As a new assistant professor, I thought I needed to hide my family responsibilities

From ScienceMag:

I was rushing out of the office to pick up my two young children from day care when I ran into a senior colleague in the hallway. They wanted to chat about a proposal I was working on and how I was settling into my new tenure-track position. I was grateful for their interest and collegiality, and I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t giving the job my full attention. So, I acted as if I had all the time in the world. I didn’t mention where I was headed, or that I had a kids’ pickup deadline. I barely made it. That night after dinner and bedtime I caught up on emails, never letting on that I was working so late because of my family responsibilities. I was convinced I had to manage my demands invisibly.

To the outside world, I was building a lab, mentoring students, teaching, writing grants, and pursuing the milestones expected of an early-career faculty member. But outside the margins of my CV, I was also coordinating child care, navigating day care illnesses and closures, recovering from pregnancies, breastfeeding, pumping, and trying to think clearly through antepartum and postpartum brain fog.

For a while, I thought the solution was to become more efficient. If I planned carefully enough, woke up early enough, answered enough emails after bedtime, maybe I could make the chaotic parts of motherhood invisible in my professional life. I could be the same kind of early-career scientist I had imagined before children, just with less sleep.

This approach almost worked, until it didn’t. Day care would call and a sick child would erase a carefully planned day. School closures would rearrange an entire week. Travel anywhere involved heroic efforts to organize small lives in addition to mine. No amount of optimization gave me full control and I was simply exhausted. There was almost always something I felt I was not doing as well as I wished I could.

Then, when I was a little over 1 year into my faculty position and pregnant with my third child, an email landed in my inbox inviting me to join a gathering for pretenure mothers at my institution. A few assistant professors had bonded over the ups and downs of juggling motherhood with the responsibilities of a tenure-track faculty member, and they wanted to connect with others doing the same. The invitation offered something I had not realized I needed: a space where my identities as a mother and scientist did not have to remain separate. I filled out the scheduling poll.

At our lunches, I kept hearing people say aloud the things I had been facing silently: the guilt of leaving campus early, the exhaustion of writing after bedtime, the pressure of keeping up with peers whose lives might look very different from ours. We shared strategies, offered reassurance, and considered what types of support we actually needed. Those conversations did not magically make working life easier. But they made it less lonely.

I began to see that my struggle was not a personal failure to become efficient enough. The many demands in my life were real, even if academic culture kept them out of view.

I became more willing to acknowledge my limitations, accept help, and resist blaming every disruption on poor organization. If I need to move a meeting because of child care pickup or a sick child at home, I say so plainly. I am careful not to make my trainees responsible for my family logistics, but I also do not pretend those logistics do not exist. I want my trainees to see that being a good scientist does not require pretending to have a life untouched by caregiving, illness, rest, or limits.

This shift has also changed how I think about my life outside the lab. Recently I was volunteering at my oldest son’s kindergarten Aloha Day party. Another mother arrived with a watermelon carved to look like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch. It was spectacular compared with my store-bought popsicles. The old me might have felt a familiar pang: Should I be doing more? Does my contribution betray my divided attention? Then I looked at the delighted children and felt grateful. This parent had offered something I could not, but I had shown up in the best way I could. I did not need to disguise the constraints of my career to prove I was a devoted mother, just as I do not need to disguise the demands of motherhood to prove I am a serious scientist.

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