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New Beginnings

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By Jacqueline M. Sage

This year marks the second anniversary of my mother's successful double-organ transplant. We celebrated with a lobster dinner -- my sisters, my mother, my nephew, and I.

Two years ago, and about a month before the end of the semester, I decided to move back home after my mother's disease took a turn for the worse. Dialysis was not working, and she had been moved to the top of the transplant list.

I was A.B.D. with about a year left to finish my program in the social sciences at a top research university in the East. But I walked into my adviser's office and told him I had to go. Within weeks, I had packed all of my things onto a commercial truck, and was on a plane for the West coast.

I had moved home once before -- in the middle of my second year of graduate school -- when my mother had first begun dialysis. She had needed daily care and my sister, who had been her primary caregiver, could no longer do it alone.

I started graduate school knowing that my mother's condition would get worse and that eventually all we would have would be the promise of an organ match. I had even considered giving her one of my kidneys until doctors told us that unless she received both a kidney and a pancreas, given the aggressive nature of her diabetes and its complications, a single kidney would last only about a year and kick her off the transplant list as well.

There were days I could not fathom opening a Microsoft Word document and trying to write. However, I think graduate school ended up affording me the kind of flexibility I required to take care of my family. I was able to move when I needed, fly home when I needed, and set my own pace so that I could meet my family's needs.

I'm not saying it was easy, or that all of my professors and colleagues have been understanding or accommodating. But the fact that I was able to get through my program has a lot to do with my adviser and my department, and their willingness to help me.

As I start looking for my first tenure-track job, I know that the academic market is not known for its flexibility. I am aware that I am starting with a little less on my CV, not as many contacts, and definitely more white hair than some of my counterparts, but maybe with a little more perspective.

At my graduate program, I had the opportunity to teach small seminars, which allowed me to get to know both my students and myself as a teacher. But it wasn't until last January, when I began teaching as an adjunct lecturer at a local state university, that I truly understood my love of teaching and how that would influence my career goals.

Seminars at elite, private universities tend to run themselves. The students are interested, bright, and, of course, jockeying for position and points over their peers. Motivating them to learn is not the problem, and as much as you prepare and provide guidance, most of the students are already a particular kind of overachiever. If anything, you need to tell the know-it-alls to be quiet.

I learned from teaching those seminars to endure the silence on the first day or two of class. Eventually the silence breaks and they realize that I won't do all the work for them.

In the lecture courses I taught at the state university, however, the silence lasted two weeks -- not two days -- and I found myself really wondering whether I could reach the students. Eventually I did, as much with extra-credit assignments as with my teaching abilities, I suspect. And I found myself beginning to understand what was most relevant to me as an academic -- the communication of ideas, especially in the classroom.

As a result, I plan to focus my job search on a full-time position at a "teaching college," although I'm not sure just yet how I will define the term. Small, liberal-arts colleges are teaching-oriented, but many have heavy publishing requirements for tenure. And anyway, do their students, who already have so much training, really need me? Wouldn't I have more potential to do good at a public institution that caters to students closer to my own background?

That is one of the appeals of my adjunct position. I grew up in this city and went to public school with students who were just like the ones I now teach -- urban, ethnically and culturally diverse, lower to middle incomes, and paying most of their own way through college.

Then there's the larger question of how to translate my career preferences into a tangible tenure-track job offer within my preferred salary range.

I don't have answers yet, but at least I can now think about them without fear of impending personal doom. For a long time, my family responsibilities did seem to spell professional disaster, particularly given that I am in a subfield in which 10 openings a year constitutes a great market.

To this day, not all of my professors understand the personal realities I face alongside the academic ones. I am still the person primarily responsible for caring for my mother -- her transplants had a rocky start and her lifetime medications will always have secondary effects. So while I am no longer tied to the area where my mother lives, wherever I end up, I will still have to run up my phone bill, my odometer, and my frequent-flyer miles to be there when she needs me.

However, regardless of the professor who refused to see that caring for a parent on dialysis requires a cross-country move, that such care cannot be delegated, and that no course or degree requirement can trump that responsibility, I found many professors and friends who did understand. And they tried to help as best they could, advocating for me and accommodating my many flights and moves.

My adjunct position allows me to do what I love and take care of my family simultaneously. And as the year progresses, as I turn in applications and fly cross country to defend the dissertation I have spent too many hours thinking about, I hope that I will find a few good job prospects.

At age 30, I see my future in a different way from what I could ever have imagined when I began graduate study. Unlike many women trying to forge an academic career, I'm not yet worried about having a baby, nor do I have a spouse to consider in my career moves. I have a slightly different perspective on family.

It wasn't until I was waiting for my mother to come out of surgery, after the 8th, 9th, and 10th hours of waiting passed, that I began to understand that this was it, the possibility I had shut out for so long -- that there was nowhere else to go should the surgery not work.

But it did. And thanks to the donation of that generous person who gave my mother a second chance at life, the doctors who fought for her tooth and nail, and the support of those professors and friends who understood my situation, I have many blessings as I begin this new phase in my life.

The most important thing to me is to find a place where I can be happy, where I can develop and enjoy my work, and where I can have the flexibility to take care of my family and live my life. Otherwise, what is the point?