The Walking Woman

I have been reading Mama, PhD,  the book whose title I borrowed for my pregnancy announcement post.  In the book, many women write about various struggles they have encountered in trying to balance the desire to be a mother with the desire to be an academic.  The problem that keeps showing up from different women, in different disciplines, is that academia expects its members to behave as if they are disembodied minds which focus solely on their work.  I have also found that the expectations of academia suggest the “best” academics are wholly absorbed in their intellectual work, unhindered by the presence of their bodies, and not distracted by the influences of everyday life.  Every graduate student, I imagine, has heard some variation of the phrase "You're in graduate school; you're not allowed to have a life" from a professor at some point.  It seems pretty obvious to me that this results from the discipline’s predominantly male past, and Cather’s The Professor’s House demonstrates one example of what this looks like. The professor has an isolated study in his home where he performs his work, while his wife cares for his growing daughters in the house below.  He engages with them during prescribed times every week, but for the most part, his wife is responsible for keeping the family and the home running.  He ignores hunger and cold because venturing out of his study to eat or get warm leaves him susceptible to familial distractions.  He even remembers fondly that his favorite daughter sat outside his office when she was 8, waiting for him to finish his work before she told him she had been stung by a bee.

Since I began graduate school, I have been pressing up against the limits of the unreasonable expectation that academics should prioritize their work even at the expense of other aspects of their lives.  My work has been a top priority for me these past three years, but it has not been my only priority.  I am happily married, my husband and I are currently unwilling to move away from the house we own, and though I have good friends in my program, I insist on trying to maintain relationships outside my academic life.  With one exception, I managed to schedule my classes each term so that I’d never have to be away from my husband more than two nights a week.  I have carefully selected as mentors those professors who care about me as a whole person, and I often disregard the opinions of those who suggest I should devote even more of my time or energy to my academics.  I know myself, and I know that if all I did was school, I’d burn extra bright for a short period of time before burning out.  Attempting to maintain a balanced life helps me to keep enough fuel in my various fires for them to burn at a more sustainable rate.

So far, I have been largely successful in managing the work/home balance, if only because those in my domestic life are so supportive of my academic priorities. I love Billy more today than I did when I began graduate school. The patience and support he has shown for my dedication to my work has better revealed to me what an excellent man and husband he is. I almost always feel like a good academic, and I usually feel like a good wife. But I realize, and I worry, that choosing to have the baby could upset this balance and leave me feeling like I am not a good wife, mother, or academic.  The traditional expectations for these three roles are mutually exclusive in a variety of ways.  The women who’ve written in the Mama, PhD anthology suggest this fear is not an unreasonable or unusual one.

This anxiety makes me reflect on the story that allowed me to give myself permission to have the baby as a graduate student.  That story is Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman,” in which the title character shares her tales of living, loving, and mothering in the desert with the short story’s narrator.  After talking with the Walking Woman, the narrator concludes that there are three things a woman needs, and if she has them, she can live without anything else.  These three things are “work—as I had believed; love—as the Walking Woman had proved it; a child—as you subscribe to it” (261).  For the Walking Woman, these three things are tied together and each is enriched by the others. I already know that work and love are richer when they inform one another; I have undoubtedly been a better thinker, writer, worker and teacher since Billy and I have been together.  Thus, when the story suggests the inclusion of a baby can strengthen this dual bond into a triangular one, it caught my attention.  After drawing this conclusion about work, love, and a child, the narrator elaborates carefully, “a child; any way you get it, a child is good to have, say nature and the Walking Woman; to have it and not wait upon a proper concurrence of so many decorations that the event may not come at all” (262).  I knew before I read this story that having the baby would enhance my life—that is why I wanted the baby to begin with.  But nothing had yet suggested to me that having the baby could enhance my work.  This story did this, and at the same time, it warned me against waiting for the absolutely perfect circumstances to introduce the baby because those circumstances might never occur.  I know it might seem strange to people who don’t have the relationship with books that I do, but this story gave me the confidence to make the decision that I had been wanting to make about having a baby and to trust that I’d be able to work out the remaining details as I went.

Now that I’ve conceived the baby, and I’m trying to imagine how I can simultaneously occupy the roles of wife, mother, and academic, the story strikes a different chord with me.  For the first time, it stands out to me that the Walking Woman walks.  I’ve often written here about how my running habit informs and influences my academic pursuits.  I absolutely believe that I have been a better graduate student because I have been a distance runner.  This past semester was difficult for me for quite a few reasons, but being unable to run has made it even more so.  This may seem trivial in comparison to the other obstacles I was facing, but for me, being unable to run has forced me to figure out how to continue moving forward without the sense of personal satisfaction I get from running.  The irony here, of course, is that pregnancy has turned me from a runner into a walking woman.  For a few months I was doing what I’ve been calling wogging—alternating between walking and jogging—but in recent weeks I have been walking almost exclusively.  And I don’t hate it anymore. It doesn’t feel like enough exercise, so I’ve joined a gym to supplement the walking with anaerobic exercise, but I’m beginning to learn to appreciate the slower pace of all these activities and the different view of things they give me.

As I continue to adjust to a different exercise regimen, I wonder if I can learn to adjust my expectations for myself as an academic in a similar way.  In grad school and in distance running, I’ve pushed myself to the limit with single-minded devotion, exhausted myself, and gained satisfaction from proving that I am capable of achieving success.  So I wonder what walking in my work might look like, and whether I will find that covering the same ground at a slower pace reveals my surroundings to me in a different way.  I hope the baby can help me redefine what it means to be successful in my work and in my life as a whole rather than making me feel like I'm failing to live up to my earlier expectations.  “The Walking Woman” suggests this is possible.  The narrator also says of the Walking Woman, “she had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it” (261).  I don’t know what “success” looks like when one is simultaneously attempting to be a wife, mother, and academic.  I know it will not look like the disembodied, focused mind that academia expects of its thinkers—but if I’d wanted that life for myself, I never would have gotten married or pregnant in the first place. I hope that, as I move forward in this balancing act, I can learn to walk off academia’s unreasonable expectations and values and walk into a better understanding of which measurements of success work for me.  

I realize that the balancing act is always going to be a struggle, but I feel obligated to attempt it for myself and for my baby.  It’s a little girl in there, after all.  If I want to bring her up to believe that she’s capable of balancing her various interests, it will be important for me to learn to do the same.  I hope I can remind myself that how I feel about what I’m doing is much more important than how anyone at school feels about it.  In this way, I hope, I can know “the best” when it comes to me and be able to “take it” as it is, rather than getting discouraged when I fail to live up to academia’s expectations. Whether academia is willing to make room for me, with my own priorities, remains to be seen—but that is outside my own control.  I want my daughter to believe she is successful when she has met her own standards of success, and I don’t want her to feel inadequate just because she may fail to live up to outdated, discriminatory, and unhealthy expectations of accomplishment. I hope that as I go, I can teach myself to do the same.

(I'm citing the version of Mary Austin's "The Walking Woman" that appears in this collection, but you can read the entire story online here.  And you should.  It's so good.)