For a Graduate Student, Parenting Is Political

For a Graduate Student, Parenting Is Political Kate Ott (bio) At the time of the "Got Life?" panel, I was a PhD student on the academic job market and the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference is the place for interviews. I had to attend the AAR. Doing so meant that as a parent, I would lose an entire week with my children. How is that possible? I asked. With full-time day care, I calculated that I have forty-five "awake hours" per week with my children. My day-care provider had forty "awake hours" with them. The AAR typically requires a full Friday to Monday commitment from a prospective job-hunting PhD student. I had to either choose to tote my children with me, or give up thirty-five of my forty-five hours that week. Granted, even this decision evidenced the luxuries I have—full-time day care and a partner to co-parent when I have to be gone for a weekend. But it also demonstrated the emotional costs, the familial decisions, and the truth that bringing my children could severely harm my chances on the job market. This essay examines that dilemma. I spend many self-reflective moments wondering, How do I as a parenting graduate student balance school and family? More specifically, I ask, How can I do a better job? In September 2005, I participated in a panel for the Women Mentoring Women program at Yale University on the benefits of having a family [End Page 131] and a career, where Associate Dean Pamela Schirmeister said, "It's not about balancing all of the different roles. It's about making the schedules work." I agree that balance may not be the right word. No matter how much time I have for work or for family, I always wish I had more for both—not to mention the other things I like to do in life! As a wife, mother, graduate student, youth minister, and full-time research associate, I do a lot of "scheduling." In my case, it works because I have a wonderful partner who shares 50 percent or more of the household responsibilities. I also have great kids who sleep twelve hours a night, enjoy day care, and are genuinely fun, understanding, and easygoing. I have a support system of people—day care, friends, colleagues, and advisors. In addition to that support system, I do my best to make sure the "various" areas of my life work together so that I'm not fragmented or disconnected, but rather interconnected and reliant. For example, I do youth ministry that relates directly to my dissertation project of adolescent sexuality education and Christian churches, many of the youth group members are my babysitters, and my kids usually accompany me to church activities. However, all of my efforts are primarily responses that I have generated through creative and industrious labor. In other words, in order to maintain the current balance between my family, academic study, career aspirations, and activist work, "I" do a lot of scheduling. I do this because the institutional systems within which I am working function based on certain assumptions. I will deal with the two assumptions I consider the most influential: (1) graduate students have unlimited and undistracted time and (2) there is and should be a public versus private divide in our lives. Graduate Student, aka Hermit in a Library Carrel Unfortunately, we still live in an academic world where the norm is a lone graduate student squirreling away hours in a library carrel. In my first semester of the PhD program, I remember students exchanging advice about how to schedule time for comprehensive exam preparation in their date books. I thought to myself, they don't have children! I wake up when my kids wake up, which is hopefully sometime after 6:00 A.M., if no one is sick or teething. Now that I am ABD, I squeeze a full-time job into the mix to cover the costs of day care. Fortunately, their 7:00 P.M. bedtime means I can work until 10:30 if I'm not completely exhausted. I did not need to make

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