The balancing act that has followed has much in common with what both Jason Mittell and Eleanor Seitz have described in previous columns. I’ve had to learn how to be both an active and engaged parent for my son and a productive and present faculty member, which has been challenging and has often left me feeling as though I’m doing a poor job on both fronts.  The difficulties of academics who choose to become mothers have been discussed elsewhere and studies on the consequences of our choice have revealed depressing statistics on the negative impact of parenthood on the careers of female academics in comparison to our male counterparts.  Motherhood and academia are in many ways an uneasy mix. And even more so when it comes to single motherhood.

My own experience surely speaks to how difficult it is for female academics to identify the ideal time in which to start their families: Is it graduate school? Immediately after graduation? During the first years on the tenure-track? Wait until post-tenure? None of these options felt exactly right for me (especially considering I didn’t have a long-term partner willing to commit to fatherhood for much of that time) until I was up against a wall and had to make a choice about what was best for my future self and family. For most women, in fact, it will likely feel as though there really is no right time, since our biological clocks start winding down just as we feel the worst of the job insecurity and workload begin to lift. Mary Ann Mason, law professor and co-director of the Economics and Family Security Center at Berkeley, refers to the ages of 30-40 as the “make or break years”, a time when almost too much has to be decided and accomplished by women both personally and professionally.

I should note that there are some unique circumstances to my life that make single parenting less stressful for me personally than it might be for many others.  I work in a family-friendly department in a Research 1 institution with a teaching load of 2/2 and a generous maternity leave policy. My tenure provides a rare and coveted level of job security. I have subsidized housing on campus and in a neighborhood zoned for excellent public schools. I also have an incredibly supportive network of friends—many of whom also live close-by in faculty housing. All of these factors, combined with the flexible schedule that being an academic affords, means my work is conducive in many ways to my life as a single parent.

That said, the many practical difficulties of being a single faculty parent still play out in my everyday life. Besides the financial burden, the most challenging aspect of my choice has been fitting in as much research, writing, administrative work, teaching and class prep possible into a 40 hour a week schedule—the time when my son is in school/daycare. While I can technically squeeze some work in at night, once my son is asleep, and on the weekends, it is incredibly difficult to accomplish anything at those times that requires my full attention and/or any level of intellectual energy. (Not to mention that I often need those hours for more basic life-management tasks like paying bills and cleaning.)

I can also only attend talks on campus, which are often scheduled after 5pm, if I chose to sacrifice both time with my son and money to pay for a babysitter, which is why I often take a pass. Conferences and research trips also involve much finagling and uncomfortable decisions, as I have to leave my son with friends or transport him back and forth to his grandparents in Florida in order to travel alone. (Some of my single mom friends chose to bring along a babysitter or family member to watch their children while travelling for work.)

Another struggle for me as a single parent involves trying to protect my time on campus without feeling as though I am avoiding or short-changing my colleagues, students, and myself. I don’t enjoy having to tell people that I can’t meet them for coffee or lunch or spend a big chunk of time conversing with them in my office. However, I often have to do just that, as every hour not working in the office is an hour that I will have to make-up post-bedtime when I am in a state of utter exhaustion.  In general, my tight schedule means that, for now, I am losing out on much of the social and intellectual life that I had prior to becoming a parent. However, I am banking on the idea that at least some of that will return once my son gets older, since, as I’m quickly learning, the early childhood years are astonishingly fleeting.

In exchange for all the juggling and social, professional and financial costs, I have a life that is richer, more intimate, and more complex thanks to the presence of my son in my life. For now, I am avoiding the workaholic trap that Ben described in his column that is often the fate of the single academic and experiencing more joy and satisfaction in my personal life than I ever had before. Single motherhood was not my first choice for how I envisioned creating a family and it likely is not a workable option for every single female academic approaching the end of her childbearing years. However, even with all of the struggle, balancing, and strict time management involved, it has turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made.

Eleanor wrote about becoming a mother in her first year of graduate school and how that dual identity became inextricably linked. Similarly, my wife and I had the first of our three children during my first year as a faculty member, so I’ve never really known what it is to be a professor or a father without simultaneously wearing the other hat. While every job and every kid is distinct with its own particular histories, contexts, and fussy temperaments, hopefully a few of the ways that my fatherhood has tinted my career may speak to some other people’s specificities. (I should note that I write this from the extreme privilege of being a tenured faculty at a supportive institution, a privilege that many of you reading this might be working toward, but is far from guaranteed.)

