Why I left academia, part 4, or: Realizing you don’t actually know how to swim, very far from land

By the fall of 2015, Ryder was on his 7^th daycare/preschool, and there were more changes to come. Each time we went back and forth between coasts, I had to find a new spot for him in care, and each time we returned to Boston I had to find a new living situation. Adding his sister to the equation just made this even more difficult. When I returned post-maternity leave for another winter in Boston, this time with two kids, I opted to sublet an apartment in Somerville walking distance from friends. The apartment came with a car and an underground parking garage – I felt totally ready for the snow this time. 

I was able to get Ryder back into the UMass Boston Early Learning Center, and after much grief and stress, I found a spot for Adelaide at the closest infant center in Dorchester. It was in a city government building, surrounded by fish-packing plants and a few blocks from a methadone clinic. In other words, I didn’t totally love the neighborhood, but the daycare itself was lovely.  

Elevatoring down to the garage

Getting the kids into the car in the covered basement was logistically much easier than walking to the T, but with two kids to drop off in different places and the tunnel under the city always jammed with traffic, we still spent about 3 hours commuting on a good day. Since it was my second year at work, expectations had increased as had my service requirements, so I would work from 8 pm – 10 pm or so every night after the kids went to sleep. I usually also got up at 5 am or so to make lunches and coffee and get myself dressed so I could enjoy the kids for a bit in the morning before we ran out the door. I did actually love the commute time in some ways; the car was so much quieter than the Redline, it allowed us to sing and tell stories and have snacks when no one was crying. 

During that semester, many colleagues decided it was time to provide their guidance on what I needed to do to reach tenure. Their advice was invariably conflicting when it came to work – how much to focus on teaching vs. scholarship vs. service was a big source of disagreement. Another was how to comport myself as a woman faculty member and a mom. The advice regarding how to logistically survive as a mother on the tenure track was just depressing.

One woman told me about her childcare situation when she had a baby: an older woman down the street watched her daughter. If she was going to be home late, she would feed her daughter dinner. If she was going to be home even later, she would bathe her daughter and get her in PJs. If she wouldn’t be home at all, the woman would put the baby to sleep at her house so my colleague could pick her up the following evening. 

A good book to make you feel inadequate

One women had a stay-at-home husband and worked late every night. Another’s husband was under-employed and did most of the childcare and household chores. Another had no children. Another seemed to not actually enjoy her child, and remarked that the child spent close to the maximum number of allowed hours in care every day. The only female colleague with a family situation close to mine seemed to be doing poorly on the work-front; she admitted to me that she was almost certain she would never be promoted. 

I haven’t yet mentioned my graduate students, which is cruel. They were the best part of my stint on the tenure track. One student started while I was on maternity leave. He settled himself in and kept busy with classes. The next semester we went on fieldwork together to the US Virgin Islands, with assistance from the kids, my mom, and husband. My student was amazing and spent time getting to know my kids and family; in addition to being a good scientist, it was clear he was a good person and this was wonderful to experience. My favorite times at UMass Boston included hours spent working with him in the lab to develop procedures, discuss problems, and talk about ideas. 

My other student was jointly advised by myself and a colleague at another Boston institution. His master’s project stemmed out of a research cruise I helped prepare for while I was extremely pregnant in San Diego; I spent weeks acid-cleaning what felt like a million bottles and other equipment that would be used to collect ocean water for trace-iron analyses, and to conduct an on-board aquarium experiment. I purposefully carried around carboys of MilliQ that were much too heavy and spent hours on my feet while experiencing relentless but ineffective contractions – still, my dumb body refused to just go into labor without medical help. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to separate that project from those slow and painful weeks. 

