Sound familiar?
If it does, trust me: don’t listen to them. As I walked around Orientation, picking up free stuff and coupons I threw out six months later, I had a growing sense of dread. I imagined myself in tears at 3 AM, frantically trying to finish an important research paper in a class I was failing, trying to get the baby back to sleep, and falling asleep myself. I imagined making a fool of myself in class discussion after losing my analytical skills to “mommy brain.” I remembered the horror stories about professors writing off their female students because they were mothers. If not for the one older student who quietly said, “Don’t listen to them,” I probably would have panicked.
Notice I say, “don’t listen to them,” not “they were wrong.” Sometimes, grad student parenting is really hard. A lot of the things I’d imagined did happen. There were tears and late nights. There were occasional instances of benevolent bias. There was the quarterly, weekly, daily headache of finding someone in my cast of friends, family, and colleagues who could watch my daughter for the few hours daily I had to be apart from her, and of finding last-minute childcare when the schedule changed unexpectedly. And sometimes, I definitely spaced out in long seminars, worrying about whether my 6-month-old could survive so long without me. Yep, my colleagues were right. It’s hard being a parent at an institution that assumes its students are sexless and child-free.
What I didn’t anticipate was all the ways grad student parenting would be easier than if I were "just" a student. I didn’t anticipate how having a child here would make me feel like more of a Chicagoan than ever, even after six years of living in the city. I didn’t realize that my daughter was a built-in outlet to get my mind off my studies, and a great excuse to get out of the UChicago bubble. My daughter was a great incentive to eat healthy and to stay well-rested – it’s one thing to slack on a term paper, and quite another to snap at my toddler. And all those things I feared? They didn’t turn out to be as bad as I expected. For every challenge, with time there came a strategy for handling it.
After a full day of hearing about how hard my life would be, I finally came up with a response to my fellow-students. I realized they too had yet to experience grad student life, let alone life as a parent. And how could I respond when I’d never been a grad student either? When people accosted me about the challenges of my future life, I started to answer, “I don’t know yet; I haven’t tried.”
Happy trying, everyone. And welcome to UChicago!
