When my daughter was four months old, I took her with me to campus for the first time. As I buckled her into her car seat and drove to school, I practiced conversations with professors, staff, classmates, students—anyone I felt might wonder at (or worse, raise opposition to) my bringing my daughter to campus.
“My husband usually watches her while I’m at school, but he has an unexpected work obligation,” I explained.
“I am holding student conferences this morning, which I can do while holding the baby,” I reasoned.
Then for good measure I added, “She’s usually quiet. She’ll probably just nap anyways.”
I didn’t end up saying any of this to anyone. No one questioned my bringing her along—they chatted with me as usual, cooed at the baby, and went on with their day.
An anticlimactic anecdote, I know. But for two reasons, it is a moment that has stuck with me as I continue to negotiate my roles as mother and graduate student.
First, it confirmed to me that not everyone will be against you if you choose to have children while pursing your degree. This is by no means to say you will not encounter individual and/or systemic opposition (which I’ll talk more about shortly), but that there are people who will not only be supportive but actively cheer you on. My advisor, for example, asks me to bring my daughter to our meetings. A certain staff member happily arranged my teaching schedule to accommodate my childcare needs. Statements of support and encouragement, as well as offers of help, have come from a number of my colleagues. And, despite now having brought my daughter to campus a handful of times, I still have yet to have had a negative experience.
Why then was I still so anxious that first day on campus? And why do I continue at times to experience similar guilt and fear? Because there subsists an underlying societal belief that women cannot be simultaneously successful as mothers and workers that affects us even when we know it to be false. I had been made aware of its existence through articles about the challenges faced by graduate mothers, and through stories of a student’s mentor telling her she would not be her advisor if she had a baby in graduate school. I experienced it personally when I feared opposition to bringing my daughter to school, rather than securely anticipating support and acceptance.
On that day, I suddenly became very aware of how much I had internalized the doubts and assumptions that accompany this belief in the incompatibility of work and motherhood. I was determined to simply work harder, to prove to anyone (including myself) who might question my abilities that I was as dedicated to and capable of research and teaching as I was pre-baby. Just as Lisa Miller described in a recent article titled “Stop Blaming Women for Holding Themselves Back at Work,” I had an impulse “to assume a posture of apologetic gratitude, as though I believed (or feared) that having a baby would make me somehow less of an employee: less reliable, less driven, less creative — a diminished asset.”
Miller concludes her insightful article (which you can read here) with the suggestion that “the first step is to stop channeling all of that criticism inward or toward individual women and instead turn it outward. Companies need to try harder, too.” ASU needs to try harder. Affordable on-campus daycare, affordable healthcare for dependents, and more than one lactation room per campus are all great places to start, and I would like to have conversations about how we can ask for these with other student (and faculty) parents. But I have also come to recognize a need to make changes on a more immediate level. I am working on not turning criticism inward, because being a parent does not make me a “diminished asset.” And I will continue, without guilt, to bring my daughter to campus when the occasion calls, working to change perceptions about graduate student parents even if it’s just one person at a time.
Meghan Nestel is a third year doctoral student at Arizona State University. She studies medieval literature, and teaches literature and composition for the Department of English. She has a seven month old daughter, whose main concerns at the moment include growing her first tooth and learning to crawl.