On Being "Super"

There are a lot of reasons I continue to keep this blog, but one of them is that I care very much about the visibility of what I'm trying to do.  I don't want to get too theoretically complicated here, but one of the critical theorists I find most useful is Jacques Ranciere.  He has this theory about how artworks function in the community, and once I figured it out, it seemed like common sense.  Artworks (aestheticized objects) can make new ideas (or ways of being) visible to the community. When the artwork succeeds at making a new idea visible, it changes the way the community functions forever after by changing what the community recognizes and imagines as possible.  Ranciere calls this process the "redistribution of the sensible" -- that which is available to be sensed is re-arranged.  I'm not creating artworks, but the blog can function in a similar way.  As a woman trying to juggle the responsibilities of academia and motherhood, whenever I'm able to share my experiences in a way that allows others to perceive them, it changes the stakes for other women who want to consider juggling these responsibilities in the future.  

Trying to establish visibility for what it's like to be me is difficult, though, because it puts me in something of a double bind.  On the one hand, there is the impulse to focus on my successes and my capability for managing both motherhood and academics at once.  Doing this strengthens the argument that women can do both, and it proves that women who want to have babies and have academic careers should not be treated like delusional stepchildren.  It gets harder for professors to claim a woman can't have a baby in graduate school and maintain suitable progress every time one of us does it.

On the other hand, though, highlighting my successes at achieving this balance runs the risk of making other moms feel inadequate by comparison. I try to be as honest as possible about the struggles this balance involves because there are so many other things that make women feel inadequate as mothers. I don't want to be complicit in this problem.  There are already plenty of narratives about maternity that are pervasive to the point of silencing alternate experiences. We've all heard these:

I got pregnant on the first try!

I loved everything about being pregnant!

My maternal instincts kicked in right away.  I knew exactly what to do from the moment she was born!

They grow up so fast-- enjoy every moment!

I think the dominance of these narratives is damaging because it runs the risk of making pregnant women and new moms feel like they're alone and/or unusual when their experiences don't match up.  It took me twice as long as "average" to get pregnant, despite our precision of planning.  I found the experience of pregnancy largely difficult and unenjoyable despite my excitement about its end result. I suffered from a sometimes debilitating cluelessness about what to do with Nora when she was first born.  I did not enjoy every moment when Nora was tiny because caring for her was really hard.  None of this means I'm a bad person, or a bad mother, or that I don't love my daughter more than anything.  The more openly I talk about these things, the more I find that other women are willing to admit to some (or all) of these feelings, too... but at the time, I struggled to find voices that spoke the feelings I was feeling.

Although I've admitted all of these things on this blog, and it has resulted in the privilege of getting to talk more openly with other women about these issues, I still find myself stuck in this double bind of wanting to prove that what I'm doing is possible without making other people feel inadequate.  For the past four months or so I've continued to become increasingly aware that my successes sometimes make other graduate students and other moms feel insufficient.  They say things to me like, 

"You made the decorations for Nora's party yourself? Do you ever sleep?"  

"I could barely pass my qualifying exam, and the only person I had to take care of was myself."  

"I can't believe you have a kid; you always look so chic!"  

It's so easy for us, as moms, to believe in the idea of the "supermom" and measure ourselves as inadequate by comparison.  It's also easy for us, as graduate students, to believe in the idea of the "super student" and measure ourselves as inadequate by comparison.  But as someone who has these labels applied to her on an increasingly regular basis, I feel the need to clarify: the people who seem super are not so different from anyone else.  They have shortcuts, too.

Here's an example: There is another mom who picks her son up at day care around the same time I get Nora in the afternoons.  Her clothes are always flawless and perfectly pressed.  She shuttles her kid and all his stuff around with ease... while wearing heels.  Her makeup is simple but professional.  Her hair falls below her shoulders in perfectly tousled waves.  I found myself especially fixated on her flawless hair.  I couldn't get my hair to look like that even before I had Nora, and I have 20+ years of experience with managing unruly hair.  Then, one day when I was running a little late, I got to Nora's school at the same time this mom did.  Her hair was wet in a braid down her back, and her dry cleaning was hanging in the back window.  I could practically see the lightbulb appear above my head.  Wet hair, dry cleaning, and a later drop-off time.  When I had previously stood in awe of how she managed to look so flawless every day, the possibility of these shortcuts never even occurred to me.   

It's a bad idea to compare ourselves to others, full stop.  There's no way to do it straight.  If you take your weaknesses and pair them up with other peoples' perceived strengths, you're going to feel inadequate every time.  You just don't know enough about anyone else's life to make a fair comparison.

So in the interest of full disclosure, here are the shortcuts that help me seem more super than I am:

-My husband is amazing.  He is responsible for almost all the cleaning that has gone on in our home since Nora started day care.  He cleans up the kitchen and washes Nora's bottles every night.  He takes care of everything in the yard and does anything else I need him to do.  He is also exceptionally patient with me.  If I forget to do something he's asked, he either reminds me or does it himself.

-Financially, Billy and I are very fortunate.  Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy ease.  The number of times I've forgotten my lunch and had to buy one on campus is embarrassing.  How is this possible given the fact that I have never once forgotten anything Nora needed for her schoolday? I must not prioritize myself because I don't have to.  Why does my hair almost always look "done" when I'm on campus?  Because I have top-of-the-line hair tools that dry and straighten my hair in minutes.  Why did I eventually stop crying all day about leaving my daughter at day care?  Because we can afford a very high quality of care.

-I don't cook very much.  Nora eats fresh, healthy meals, but Billy and I have always relied heavily on takeout and fast food.  Since Nora started eating, I have made a concentrated effort to cook at home more for us, too.  The end result?  This semester, I've probably averaged 3 home cooked meals per week, and nothing I make takes much longer than 30 minutes.  This leaves plenty of room for improvement.

-If you walked into my house at any given time, there's about a 90% chance that the dryer contains a load of clothes I've completely forgotten about.  I think the only thing that has been ironed in my house since the semester began was Nora's birthday party dress.
-You know how much I love running?  I ran once this entire semester.

-I plan ahead compulsively.  Those decorations for Nora's birthday party?  I made them in August.  How did I cover 104 texts in 12 weeks AND teach a stand-alone literature class?  My lesson plans were also done in August, before the semester began.

-Nora sleeps a lot and very well.  We started sleep training as early as possible, and the result is that by the time this semester began, Nora was a champion sleeper.  She was down in her bed without incident by 7pm every single night of my exam preparations.  On weekends, she took extra long naps to make up for her inability to sleep well at school.  

The list goes on from there, and I'm sure there are plenty of other "shortcuts" I'm not even aware of... but these are the things that I recognize as having helped me to balance graduate school and motherhood these past few months.  So please know this: it IS possible to succeed as a mom and an academic at the same time.  Nobody has a right to suggest that women can't do it.  But it takes a lot of advanced planning, it takes extra time, and it takes a village of people to help.  There is one thing that seems to separate out the "supers": the way we think of time.  People ask me this question on at least a weekly basis: "Where do you find the time?"  And I think to myself: Who "finds" time?  I make time for the things that really matter to me, everything else falls by the wayside until I get a chance to catch up, and the people I keep close to me are kind and generous enough to stick with me in the meantime.

Other graduate students and/or moms: what are your shortcuts?  How do you "make" extra time?  I'm also convinced that learning "tricks of the trade" from women in similar situations also helps us to be evermore efficient... and for me, efficiency is the name of the game.

(End note: How did Liz manage this long, introspective blog post?  She's been working on it since Saturday.  After hitting "publish" I noticed that the font is all messed up, but I can't be bothered to fix it.)