On being a part-time SAHM
This is a post I've been mulling over for a while, and I think I'm finally ready to write it out.
In May 2002 I received my PhD in mathematics from the University of Arizona, and subsequently accepted a tenure track position in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. That was about as good a job as I could have possibly hoped to get coming out of grad school, and the future seemed wide open. We had always planned to start trying to have a baby as soon as I graduated, with the idea that we would have two kids early in my tenure years, leaving me the last few years (when those kids were pre-school aged) to push hard for tenure. I imagined myself as a tenured professor, a successful researcher in my field and providing a example of a strong career woman to my children, who would be enrolled in the best preschool around.
But as most of us know, plans don't always work out the way you expect them to.
The first thing that didn't go as expected was that I didn't get pregnant. Not in the summer, and not in the fall, and not the next spring, and then it had been a year since we'd started trying. And then it was two years, and we realized we could no longer blame it on Doug's traveling. Something was wrong.
That started us on a 3-year-long path of dealing with infertility. We made the mistake of not going to a specialist, and instead kept going back to my OB, who insisted that we should try one more IUI because nothing was apparently wrong. I had exploratory surgery; I tried many different drugs, I had bad reactions and painful experiences, and nothing worked. Looking back, I realize that I was clinically depressed for several years, and really should have sought professional help. But it's really difficult to think about the big picture when you're constantly just a few weeks away from your dream coming true, over and over and over, only to see it dashed every time.
Meanwhile, both my depression and the reality of the career path I'd chosen were crashing down on me at work. I started having trouble functioning, and could only manage to get through teaching my courses day-by-day. My research, which had started out well, was slipping away as I lost the ability to manage a project and all the students working for me. When the funding dried up, I couldn't organize myself well enough to apply for more. I started to realize that the career I'd imagined while a grad student didn't exist. It wasn't about teaching courses and pursuing research projects of interest to me. It was about being on committees, and playing departmental politics, and competing for grant money in areas that weren't really of interest to me (but that was where the money was, so that's what you had to do if you wanted to support grad students). I realized at some point that I probably would have been better suited for a position in a math department at a small state university, rather than the prestigious R1 position I'd gotten.
Five years after moving to Austin and starting at UT, I finally got pregnant via IVF. My depression started to lift as the pregnancy proceeded, and I felt like I was coming out of a fog. Carter was due in March of 2008, and I would be able to postpone tenure for one year, meaning I would go up for tenure in the summer of 2009. That meant that I had a year and a half to get as much research done as possible -- in addition to having a baby. But the five years of struggling to get pregnant had shifted my priorities. In order to get tenure, I'd have to spend the first year of my son's life working 60-hour weeks and missing out on all the experiences I'd been dreaming of for so long. When I took a good hard look at what it meant to be a tenured professor in my department, and compared that to spending as much time as possible with my baby, there was no contest.
It's funny how many things in life seem so cut-and-dry in theory, and then your perspective shifts completely when reality hits. I always thought I would be driven and defined by my career. I worked my ass off to get that PhD, and I was incredibly proud of it. I knew women who had given up tenure track positions to be moms, and I didn't understand why they were throwing their hard work away to do something they didn't need an education to do. Yeah, I was pretty damn clueless. :-P
But then there I was, thinking that I could be a SAHM and be completely happy. The more I read about parenting, and the more I drifted toward AP practices, the more I realized I didn't want to work full-time and be a mom. I was lucky that we could afford for me to not work for a while, and Doug was completely supportive. I was in the very fortunate position of being able to choose whether to stay home or continue to work once Carter was born.
It wasn't an easy decision to step off the tenure track, though once I made it I felt completely at peace with it. Stepping off the tenure track felt like the right thing to do. I let go of my fear that I was throwing away my education, that I was disappointing so many of the people who had supported me, of the fear that this would be the biggest regret of my life. That wasn't easy to do, but I did it, and I can honestly say that those fears are now long-gone.
I was still a little worried about my long-term career options, though. I could imagine myself being a SAHM while I had young children at home, but what would happen when they started school? What would I do with myself then? Would it be too late to look for a new position? Could I start my research career again after a years-long hiatus? I had long discussions with several colleagues (all of whom were very supportive), and realized that there was a third option I hadn't considered. I could continue teaching at UT as an instructor, and could participate in projects and keep myself current in my field. In other words, I could work part-time.
