Parenting and Professing in a Pandemic
Title
Parenting and Professing in a Pandemic
Creator
Lesley Lavery, Associate Professor, Political Science
Date
04-10-2020
Language
English
Text
Finding balance in life is challenging no matter who you are, what you carry, or what you do. That balance has been particularly difficult for me as an academic with young children. Two years ago, when I earned tenure, I thought I'd made it. I had prepared four new courses my first year at Mac with a two-year-old, managed a three-course semester that ended on my second daughter's due date due, balanced preparation for a new course, a three year old, and a newborn at a time when Mac's parental leave policy required that I return to work with a five-week-old. I somehow churned out an impressive array of articles, built a rich, full load of amazing and inspiring advisees, and wrote my first book as my little ones progressed from preschool to elementary school.
But now I find myself back in an unsustainable race and I don't know when it will end or how I will manage. On the road to tenure I learned a variety of crucial coping mechanisms. I built exercise into my routine and added in walking office hours (now of Mac Admissions Tour lore) to ensure my physical health, started daily meditation and built boundaries for screens and piles of student papers to ensure my mental health and found a delicate bridge between my scholarship, my teaching, and my personal life through work with and for St. Paul Public Schools. Then COVID-19 hit.
I know that I'm lucky. If travel restrictions, isolation, and pay cuts are the worst my family has to endure for the foreseeable future, I have no room to complain. And yet, I'm again overwhelmed by the unsustainable pace of a new marathon (we assume it's a marathon, since we don't know when this all ends). I'm a people person. I'm at Mac rather than a research university because I love working with inspiring people. But holding those people and the little girls who had finally become so much more independent is too much. Professors have enviable flexibility at the best of times. But with that flexibility come a variety of pressing obligations for scholarship, service, teaching and advising. And so, like workers who report to other jobs that are often less flexible, I now sit each day at my dining room table juggling kindergarten and 4th grade curricula alongside my research methods and education policy courses. I am grateful for my amazing preceptor who now responds to all student homework and holds Zoom office hours while I'm juggling multiplication of fractions and sight words. I am grateful for my department chair who is finding ways to support all of my colleagues as they navigate emotions and shuffle between synchronous and asynchronous teaching methodologies. I am grateful for a senior colleague who has offered to Zoom-sit my kids so I can take a call or just a much- needed break. I am grateful for a strong internet connection and on demand television and music and family from far away who check in or send crafts and puzzles in the mail. And I am grateful for the other parenting Professors who are holding the same reality and sharing candidly the balls dropped rather than posting glowing successes on social media. Parenting has always been a fulltime job, one that 37 hours of free public school per week has allowed me to combine with my vocation. But this virus strains the few social provisions that allow most of us to keep up even when we feel we're running ourselves ragged. Now, we're just left in the dust panting and hoping that when this ends we'll catch up. On the other side, we hope to be there for the students that are grieving graduation and the accompanying commemorative rituals, our recent graduates out of work and grasping for career connections, our colleagues who are battle demons in isolation, and a sobbing six year old I hold as she stutters a wish to live in her memories rather than right now because it is too sad and scary.
Old realities allowed us to hide the difficulties inherent in parenting while professing from ourselves. Now it's all in plain sight and yet none of the rest of you can see it.
But now I find myself back in an unsustainable race and I don't know when it will end or how I will manage. On the road to tenure I learned a variety of crucial coping mechanisms. I built exercise into my routine and added in walking office hours (now of Mac Admissions Tour lore) to ensure my physical health, started daily meditation and built boundaries for screens and piles of student papers to ensure my mental health and found a delicate bridge between my scholarship, my teaching, and my personal life through work with and for St. Paul Public Schools. Then COVID-19 hit.
I know that I'm lucky. If travel restrictions, isolation, and pay cuts are the worst my family has to endure for the foreseeable future, I have no room to complain. And yet, I'm again overwhelmed by the unsustainable pace of a new marathon (we assume it's a marathon, since we don't know when this all ends). I'm a people person. I'm at Mac rather than a research university because I love working with inspiring people. But holding those people and the little girls who had finally become so much more independent is too much. Professors have enviable flexibility at the best of times. But with that flexibility come a variety of pressing obligations for scholarship, service, teaching and advising. And so, like workers who report to other jobs that are often less flexible, I now sit each day at my dining room table juggling kindergarten and 4th grade curricula alongside my research methods and education policy courses. I am grateful for my amazing preceptor who now responds to all student homework and holds Zoom office hours while I'm juggling multiplication of fractions and sight words. I am grateful for my department chair who is finding ways to support all of my colleagues as they navigate emotions and shuffle between synchronous and asynchronous teaching methodologies. I am grateful for a senior colleague who has offered to Zoom-sit my kids so I can take a call or just a much- needed break. I am grateful for a strong internet connection and on demand television and music and family from far away who check in or send crafts and puzzles in the mail. And I am grateful for the other parenting Professors who are holding the same reality and sharing candidly the balls dropped rather than posting glowing successes on social media. Parenting has always been a fulltime job, one that 37 hours of free public school per week has allowed me to combine with my vocation. But this virus strains the few social provisions that allow most of us to keep up even when we feel we're running ourselves ragged. Now, we're just left in the dust panting and hoping that when this ends we'll catch up. On the other side, we hope to be there for the students that are grieving graduation and the accompanying commemorative rituals, our recent graduates out of work and grasping for career connections, our colleagues who are battle demons in isolation, and a sobbing six year old I hold as she stutters a wish to live in her memories rather than right now because it is too sad and scary.
Old realities allowed us to hide the difficulties inherent in parenting while professing from ourselves. Now it's all in plain sight and yet none of the rest of you can see it.
Note
Lesley Lavery is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Mac and mother of two children, 6 and 9 years old.
Files
Citation
llavery, “Parenting and Professing in a Pandemic,” Macalester: Place and Community in a COVID Landscape, accessed April 29, 2024, https://dwlibrary.macalester.edu/spring2020/items/show/11.