Touristing in Boston

During the summer after my second year at UMass Boston, it became clear that the only way Adam could move to Boston would be for him to give up his established career and start fresh. I thought I might have a chance of convincing him it was worth it when he came to spend time in Boston that next fall – while we’d certainly enjoyed a lot of snow together so far, we had yet to experience the purported best season in Boston. We went leaf-peeping in New Hampshire, we visited the Cape, Glouster, and Lowell; we fell in love with several adorable coastal towns and discussed the potential to live in Hull or another town with surfing options. 

Meanwhile, though, I was feeling less than confident at work. I was co-teaching with a seasoned professor who demonstrated abundantly that I was not actually as awesome at teaching as I had convinced myself. I also realized I not only wasn’t particularly talented at teaching, but I had very little grasp of the literature on teaching methods. I was mostly just teaching by feel, and was demoralized to realize that if I really wanted to become as effective a teacher as I had hoped, I was going to have to invest a lot more time into that pie-slice of my job. Barring that, I was going to have to live with myself being a sub-par instructor for people who deserved better. 

During my maternity leave, I had taken a break from proposal-writing. This turned out to be a potentially deadly blow to my academic career. I saw that the end of my start-up funding was looming, as was the end of my first and only federal grant, and I didn’t have any proposals in the pipeline. I couldn’t bring on new students without funding, but I couldn’t get new funding without some preliminary results and new ideas, and I didn’t have the time or energy to produce these things. I had nothing lined up to pay my summer salary the following year; without that money, the cost of childcare and rent in Boston would exceed my monthly income and I would have to pay to go to work. I started to freak out.

Why I left academia, Part 3, or: I do not know how single parents do it

I guess I should go on surf trips more often. I was in Costa Rica with my husband, 2 yr old son, and some old friends, renting a little cabina near a beach. Ryder was having a rough go of it: the howler monkeys terrified him (“can we find some quieter monkeys?”), he got attacked by fire ants, a wasp stung him on the boy parts while he was playing naked because it was so hot, and then a scorpion had the audacity to hide under a dustpan and sting his foot when he went to play with it (I give him all the best toys). 

One afternoon I was sitting in the hammock while the guys went surfing, and Ryder was bulldozing pebbles. I had received a weird email from UMass Boston that asked me to go to their job application website to check the status of my application. Being very used to rejection, I logged into the site to see what they had to say - at least they were kind enough to actually reject me. Many jobs I had applied to just never said anything. 

Weirdly, the message said that I was being invited for an on-campus interview for a faculty position in the School for the Environment, and would I please let them know my availability. I was suddenly glad they made me go to the bother of logging into their site, so I actually believed the message. 

Finally, I had been able to apply for another job in an interdisciplinary environmental science department, where I didn’t have to pretend to be an expert in a particular discipline, and my weird mishmash of a background had apparently gotten some traction. I felt like a million dollars, and started envisioning myself wearing professorly sweaters as I strolled confidently around campus in the crisp New England fall. 

UMass Boston: So pretty in the snow

A month later, I was at the interview. The weather was about as dreary as it comes - 40 degrees and raining - and the campus was not exactly going to win any architectural or landscaping awards. The upside was that the buildings were all connected by glass “hamster tubes” so one didn’t have to go out into the elements to get around. Plus, it was right on the Bay and it was in Boston - a pretty vibrant and exciting part of the country from what I could tell, and the people were great. I had so much fun at the interview.

My husband was shocked when I was offered the job. He has a permanent-as-they-come research position at UC San Diego, and the idea of once again somehow living apart – as we had in Australia – was not appealing. However, since he is grant-supported, and not part of the teaching faculty, his job is theoretically portable. He went to his supervisors with the news of my job offer to ask their advice, while I went to my mentors including my PhD advisor as well. All of the academics we spoke to agreed: I had to take the position if I wanted to succeed in academia; we could, they trusted, work out our personal lives, but too many years adjuncting was apparently the kiss of death for hopes of joining the tenure track.

