How a research trip helped me overcome separation anxiety as a new mother

From ScienceMag:

At the foot of the French Alps in Grenoble sprawls an 844-meter-long ring: the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF), which accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce bright x-rays. And here, in a restroom within this magnificent facility, I stood expressing milk from my breasts. I had just started my first shift of a 5-day experiment. While troubleshooting with my colleagues, I noticed my hoodie was soaked with milk. My breasts were hurting, and I could hardly move my arms. As I made my way to the bathroom, I tried to convince myself this was an empowering moment and that I should be proud. But in reality, it was a reminder of my anxiety at being away from my young daughter for the first time—feelings I felt ashamed to be bringing to the lab.

When I got pregnant in my last Ph.D. year, I didn’t think much about how motherhood and my career might come into conflict. After all, I was in Sweden, a country with great family support. Many of my colleagues had children. And I was fortunate to be able to take a full year of parental leave.

After I came back to work, I had 3 months left in my contract to write up and defend my doctoral thesis. It was a highly stressful period—but both early motherhood and writing a thesis are exhausting, and I assumed once I had finished my Ph.D., life would go back to normal.

But the stress continued even after I started my postdoc and my 1-year-old daughter began preschool. Every day at work I felt waves of inexplicable panic. It was hard to focus, even though I knew she was safe and fine. I felt overwhelmed with guilt each time I recalled her upset face at drop-off, her distress exaggerated in my memory. I soon realized I had developed a strong separation anxiety, a condition well-known in toddlers but rarely acknowledged in parents. The hardest part of becoming a postdoc turned out to be learning how to leave my daughter behind.

When the opportunity to travel to the ESRF came up, my daughter was still breastfeeding and was deeply attached to me. I was more worried than ever about leaving her. A student in the lab with two children assured me I would overcome this “energy barrier” simply by going. “The hardest part,” she said, “is not being there; it is thinking about going. You are the most stressed person in this situation, not your daughter. She is, and will be, fine.” She knew it from her own experience.

Her insight was helpful, but the anxious part of my brain continued to generate worst-case scenarios. I booked my return flight for right after my final 12-hour night shift at the synchrotron, without any rest—but I kept worrying about delayed flights or missed buses. My husband and I are immigrants to Sweden, with no family close by for support, and I couldn’t help wondering how he and my daughter would cope if he got sick while I was gone.

But none of those things transpired. After that first night at the synchrotron, I was relieved to learn that my daughter had found comfort in her father. In the following nights, she quickly adapted to sleeping without breastfeeding. Over the course of those 5 days in France, I found myself gradually transforming from an anxious and unfocused mother into a well-performing researcher.

The experience also left me feeling more confident back home. Drop-offs have become easier: If we can survive 5 days apart, we can survive a morning goodbye, too. I still worry about my daughter, but my intense separation anxiety has eased, and I feel less tension and internal conflict.

Now, writing this from a conference, again far away from my daughter, I can see that that moment spent expressing milk at the synchrotron really was empowering, even if I didn’t feel it at the time. It was part of learning to cope with separation. If you’re a parent dreading the first experiment or conference abroad, my best advice is what I was told: The hardest part is often thinking about going. Once you’re there, let the evidence accumulate that your child can be safe and loved without you in the room—and that you can still be a serious scientist with milk stains.

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