Teacher by Day, Mommy by Night: The Unheroic Pursuits of the Academic Mother

When my daughter was two days old, I went to a committee meeting. When she was a month, I brought her to an academic conference. When she was five months, I taught a three-week travel course in Europe. In retrospect, I don’t regret—all of it. It was a valuable investment in authentic co-parenting and work-life balance, yet I still struggle daily with the ever-present sense of trying to do it all—just not very well. As academic mothers, we both benefit from and are disadvantaged by a system without clear protocols, models, or customs. Yes, our work time is flexible, but often at the expense of prioritizing long-term research and professional development projects. Left to navigate decades of unspoken rules and traditions about workload, maternity leave, tenure and promotion, and childcare, female faculty members experience variability and inequity leading to frustration and resentment. I am fortunate to be part of an intellectual and social community of women, who model parenting styles as diverse as their research and pedagogy. By collectively seeking and achieving a more equitable division of reproductive and productive labor, we have reached behind the facade of individual projections of professional competence and collegiality to really listen to the collective voices of women’s experiences. Only an honest reckoning with how the university really works for parents, particularly mothers, will move us toward supporting each other in navigating and then changing these norms inside and outside of the academy.