So, I went. We decided at first that my son and I would live in Boston during the teaching semesters, and come back to San Diego during breaks; my husband would visit when he could, but because of some changes at his University regarding employees working from afar, his visits would be relatively short and sparse. We would also pursue options for him to transfer his grants or obtain new funding through UMass Boston, but we knew early on that this would not be as easy as I had thought during my job search. 

The new building on campus that would house my shiny new lab and office wasn’t yet open when I started my position in Fall of 2014, so I was given part of a cubicle in a room with no windows when I first arrived. This didn’t exactly make my heart swell with excitement for my new position; it also made it difficult for me to spend the semester setting up my lab, which had been the original plan, and the reason I had no classes to teach that semester. I spent October in Boston, and then retreated to San Diego, where I had more space to work and life logistics were easier. I wrote proposals and resurrected projects, and prepped all new material for my class in the spring. When I got back to Boston in January, I felt excited and ready to roll.

Just one of the many blizzards we enjoyed in 2015 (inches)

Ryder and I moved into a furnished 2-story duplex in Cambridgeport. We were a few blocks from Trader Joes, Rite Aid and Whole Foods, as well as the Charles River, with a backyard and a kind landlord who lived two doors down and kept an eye out for us (and cleared our snow!). We were half a mile from the Central Square Redline T stop. I was excited to commute by train, pop into the city to see sights, and do my shopping on foot. I had never lived an urban lifestyle, and was amped. 

Then that winter broke all of Boston’s records for snowfall and cold. One day we bundled up to walk to Rite Aid for Lucky Charms (as you do). Ryder had to pee when we got there; unfortunately I was too slow getting him into the restroom and undressed from his layers, and he lost it and ended up peeing all over the back of his snowpants. I knew it was too cold for him to get home without the pants, but worried the wet clothes would freeze against his skin when we got out into the intense cold. A couple plastic bags from the checker later, and I had sandwiched the wet parts of the pants between layers of bags and then put his jacket on to hold it all together. I was clearly killing it at this Boston-living thing.

A relatively mild day at the T

To get to work, I had to bundle Ryder in snowpants, jacket, boots, hat, and gloves, and then dress myself quickly and get us and the jogging stroller out of the door (thanks to friend Rachel for alerting me that small-wheel strollers are ridiculous in snow). I was born in Boston when my mom was a grad student at Harvard. A favorite story I used to make her tell me over and over was about just this: bundling me up in a million layers, getting outside to stroller to daycare, but forgetting to strap me in - when the stroller stopped short on a chunk of ice, baby me flew out and rolled down the sidewalk. All the layers meant that when my mom ran up to me, horrified, I was just laughing.

When the temperatures dropped below 15F, I would put a plastic rain cover over the stroller to keep Ryder a little bit warmer on our way to daycare. After the second blizzard, people stopped bothering the clear their sidewalks properly, so we had to walk in the street to get to the T, praying no cars slid into us. When we got to the T, we would have to fight to get on. Often, multiple full trains would pass before we could shove our way in. I learned to be rude and pushy. When we got to our stop, we would bundle up again and walk another ½ mile to the UMass Boston Early Learning Center. I would drop Ryder off, removing his outer layers to place in his outside cubby, and then bring his special blanket and elephant into the inside cubby. After that, I walked another ½ mile to my office. It was great exercise, but the whole evolution took a long time. 

Checking out the shiny new building that housed my lab & office

Before I knew it, and before I felt like I’d accomplished what I needed, it would be time to leave to reverse the trek. In the evenings, after Ryder went to sleep, I knew that I should work again to make up lost time, but I was pregnant with my daughter and too exhausted. Usually, I would just go to bed when he did, snuggling together in my queen bed because neither of us wanted to sleep in separate rooms.

