Balancing Act

Part-Time Single Parent

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By Jon T. Coleman

When is a stuffed bear not a stuffed bear, but a naked mole rat? If I fell into quicksand, how would you rescue me? Why is the street hard?

Thus begins my daily inquisition. Harry, my 4-year-old catechist, excels at asking tough questions from the backseat of the station wagon on the way to preschool. Part Zen-master, part Cartoon Network junkie, he continually shipwrecks me at wit's end. I have actually resorted to talking gibberish in order to distract him long enough to change the subject.

"Why is the street hard? Well, hmm, it's hard because cars ubeeygeebegobble -- hey, look there's a T-Rex in the bushes."

Parenting skills such as these are not easily won. It takes years to become desperate enough to ride herd on young children with any dexterity. For example, the other morning the dog pilfered my 1-year-old daughter's soggy diaper while I tried to catch the former owner as she squiggled under her crib in search of a toy. My son, brushing his teeth in the bathroom, slipped off his footstool, whacking his shin on the stool's edge. As he howled, Louise, who shot under the crib like a chipmunk, realized she was not a scampering rodent but rather a stuck toddler, and added her voice to the chorus of screams.

A seasoned parent knows exactly what to do in this situation: Let the kids cry, and sprint after the dog. If he ingests too much of the diaper's high-tech, super-absorbent stuffing along with the urine that he adores, his intestines will clog shut and you will have to add taking a constipated basset hound to the vet to an already overloaded to-do list.

Since starting my first tenure-track job in history this past fall, the level of difficulty of my child rearing has been upped. While I started my new job, my partner kept her university position at a Midwestern college three hours south of our new home. She drives down on Tuesday mornings and returns on Thursday afternoons. In between, I'm the primary-care dude.

The decision to let me oversee our children three mornings and two evenings every week of the school year was an anxious one. The most worry hovered around the children's clothes. I'm an imaginative kid dresser, mingling paisleys with stripes, white socks with red, frilly dresses with Chuck Taylor's. For my son, the antidote to my exuberant costuming was letting him pick his own outfits. Today he's wearing a Martha's Vineyard T-shirt, beach shorts, and sandals. A perfect ensemble, if it were 90 degrees outside instead of 40.

I don't know how this experiment will end. When the semester started, our household resembled one of those World War II submarines you see in the movies plunging to the ocean bottom to escape depth charges hurled from an enemy destroyer on the surface.

We held our breath as the pressure built. The seams of our life groaned and creaked. Yet no rivets popped, no water gushed in. Untested in battle conditions, our bonds proved as steely as we had hoped. Still, this arrangement is young, and we're afraid to dive deeper.

Like most academics, my partner and I wrestle with an affection problem. (I label my significant other my "partner" with considerable ambivalence. The bland political correctness of the term makes me ill. But if I think of her as a "pardner" of the Starsky and Hutch, Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise variety, the notion heats up. I can definitely see us eating doughnuts on a stakeout, dying together in a Bolivian crossfire, or flying off a cliff in a Thunderbird.)

We love each other, our kids, and our jobs. Last spring we chose to increase the stress on the first two relationships in order to enhance the third.

After finishing my dissertation and teaching as an adjunct in her department for several years, I received two outside job offers. In response, her college offered me a tenure-track position. With the solution to our dual-body predicament in our grasp, we let it go.

Grateful as we were to the fine people in her department, we chose a third option: My partner would keep her job, and I would accept the one at the more prestigious university up the road. She would be eating doughnuts in the car alone.

It was a scary decision, enhanced by the looks of worry our plan evoked in old friends and new acquaintances. At first, those uncertain reactions fueled my doubts. More than once this past summer, nightmares of broken marriages and screwed-up kids rattled me from sleep at 2:30 in the morning. Unable to quiet my brain, I would slip out of bed to commune with the unpacked boxes in the living room and ponder the ramifications of not having made the easy choice.

One thought helped me get back to sleep: Ease may not be the value I want guiding my days on earth. Living should involve some risk, strain, and discomfort. Existence would be pretty disappointing if it all could be done from a beanbag and still be considered worthy. Leading a big, full life should provoke some uncertain stares.

Also, as my father explained to my partner when we announced our engagement during my first semester of graduate school, "You know, he could work at any time." If the commute wears thin; if the children grow sick of my French toast; if the dog will not stop peeing on the rug in his quest for more attention; if we decide this experiment has failed, we will terminate it and find another arrangement.

At times, I nearly convince myself that academic jobs deserve the utmost reverence because they are so hard to find. I tie my guts in knots imagining worst-case scenarios: Will we be stuck with this commute for the rest of our working lives? What if my teaching stinks and my research flops? What if I fail to get renewed at my three-year review?

Yet, while frightful, my disaster fantasies are also self-serving. They create the illusion that my job has such a heightened level of importance that losing it would be a catastrophe. Of course, the specter of unemployment haunts every endeavor that pays bills and buys groceries. The anxieties surrounding academic positions, however, seem to far outweigh the social significance and material rewards of the jobs.

The scarcity of professorial gigs allows us academics to pretend that our jobs matter more than ordinary vocations. How could a systems analyst or a short-order cook claim occupational supremacy when they don't have comprehensive exams, thesis defenses, or job interviews at conferences you have to pay to attend?

We fool ourselves into believing that the anguish that goes into securing academic employment means that ours must be among the most desirable jobs on the planet. I do think being a professor is cool and worthwhile, but I would rank it below professional bowling, wine and food criticism, and rock stardom. It's certainly not worth the spiritual body blows some people absorb as they enter and stay in the profession.

As far as I know, Johnny Paycheck never spent a minute in the hallowed halls of academe, choosing instead to linger in beer joints and penitentiaries. But the country singer offered a nugget of wisdom to anyone worried about gaining or losing employment. Until you are certain that you can say "take this job and shove it" to defend your family, safeguard your marriage, or simply preserve your sanity, you may never be free.