When this idea first came up, it felt like a light bulb had come on in my head. It seemed like the perfect blend of career and home. I could teach 2 courses in a semester and make a decent salary (a good salary if I also teach in the summer), and also qualify for health care if we needed it. I would only teach, so there would be no committees, no grants to write, no pressure to publish. I could work two days a week, and spend the rest of the week at home with Carter. This plan would also allow me to teach courses in the math department, something I'd been wanting to do for years but had never managed to work out.
And so that is what I do. I teach one teacher education course in the CoE and one course in the math department (calculus this semester, but starting next semester I'll be teaching upper division courses for math education majors), and I'm on campus two days a week. I work at home one afternoon and try to get as much of my planning done as I can during that time (when Carter's nanny is there). That leaves Monday mornings and all day Wednesday and Friday to be a SAHM.
And I LOVE it! It's perfect for me. I have time to be a teacher, to feel like I have a career that is contributing something important to the world, and I also get to spend lots of quality time with Carter. I get to take him to parks during the week when they're quiet and most kids are in school. I get to take him to his swim lessons and splash around in the water with him. I get to play with him, and put him down for his naps, and nurse him, and eat breakfast and lunch with him. And on those other two days, I get to be around grownups enough that I feel like I can more fully appreciate my time with Carter. I don't get stir-crazy hanging around the house with him, because it feels very special.
I feel incredibly lucky to be able to have what seems like the best of both worlds. It can still be a little crazy at times. I spend his naps working, and often have to finish getting ready for the next day's class the night before, after he's gone to sleep, but it's worth it. I plan to work part-time for the next few years, and hopefully have another baby, and when both children are in school I can hopefully teach a third class, or perhaps get involved in a research project. I'm also thinking about opportunities to do volunteer work and am seriously considering applying to be accredited as a LLL leader.
I now look at my education not as something I wasted, but as something that has enabled me to be a part-time SAHM. Without that degree and the time I spent on the tenure track at UT, I couldn't have this time to spend at home with Carter now. I used to think it was important for my children to see an example of a strong career woman -- and I still do, only my definition of career woman has changed. It's not something you have to devote all of your life to. At least in my view, you can step away from it for a few years when other priorities arise, and then when the time is right, shift your time and energy back to your career again. Maybe it's not exactly the same career as you once imagined, but some careers turn out not to be exactly as shiny as they looked from a distance. Some careers are just not worth the sacrifices, in my opinion.
So that's the story of how I became a part-time SAHM, and happier than I've been in a long, long time. :-)
In May 2002 I received my PhD in mathematics from the University of Arizona, and subsequently accepted a tenure track position in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. That was about as good a job as I could have possibly hoped to get coming out of grad school, and the future seemed wide open. We had always planned to start trying to have a baby as soon as I graduated, with the idea that we would have two kids early in my tenure years, leaving me the last few years (when those kids were pre-school aged) to push hard for tenure. I imagined myself as a tenured professor, a successful researcher in my field and providing a example of a strong career woman to my children, who would be enrolled in the best preschool around.
But as most of us know, plans don't always work out the way you expect them to.
The first thing that didn't go as expected was that I didn't get pregnant. Not in the summer, and not in the fall, and not the next spring, and then it had been a year since we'd started trying. And then it was two years, and we realized we could no longer blame it on Doug's traveling. Something was wrong.
That started us on a 3-year-long path of dealing with infertility. We made the mistake of not going to a specialist, and instead kept going back to my OB, who insisted that we should try one more IUI because nothing was apparently wrong. I had exploratory surgery; I tried many different drugs, I had bad reactions and painful experiences, and nothing worked. Looking back, I realize that I was clinically depressed for several years, and really should have sought professional help. But it's really difficult to think about the big picture when you're constantly just a few weeks away from your dream coming true, over and over and over, only to see it dashed every time.
Meanwhile, both my depression and the reality of the career path I'd chosen were crashing down on me at work. I started having trouble functioning, and could only manage to get through teaching my courses day-by-day. My research, which had started out well, was slipping away as I lost the ability to manage a project and all the students working for me. When the funding dried up, I couldn't organize myself well enough to apply for more. I started to realize that the career I'd imagined while a grad student didn't exist. It wasn't about teaching courses and pursuing research projects of interest to me. It was about being on committees, and playing departmental politics, and competing for grant money in areas that weren't really of interest to me (but that was where the money was, so that's what you had to do if you wanted to support grad students). I realized at some point that I probably would have been better suited for a position in a math department at a small state university, rather than the prestigious R1 position I'd gotten.