One day I got food poisoning. I started feeling weird on the way home, and by the time we got to the apartment, it took every ounce of energy to get Ryder dinner and to bed. I then spent the entire night puking. In the morning, I called a cab, hauled Ryder’s carseat into it, and had them take us to the hospital. A few bags of IV fluid, some anti-emetics, and something that knocked me out for a few hours did the trick. When I woke up after being knocked out, Ryder was sitting in his carseat in the hospital room, coloring and eating animal crackers. I just about died from love and gratefulness for him being so good and patient, and also immediately had a thousand visions of all the ways he could have been harmed while I was asleep and no one was caring for him. 

Spring came, and life got easier. Instead of snow on the sidewalks, there were pink drifts of cherry blossoms. One day we emerged from the T station at our stop on our way home, and it wasn’t dark. We celebrated by going out for an impromptu dinner, complete with fancy desert.

And then it was time for summer back in San Diego. It was a bit of a break, and I felt like I caught up on work a little – my husband helped with the preschool commute, I wasn’t teaching, and I worked at home most days, so I had much more time. At the end of summer, I ballooned into a whale and a few weeks later my daughter was born. We remained in San Diego that fall on maternity leave. I kept up with some work, but I also did take a real break to enjoy her, knowing she’s my last baby.

How to do it all

Hello out there! This poor blog has been quite neglected lately. Work seems to be 99% typing these days, so my writing energy is flagging. But, it’s 8:30 pm on Friday night and the kids are asleep – so here we go!

Life these days is a little hectic. I’m often single-parenting and my job is pretty demanding (many fledgling professors like myself claim 80-hour workweeks. I definitely do not, and could not, physically work that much even without kids, but it is relatively demanding, nonetheless). I’m often flattered and surprised by friends exclaiming things like “wow, look at you doing all of this and keeping your shit together!” The truth is that (1) my shit is about as together as this 

but (2) thank you, and it’s because of a lot of moral support and tricks I’ve stolen from other folks.

Here are some of the most useful tricks I use to semi-successfully parent two small kids while not completely sucking at my career:

1. When the kids are in bed at night, I do the life-stuff that must be done, like contesting parking tickets, trying to figure out what the fuck excise tax is, and paying the seemingly endless bills. 
2. I also have started cooking after the kids are in bed. I used to really enjoy cooking (especially when paired with wine and good music) and I do actually want to feed the kids good food, but the idea of getting home from work/school/Boston traffic hell and then cooking while the kids whine about being hungry and claw at my legs is awful. So, I just pull something I made the night before out of the fridge (or the week before out of the freezer, respectively) and zap it in the microwave. Voila! Dinner is ready in a few minutes with minimal effort, yet it's not always just Trader Joes packaged food (as it had been before I figured this out).
3. My dad gave me a Roomba for my birthday, and…let me just say that if there were a fire and I could only save one thing aside from the children – it would be the Roomba. 

   

   forts >>orderly houses

4. Most of my social life these days consists of texting, social media interaction, and commiserating with other parents of small children while the kids destroy one of our houses. 
5. Ryder often goes to bed in clothes ready for the next day. His school serves breakfast, so as long as he is wearing clothing, I can just get shoes on his feet and get him to school and he will be fed and set for the day. I love the idea of changing into PJs each night and having breakfast at home in the morning together, just like in the cereal commercials. But the reality was that I was spending the 60-90 minutes of our time together in the morning nagging him incessantly to get dressed and/or eat his breakfast so we weren’t late, and we were still invariably rushing every morning. When he sleeps in his clothes, he can spend 45 minutes carefully arranging tiny scraps of paper on his desk, watch a cartoon, and harass his sister before we have to leave. We can be on time and he can eat French toast sticks and other delicacies served by the amazing school cafeteria that I don’t have the energy to prepare.
   