One of the most important keywords as a faculty member (and parent) is flexibility. On a micro, day-to-day basis, being a full-time college professor is one of the most flexible professions there is: aside from your class schedule and regular meetings, your daily schedule is quite amenable to the demands of parenting. I can usually pick-up my kids from school, shuttle them to activities, stay home if they’re sick, or otherwise make adjustments to fit the family’s schedule. And even though I have a constantly growing to-do list, nothing on it is ever as important as taking a kid to the doctor – our daily work is generally low-stakes and highly-flexible, while parenting has much higher and more vital demands.

But at other levels, being a college professor lacks macro-flexibility, putting a number of major constraints on a family. Most notably, it often forces people to move across country for a job with comparatively lower pay than other professions with highly competitive national job markets – talk to a doctor or lawyer about what would draw them to relocate for a job for some perspective (and while money is not everything, having extra cash is a way to buy time as a parent, in the form of childcare, housekeeping, etc.). This is most challenging to a faculty spouse, who probably must work to supplement that meager pay, but also must deal with being plopped down in whatever part of the country hosts the job you land. We’ve grappled with this constant imbalance, as I worked to get a job in a part of the country close to extended family and in keeping with the lifestyle where we want to raise our kids, despite the resulting limits on my wife’s career options. And I write this as someone who knows that I’ve won the academic lottery with a great job where we want to live – for the majority of PhDs, the choices and trade-offs are far more dire and limited. But for almost every academic parent I know, choices are first motivated by what is best for their families rather than what might be best for their individual careers.

One great appeal of being a faculty member is the flexibility of how we spend our professional time, allowing us to choose what to research, what forms of publication or scholarly output we wish to pursue, how much time to focus on teaching or service, and generally the freedom to self-define the arc of our careers. But this flexibility has a sting: without clear markers of what you need to do for career stability or advancement, many of us feel like we need to do it all. Likewise, parenting without an owner’s manual often leads us to think that the right answer to choices about what to do for/with our kids is All of the Above. As both a professor and a parent, I find myself stressed by self-inflicted pressure to do more, do it perfectly, and say “yes” to new opportunities. One of the most important lessons for both parents and professors is that it’s alright to say no, and that it’s ok to fall short of perfect on some of those things we say yes to.

Another great bit of mixed-bag flexibility of this career is technologically enabled – aside from in-class teaching, most of my work can be done anywhere, needing only intermittent WiFi and power. This is quite useful when I need to stay home with a sick kid, edit an article in the car during a soccer practice, or catch-up on emails after everybody’s bedtime. And technology also makes our familial choice to be at an isolated rural locale feasible, enabling professional connections and communities via blogs like Antenna and other technological tools – I know I would have been far less happy as a professor at Middlebury a generation ago, when isolation was far more acute and professional advancement more limited by geography.

But the curse of constant connectivity is that I have trouble resisting the urge to check email while dinner’s cooking, or stop writing a blog post while I could be taking care of something on my parental or homeowner’s to-do list. Pervasive connectivity is a boon to someone with a flexible schedule, but always having one more thing to do (as both father and faculty) and a predilection toward distraction makes it a curse. (I would love to hear from others who’ve found ways to overcome this tendency.)

Another more disciplinary-specific intersection between faculty and fatherhood is that with the flexibility to aim our academic interests at self-defined projects, I’ve found that I often get inspired by my kids to explore new avenues of media studies. Watching my oldest daughter learn to use our DVR led me to write “TiVoing Childhood” for Flow, and I’m currently writing a piece about my kids’ favorite current show, Phineas and Ferb. I’ve also taught a course on Media & Childhood that stemmed in part from my own experiences as a parent watching my kids interact with media, and I even drafted my daughter and her friends to create a student video project on climate change for kids. Obviously it helps that media scholars grapple with issues and developments with clear connections to our children’s lives – my fellow faculty fathers who research PTSD or hate-speech have not found similar opportunities for synergy! – but it’s been a great boon to my academic interests to be able to see television and media through the developing eyes of my children.

One last thought, going back to issues raised in Eleanor’s post, is that parenting foregrounds issues of gender in ways that complicate many of the post-structural feminist theories I studied in graduate school. Having two girls and a boy makes me view gender as less of a discursive free-for-all than I used to think, as daily behavioral differences reinforce gender as something more biologically-grounded than I’d been taught. Yet as a faculty father, I try to articulate my identity as one in which my kids are an active and visible part of my professional life – they often come to my office and my colleagues hear it when they want to schedule meetings that are less than family friendly. Hopefully such behaviors by me and fellow faculty fathers carve out a more family-friendly workplace for all, but especially for female faculty who face many of the pervasive issues and assumptions that Eleanor outlined.

