Sometimes miracles do happen

When working towards a goal for many years, and it is still not reached, it's not uncommon to lose faith. And at one point you stop talking about it with friends and family, because it is just not that interesting to talk about, to mention yet another failure. That job that you thought was going to happen, that achievement, that one and only person you wanted to meet, fall in love with, it just doesn't materialize. At first the friends and family are encouraging, telling you it will happen. Things will happen and you will reach your goal. Because you deserve it, or because you are worth it. But then their voices vane and you are left with the persistence in your head and nothing else. And it is all up to you to continue the fight. But the thing is, I did. I persisted month after month, method after method. And after almost four years of continuous fertility treatment I finally got pregnant. In fact I'm already 25 weeks tomorrow and have a kicking baby-boy inside my belly, growing and waiting patiently to come out and see his big sister and his mom by the beginning of the summer.

It was an emotional roller-coaster from the day I realized my period was not coming and that I should probably skip the beer I had just been offered. I was in chock for a week, before I took the test, watching the two lines appear and then another week later told my mom and Zoe, watching their tears of joy. I was hesitant to tell anybody else and I was hesitant to feel secure in my pregnancy. I prayed to god every evening that he would protect me and the little growing miracle inside of me. If something takes so long, it can't be real, can it? It was not until week 14 where I started thinking it is very likely that there will come a baby out of this in the end. I might actually have a second child. Zoe will finally have a little sibling. Meanwhile she takes it with the ease of a 6 year old, randomly holding my belly, putting her ear to it and getting kicked in her hand. "It's a foot, I can feel a foot!" she says excitedly and starts talking to him. "I'm your big sister and I can't wait until you come out and we can play." I'm hoping that she understands how boring babies are initially and how much time her mom needs to spend with the baby at first. But I did, those many years ago when I got a little brother, so I'm sure Zoe will be just fine. I'm cautiously optimistic.

With my growing belly comes a lot of new issues into play that I've spent the better part of my days and nights pondering. I'll share some of them here as time moves on, but right now I realized that I cannot continue chronicling Flybaby without sharing the most important news in our lives, that there will soon be a Flybaby II.

The baby penalty

As a female academic with a child, not to talk about my early and continuing perpetual desire to have a family, the discussion of academic career and children has always been relevant and worrying to me. Having read all the books (Mason, Hewlet, Hewlet and of course Sandberg) makes me acutely aware that anything I do in my professional life I have to do better, faster and more rigorously than others to get ahead. I have to keep focusing on research, papers, networking and politics without skipping a beat. I repeat to myself the age-old saying (that Charlotte Whitton has been credited with): "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men. Luckily, this is not difficult." Because I have to keep my sense of humor to get through the day. I find all these statistics and anecdotes indicating that children hurt women's career where they are an asset to men's, hugely depressing, not only for myself but also for all the other women who are not getting the most out of their life because they have to change career track and ambition level. These women are not contributing enough to society with their intellect because that is the duality of the downside: women don't get to contribute intellectually because they can't keep high level jobs and they are not happy with their lives because they had to give up careers or turn down ambition level to make ends meet. The ones who, like me, attempt to 'have it all' (like this is an unfair demand!) end up torn in half from this attempt, either compromising a career or compromising togetherness with our children.

And it is really hard to sell yourself, being someone who have made choices favoring the family for most of my career. I sometimes envision myself adding the following to my CV, right after me leaving the US and the top institution where I was, and the resent years, in the employment section and publication section: "The change of affiliation was due to family reasons and my priorities to my family took center stage for a short while, as I tried to maintain my professional contacts and publication record. The gap in my publications is in no way a reflection of a sudden lack of ambition or lack of ability, but simply a reflection of serious personal family complications. Future level of work will again reflect my true ambition level and opportunities".

I'm not sure how this would be interpreted but my big fear is always that people see my publication record and think "Oh, she had such great potential. Then something happened and she is clearly not dedicated anymore". Yes, something happened. I had a baby, got divorced and had to start all over in a new country with few potential collaborators and a scarce research resources (in Sweden, for example,  you don't 'get' PhD students, which has been detrimental to my research and career development). All in 2 years. But I am just as dedicated as I have always been, I'm as ambitious, if not more, as I always was and I still want to 'make it' in the academic system. I want to do interesting and valuable research, I want to publish and I want that solid, (semi)permanent well-payed position, no matter what the name of it is. I want the opportunity to do good work. And that's bloody difficult when you have to pick up a girl at 4:30pm and somehow feed you and her dinner while answering all the emails you didn't get to during the day, grade papers at night while the dishes are growing moldy and feeling guilty that the girl was watching an hour of TV while you were trying to review a paper.

If I were to be part of the statistics I would stay in this position, publish three workshop papers a year and never make professor. Ironically I'm already ahead of the US statistics where women stay in temporary teaching positions, get tenure much later and do too much administrative work to publish. So apparently I do have some sort of potential. I just need to find out where I can build on that because it is certainly not here.