   

   A prime example of why my car is a pigsty. But, at least snacks like this keep the small people from mutiny during drives

6. I shower as infrequently as possible. This saves time, and also makes me virtuous because we are in a drought. 
7.  I only cloth diaper on the weekends.
8.  I make the kids do errands with me. This usually requires bribery, often in the form of a sugary treat.
9. I don’t work when the kids are awake and with me. If they aren’t asleep or at school, I try my hardest to focus on them (with the occasional foray onto Twitter or email when they are occupied and I crave a moment of fleeting virtual connection with other adults). We read books. We go on walks. We look for treasures in cracks in the sidewalk. We visit museums and clean pennies and count blue plastic gems and draw and decorate the porch with fake spiderwebs and go down slides and do all the wonderful things that we should be doing. I remember that I’m the luckiest person alive.

Starting a new job

I’ve been working at UMass Boston now for more than 6 months, but I still have a lot to learn. I’ve found it somewhat surprising how simple things can trip you up when starting at a new place of work, so I’ve made a randomly ordered list (I know, I’m obsessed with lists) comprised of things that might confuse new people. If every company/University/government office would hand us each a “new employee” manual that contained the answers to these sorts of questions – I think it would make things run much more efficiently.

1.     Where are the pens?

2.     Where are the other office supplies?

3.     How do I get set up with email/wifi/etc.?

4.     Where can I find and get access to the important websites, like:

•  HR
• Class schedules and roster
• Blackboard 
• Maintenance requests
• Tracking spending on grants/startup $
• Websites for specific things such as graduate admissions documents (if you are on that committee)

5.     How do I print?

6.     How do I make photocopies?

7.     Where is the library and how do I find and check out:

•  Journals 
•  Books 
•  Interlibrary loan items

8.     Who are the PR people to contact for press releases?

9.     Who are the grants office people?

10.  What is the standard overhead rate for grants? Do we get any of this back?

11.  What are fringe benefits and how are they charged on grants?

12.  Is there a lactation room, and where is it?

13.  What shared lab facilities exist, and where are they?

14.  Where is the bathroom?

Who do I call for help?

15.  What teaching supplies exist for lab classes?

16.  How do I get new teaching supplies for my classes?

17.  How do I order supplies for my lab?

18.  Is there an on-campus stockroom where I can purchase items?

19.  How do I get my own website?

20.  Where can I store and heat up my lunch?

21.  When and where are any recurring seminars held?

22.  What public transport and parking options exist? Are there discounts?

23.  How do I sign up for instrument/boat/etc. time?

24.  What if my assigned classroom is not set up well for teaching, and/or the ceiling starts falling down when it rains?

25.  How are graduate students supported?

26.  How do I recruit graduate students?

27.  How can I incorporate undergraduate students in my lab (independent study, volunteer, work study, etc.)?

28.  Are there any on-campus health facilities that I can access if needed?

29.  How do I use the exercise facilities?

30.  How do I get basic supplies like paper towels and soap in my lab classroom?

31.  How do I take students on fieldtrips? 

Is there an adorable toddler who gives out protective eyewear and air fresheners somewhere on campus?

32.  Is there any organized safety training that myself, students in my lab, or students in my lab classes need to undertake?

33.  Who do I call if I have a hazardous waste spill in the lab?

34.  How is hazardous waste stored and picked up?

35.  How the actual F- do I keep the lights on or off in my office instead of relying on the automatic motion detector thing that doesn’t work?

36.  How do I get a phone and/or what is my phone number?

37.  How do I dial out? Long distance?

38.  How do I access new software licensed or purchased by the University?

39.  Where is the best/worst coffee on campus?

40.  What childcare facilities are available on campus or nearby?

41.  Where should I live for ease of commuting, quality of life, schools?

42.  What kind of specialized gear do I need to buy to deal with the new climate into which I am moving?

43.  Do I get my money back if there are 4 blizzards within the first month of spring semester?

44.  How do I get an ID card?

45.  How do I get keys/access to my office/lab/building?

46.  How does incoming and outgoing mail and package delivery work?
47. What is the emergency phone number?

I’m sure there are other questions I’ve forgotten – and I haven’t even brushed the surface when it comes to moving countries! But that’s another story.

What other items would you include in the ideal “how stuff works here” manual?