against moving the family for a short-term gig.

So I scuttled the clunker that got me through graduate school, and replaced it with a car half its age, with lots of miles already on it and lots left in it. Each week, I would drive out on Monday evenings and return late Thursday nights, teaching a tall stack of courses in between—and listening during the drive to seemingly every book put on tape.

As my wife's due date approached, I pressed for any sign of the onset of labor before driving off on Monday night. Inevitably, her water broke early on a Tuesday morning. So no sooner had I arrived than I quit the campus after e-mailing some hastily drafted contingency plans to my students. But the distance was too great and my daughter arrived before I did.

When we moved from our two-body problem to the three-body version, we learned a simple truth: A child must be attended by an adult at all times, a rule that is easy in the articulation and challenging in the execution.

Our first child was born when I was working as an adjunct and writing my dissertation. My wife taught in the local school district, ending her day around 3, just as I was due to start teaching my courses. To our napping daughter, the transition was seamless. She never saw me idling in the car, fixing my eyes on the rearview mirror, tearing off the moment my wife rounded the end of the block.

Not blessed with great riches or an available grandparent nearby, we hired sitters sparingly. But when we did, my wife was adamant about paying them a decent wage, whereas my instincts were to factor in the degree of difficulty. Changing diapers might deserve combat pay, but watching TV while an infant sleeps takes no special skills or effort, so it seemed we could scale it down. But my wife wouldn't budge, for several reasons. If we consistently pay well, she reasoned, they'll readily agree each time we ask, reducing the hassle of lining up a sitter. And less hassle was worth the extra cost. Plus they're college students; they'd rather be doing other things.

She did a lot of baby-sitting in college, I pointed out. How much was she paid? It was different then, she insisted, though I couldn't see how. Minimum wage had barely changed in that interval, and our standard of living was way lower than the suburban professionals who had hired her, sometimes to watch three or four kids. She would not yield, however. I think her conscience wouldn't let her take part in, or benefit from, wage oppression for "women's work."

But it wasn't always women we hired. The few times I had to ask the Monday-Wednesday-Friday students if any could baby-sit during my Tuesday-Thursday class, college guys jumped at the chance to pocket some beer money.

The year of my long commute, my wife took a leave from her teaching job to get her master's degree. I could watch our daughter on Mondays and Fridays, and we paid a daylong sitter on Wednesdays, when I was gone. But that sitter wouldn't take newborns, so when our second child was born early in the spring semester, our mothers, friends, and neighbors all took turns filling in. We were fortunate to be in a house on a block where we could be part of a small community. It may or may not take a village to raise a child, but we relied on what seemed like half the neighborhood.

Eventually I found a tenure-track job. When we relocated, we sure wished we could take our neighbors with us. Breaking in to a new neighborhood was not as easy the second time around. The new house faced the campus, with a dormitory squarely opposite; most of the houses on our block were rentals, and a house of worship took up the other side. There were upsides to all of that—a short walk to work, the church parking lot, where the kids could ride their bikes—but the big downside was few permanent or long-term neighbors.

Since my wife had a master's, my college offered her an adjunct job teaching one course. It paid her a pitiable amount, further reduced once the cost of a sitter was deducted. Fortunately a graduate-school friend from our old block put us in touch with a niece enrolled at my new employer, who reliably watched our kids that first year. Unfortunately, she then graduated and put us back to square one.

At the end of our street, we saw parents dropping off their kids with a woman who watched six or eight at a time. We envied how close she was but assumed we could never afford her. So we patched together students for the next couple of years, paying them handsomely to keep them coming back. One student who boasted lots of experience and offered to babysit "anytime" was clearly stunned when I paid her. She'd always babysat for friends and neighbors for free.

I wished I'd known that before I wrote the check.

For faculty events, we found ourselves in competition with other professors for the most desirable sitters. Early-childhood-education majors were in particularly high demand. They arrived with their own bag of surprises, like Mary Poppins: whipping out Mad Gab for the older ones, sparkle nail polish for the little one. They arrived like rock stars, with our girls cheering, screaming, crying for joy. It was a challenge to book them far enough in advance, or risk getting shut out.

But relying on college students means adapting to new circumstances every semester. The most reliable sitter from the fall semester announces she's student teaching in the spring, and she won't be around in the summer. We tend to find one who's always available, put her on speed dial, lose track of the others, and find ourselves in a panic when our favorite has a conflict. It's wrong to presume so much with busy students, but a reliable sitter enables complacency to set in, until we're forced to refresh the Rolodex with some new names and contact information.

When our oldest two were in school and our third was potty-trained, my wife returned to full-time work, teaching in a middle school. We would need daylong care, and the second income would enable us to afford it. One mom we knew offered day care for $25 a day, 50 weeks a year, to be paid year-round (whether our child came or not, simply to hold the spot). We finally inquired with the woman at the end of our street. She had an opening and agreed to watch our youngest any hours we wanted, for her standard rate: $2.50 an hour, with lunch and snacks included. We kicked ourselves for not investigating sooner.

She kept a time card for each child, calculating our charges to the minute and the penny, charging for five whole days barely more than we had paid students for only a few hours a week. When we tried to round it up and overpay her a few bucks, she applied the balance toward the next month. Although it felt like wage oppression, it wasn't: Her husband was a banker, and her house and yard were lavishly maintained. She was simply a financially secure empty nester who loved kids and surrounded herself with them by choice.

The interval between birth and bus-riding seems short, in retrospect, but interminable in the process. There's nothing like arriving late and harried to the dentist, with a toddler in tow because the sitter failed to appear, only to hear a saccharine, "We'll need to reschedule," with the next opening 10 weeks away. At least that should be time enough to line up a sitter.

John Lemuel is the pseudonym of an associate professor in the social sciences at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.