As always, stories of someone’s career or parenting are highly individual. So I hope this post prompts some conversation among academic fathers, mothers, and non-parents about flexibility, visibility, and priorities – I look forward to further discussion in the comments!

As I tell my students as I try to lead them to critical media consumption, my goal is not to make them dislike their pleasures, but to be able to recognize the operation of ideology amidst the candy-coated fun. Thus my pleasure in this show often runs up against its occasional foray into politically-charged representational terrain as gender politics are somewhat an inevitability (perhaps someone else can raise the series’ handling of race and interracial parenthood). I’ve particularly found myself holding my breath as the series tiptoes through the minefield of questions of women and work.

On the surface, legal eagle Julia and her stay-at-home husband may seem the central character pair for these topics, but the series notably offers a range of strategies, choices, and takes on motherhood and work. To the series’ credit, it often “goes there”—into those contentious waters of clearly gendered dilemmas about women’s work, motherhood, and guilt that were a mainstay of a lot of 1980s and 1990s drama. I also get the sense the writers know the complexity of the politics—complexity that most recent depictions of adult women have chosen to simply avoid by uniformly writing characters with highly professionalized careers—but hold my breath because charting a way through remains unclear, whether for television characters or in conversations with moms at the park. Thus, while there have been some missteps this season (why couldn’t Adam have not just supported the idea of Christina going back to work, but pushed back at Christina’s assessment that her children needed her too much “right now” in the final seconds of an episode that did an otherwise brilliant job of depicting the challenges women face re-entering the work force or feeling like their work in the home matters?), I credit the series with providing viewers with a stay-at-home mom and a mom who is trying to find her calling instead of staying in the safe zone of personally troubled but professionally successful women that are have been the new norm.

In many ways, Julia is the prototypic late 20^th century female character as a tough, motivated lawyer who is the sole breadwinner for her husband and grade-school-aged daughter. Yet she is also a generation younger than the women who embodied these dilemmas in the past—instead she grew up appreciating and assuming the benefits of Title IX and gender equity. The fact that the series really hasn’t devoted plot time to debating its stay-at-home father is notable for its normalization. I appreciate that the series doesn’t depict this role reversal as easy; parenthood, in any configuration, isn’t. The multi-generational aspect of the show also offers rich context, with family patriarch Zeke ‘s advice that Crosby tell his girlfriend to give up an out-of-state opportunity wisely going unheeded and no doubt setting up a central problematic for next season.

Case in point, Tuesday night’s viewing of Lost led me to pronounce the following mandate to my husband as we drifted to sleep. “Just so we’re clear, if I’m ever trapped in the debris of an explosion in a submarine that is rapidly taking on water, there will be no romantic gestures. You know I love you, but someone has to get out to take care of the kids.” Minutes before I had been enthralled by the latest chapter of the Lost saga, but the final minutes rang false to me. Part was probably the oddity of the Kwons speaking in English (an idiosyncrasy others have already commented on), but narrative disbelief really took over once I realized that Jin was to sacrifice himself to die with Sun. Maybe they have a good option for their orphaned child (although I don’t recall this to be the case). But the supposed romanticism of Jin’s death and subsequent orphaning of the child seemed far-fetched to me.

A previous version of myself might have bought that scene, and my point here is not to pick on Lost. In the spirit of the holiday, the episode gave me a way to express something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. To be clear, I’m not arguing some sort of essential maternal viewing position, but in the nearly three years since I joined the motherhood, I’ve noticed differences in the meanings I make and in what stays with me. More typically I notice it in tragedy. A child’s death on Grey’s Anatomy would have been sad in the past, but now the meaning I take is far more devastating. This subject position also probably explains why just remembering the detectives arriving at Shane Vendrell’s (Walton Goggins of The Shield) apartment to find he killed his family as part of his suicide still takes my breath away. While Goggins had displayed growing desperation throughout the last season, the audacity of this last act made clear the consequences of his friendship with Vic Mackey and their actions of the previous seasons. I suspect there are myriad other ways my meaning making has changed that I can’t recall as readily or may not even recognize.

Certainly, this isn’t a radical reading position, and as much as many of us have been interested in the prospect of oppositional readings, it grounds my understanding of negotiation of meaning to be fairly limited and of polysemy to be bounded.