Five years after moving to Austin and starting at UT, I finally got pregnant via IVF. My depression started to lift as the pregnancy proceeded, and I felt like I was coming out of a fog. Carter was due in March of 2008, and I would be able to postpone tenure for one year, meaning I would go up for tenure in the summer of 2009. That meant that I had a year and a half to get as much research done as possible -- in addition to having a baby. But the five years of struggling to get pregnant had shifted my priorities. In order to get tenure, I'd have to spend the first year of my son's life working 60-hour weeks and missing out on all the experiences I'd been dreaming of for so long. When I took a good hard look at what it meant to be a tenured professor in my department, and compared that to spending as much time as possible with my baby, there was no contest.
It's funny how many things in life seem so cut-and-dry in theory, and then your perspective shifts completely when reality hits. I always thought I would be driven and defined by my career. I worked my ass off to get that PhD, and I was incredibly proud of it. I knew women who had given up tenure track positions to be moms, and I didn't understand why they were throwing their hard work away to do something they didn't need an education to do. Yeah, I was pretty damn clueless. :-P
But then there I was, thinking that I could be a SAHM and be completely happy. The more I read about parenting, and the more I drifted toward AP practices, the more I realized I didn't want to work full-time and be a mom. I was lucky that we could afford for me to not work for a while, and Doug was completely supportive. I was in the very fortunate position of being able to choose whether to stay home or continue to work once Carter was born.
It wasn't an easy decision to step off the tenure track, though once I made it I felt completely at peace with it. Stepping off the tenure track felt like the right thing to do. I let go of my fear that I was throwing away my education, that I was disappointing so many of the people who had supported me, of the fear that this would be the biggest regret of my life. That wasn't easy to do, but I did it, and I can honestly say that those fears are now long-gone.
I was still a little worried about my long-term career options, though. I could imagine myself being a SAHM while I had young children at home, but what would happen when they started school? What would I do with myself then? Would it be too late to look for a new position? Could I start my research career again after a years-long hiatus? I had long discussions with several colleagues (all of whom were very supportive), and realized that there was a third option I hadn't considered. I could continue teaching at UT as an instructor, and could participate in projects and keep myself current in my field. In other words, I could work part-time.
When this idea first came up, it felt like a light bulb had come on in my head. It seemed like the perfect blend of career and home. I could teach 2 courses in a semester and make a decent salary (a good salary if I also teach in the summer), and also qualify for health care if we needed it. I would only teach, so there would be no committees, no grants to write, no pressure to publish. I could work two days a week, and spend the rest of the week at home with Carter. This plan would also allow me to teach courses in the math department, something I'd been wanting to do for years but had never managed to work out.
And so that is what I do. I teach one teacher education course in the CoE and one course in the math department (calculus this semester, but starting next semester I'll be teaching upper division courses for math education majors), and I'm on campus two days a week. I work at home one afternoon and try to get as much of my planning done as I can during that time (when Carter's nanny is there). That leaves Monday mornings and all day Wednesday and Friday to be a SAHM.
And I LOVE it! It's perfect for me. I have time to be a teacher, to feel like I have a career that is contributing something important to the world, and I also get to spend lots of quality time with Carter. I get to take him to parks during the week when they're quiet and most kids are in school. I get to take him to his swim lessons and splash around in the water with him. I get to play with him, and put him down for his naps, and nurse him, and eat breakfast and lunch with him. And on those other two days, I get to be around grownups enough that I feel like I can more fully appreciate my time with Carter. I don't get stir-crazy hanging around the house with him, because it feels very special.
I feel incredibly lucky to be able to have what seems like the best of both worlds. It can still be a little crazy at times. I spend his naps working, and often have to finish getting ready for the next day's class the night before, after he's gone to sleep, but it's worth it. I plan to work part-time for the next few years, and hopefully have another baby, and when both children are in school I can hopefully teach a third class, or perhaps get involved in a research project. I'm also thinking about opportunities to do volunteer work and am seriously considering applying to be accredited as a LLL leader.
I now look at my education not as something I wasted, but as something that has enabled me to be a part-time SAHM. Without that degree and the time I spent on the tenure track at UT, I couldn't have this time to spend at home with Carter now. I used to think it was important for my children to see an example of a strong career woman -- and I still do, only my definition of career woman has changed. It's not something you have to devote all of your life to. At least in my view, you can step away from it for a few years when other priorities arise, and then when the time is right, shift your time and energy back to your career again. Maybe it's not exactly the same career as you once imagined, but some careers turn out not to be exactly as shiny as they looked from a distance. Some careers are just not worth the sacrifices, in my opinion.
So that's the story of how I became a part-time SAHM, and happier than I've been in a long, long time. :-)