Balancing Act

Stuck in Transition

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By Eleanor Robinson

I was supposed to have a baby this summer. Like many women who are junior faculty members, I spent my 20s in graduate school earning my Ph.D. and my early 30s getting a full-time (but, in my case, non-tenure-track) teaching job. Then, last November, my perfectly planned first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at six weeks.

My husband and I had only just started to get our heads around the idea that the family we had dreamed about was finally going to become a reality. We had met in graduate school, both pursuing Ph.D.'s in the same overcrowded field. Fortunately for my academic career, he became increasingly disillusioned with the scholarly life and left to pursue other work.

Within a year of our marriage, I had earned my doctorate and landed a renewable-contract position at a very good liberal-arts college with a reasonable teaching load, excellent students, stimulating colleagues, and full faculty benefits.

I've read all the stories in The Chronicle and elsewhere about being a woman in the academy -- about when is the right time to have a baby and about the difficulties of balancing family life with professional advancement. So when we decided to start our family, we planned a pregnancy that would not conflict with my teaching schedule. And much to our delight -- and thanks to some precise charting on my part -- I got pregnant right on schedule.

The baby was supposed to arrive in late June or the first week of July, leaving us the rest of the summer to adjust before I had to return to teaching full time in fall. I miscarried in the middle of preparing for my third-year review.

I know that my department head and colleagues would have been understanding and supportive if I had told them. But I just couldn't.

A week later, a cover story in The Chronicle reported on a study about how babies alter academic careers, led by Mary Ann Mason of the University of California at Berkeley. According to the article, "While having children, particularly early on, can severely damage the job prospects of women, fatherhood is actually a boon to academic men." Women who have children within five years of completing their Ph.D., the study said, find themselves far less likely to achieve academic success than men.

Even in the midst of my emotional turmoil, I did the math and wondered angrily when those of us who had decided not to have children during graduate school were supposed to reproduce.

I was hoping to parlay a good third-year review into a tenure-track position at my college, or at least, into a better chance at a nonacademic job in my field. At that particular moment, then, outing myself as an active "breeder" seemed like an unwise career move.

I needed to compartmentalize my emotions in order to get my work done. I had classes to teach, papers to grade, and students to meet. And I had to complete a personal statement for my third-year review by the end of the following week.

I was not so devastated that I could not write. But it took a force of will to get back into the mind-set of thinking about myself as competent, accomplished, and successful. The personal statement needed to be serious yet optimistic, reflective yet not self-indulgent. It had to be appropriately self-congratulatory while also outlining avenues for growth.

In the two weeks after the miscarriage, writing about my professional development in rosy terms proved to be too daunting. After numerous failed attempts, I requested an extension.

Consultations with close friends assured me that the chairwoman of my review committee would understand the circumstances. Nonetheless, I wimped out. I told her that I needed another week because of "some family problems."

I just could not face having to tell her about the miscarriage -- a conversation that I knew I could not have without crying -- in the midst of working so hard to present myself as a confident teacher and developing scholar. It was just too much to balance.

In the end, that was the simplest reason that I did not say anything about my miscarriage: I could not talk about the loss without crying. And justified or not, I could not get past the thought that women who cry at work cannot easily, in the next breath (or on the next page), describe themselves as competent professionals.

The academic year ended well. My chairwoman had built some extra time into the review timeline and accepted my statement when I finished it the following week. By the end of the spring semester, I was pleased to receive the committee's favorable assessment of my promise as a scholar, a community member, and a teacher.

Experiencing a miscarriage (an all-too-common setback for women trying to conceive) highlighted for me just how much I felt stuck in an extended period of transition.

Despite almost nine months of trying to conceive, guided by my careful charts and continued reading about fertility (I am trained as an academic after all -- what better way to tackle a problem than by reading about it?), we have not gotten pregnant again.

At some point we will probably pursue medical intervention or adoption. In the meantime, I am a top candidate for a nonacademic position, and I'm waiting to hear about the tenure-track possibilities at my college. Until I know where we are going to be living, it is hard to move forward on other fronts.

As a result, I feel as though I am waiting for forces beyond my control to determine the course of my future. I am waiting to begin my family. I am waiting for my professional paths to develop. And as I wait, I have started to wonder how many other women share some version of my story. How many other women (or men) are closeted wannabe parents trying to negotiate the sometimes-painful contradictions between building a family and developing a career?

In the meantime, I am working to believe all of the well-meaning, compassionate people who tell me that these things -- family, career paths -- clarify themselves with time.