Work-life balance rears its ugly head.

Last Friday ODB had his first sick day from daycare. These days generally make me nervous. Ol' Dirty is sick which sends my mommy nerves into overdrive and then I worry about struggling to work from home for the day. It is usually a losing battle and my productivity tanks. I worry more about when the semester starts and I have classes that are less flexible to work around. An academic job offers a lot of flexibility with the running joke 'you can work any 100 hours a week that you want'. However, it also offers little redundancy.  There are not many, and sometimes any people, to cover my responsibilities in the event that I am out. During my maternity leave, my teaching responsibilities were covered but my research responsibilities were not.  I submitted grant proposals, recruited new graduate students, wrote recommendation letters, interviewed faculty candidates, organized a meeting for a program officer visiting campus, advised graduate students, reviewed journal articles, presented to prospective donors, and fielded my undergraduates course registration questions. On the day I returned to work, my first graduate student defended his master's thesis.

I really do enjoy my job and I love being a mom. However, I am generally nervous about my prospective for a long term career. There are countless articles, books, conferences and discussions regarding women's advancement in professional settings and a notable lack of women in leadership roles. In most professional fields, women will plateau professionally. In academia, if you don't get promoted with tenure, you get the boot.  Of the approximately one hundred tenure-track faculty in my engineering college, only 13 are women. In my department, I am now the only female tenure-track faculty who is also a mom.

Contrary to public perception, my job as a professor is not solely about teaching. Though teaching is an important part of my job, most of the metrics that will be considered in my case for tenure are research based: how much grant money was I able to secure, how many papers did I publish, how many Ph.D. students did I graduate. Also important is my reputation within my research community, gauged by letters sought from other top researchers and academics in my field. Having a baby pre-tenure can make this more difficult. For example while pregnant with ODB, I had to turn down two invitations to travel to international conferences because my OBGYN advised against it. Both conferences would have been great networking opportunities.

There are certainly measures within many universities to help accommodate women who have a baby (or babies) while on the tenure track. At my university, after the arrival of the first baby you get a one year extension to your tenure clock. Though this is a standard extension, internally these measures can be met with trepidation. In my conversations regarding maternity leave and tenure with my department head, he expressed concern about me taking a full maternity leave and adding a year to my tenure clock. He asked me rather insensitively if I would take the full leave or if I would be like a Native American who has a baby on the side of the field and then gets right back to work (yes, that actually happened). He also cautioned me that tenure cases that do not proceed in the standard amount of years (the review begins at the beginning of your 6th year), can be met with scrutiny.  Some believe that committees who review tenure cases with the maternity leave extension expect additional productivity because they had additional time.  I wonder if members of these committees have ever had stitches in their most sensitive area, had to submit a doctor's note with their due date to ask for a extension from a funding agency or pumped breast milk in a public toilet at a conference.

The only thing that I can do is give it my best effort and hope that it works out. I know that I my tenure case will be reviewed along side single faculty and faculty with stay-at-home spouses and that I will never be able to put in the same amount of hours with a baby at home and KH 90-miles away four days a week. But I wouldn't change welcoming a ODB into our family!

Developmental Displasia of the Hip and the Hip Baby

When Ol' Dirty Baby was minutes old, a peditrician told me that he felt a click in his left hip. After 22 hours of labor, I could not process this information. The next day a second pediatric hospitalist confirmed that there was in fact a 'click' and told us Ol' Dirty had developmental hip displasia.  What this meant for ODB was his hip socket bared a closer resemblance to a spatula than the more anatomically correct ladle and the tiny head of his femur could slip in and out of the socket with the slightest of movement.

When caught early, as in ODB's case, hip displasia can often be treated without surgery. At 5 days old, the good doctors at Shriner's put Ol' Dirty in a Pavlik Harness to be worn 24/7. The harness held his legs in a position that optimizes the growth of his hip socket around head of his femur. We visited Shriner's weekly or biweekly to ultrasound Ol' Dirty's hips. It was amazing to watch the shape of his hip change.

My husband KH and I mastered changing diapers, hand-bathing and dressing ODB around the harness for the first 11 weeks of his life.  Though, as you could imagine, not being able to wear pants during New England February and March was not ideal. Sleep sacks and long socks were his daily uniform. There was only one very low moment that involved a diaper blowout at 3 am and trying to clean poo off of ODB and the harness.  There were tears involved for all parties.

ODB's hip abduction brace

At 11 weeks, we switched to a hip abduction brace. The brace could come off for diaper changes and baths. ODB got his first real bath at 2.5 months!  After a month of 24/7 in the hip abduction brace, he got a few hours of brace-free time each day. Yahoo!! Of course, taking a brace on and off to change a diaper was challenging and now that it was finally warm and humid here, ODB was restricted to wearing pants to protect his legs from the plastic and metal brace. One item that I made fun of prior to Ol' Dirty's arrival turned out to be a savior.  Baby leg warmers were perfect for quick diaper changes, while still protecting his legs from the plastic brace. With an off-the-shoulder onesie, ODB would be perfect for the infant version of Flashdance or Fame.

With the hip abduction brace, ODB fit in very few things designed for babies his age. The infant car carrier was traded for the convertible car seat with the widest seat we could find. With aggressive side impact standards, this was no easy feat!  Our baby swing was a tight squeeze and only worked after KH attacked the snack tray with some tools. Thank heavens for the Baby Bjorn which allowed me to carry ODB to places  (church, stores, and even work) where I needed both hands but the jogging stroller he fit in was too wide to travel.  There was only one seat at daycare that Ol' Dirty could fit in. We were testing the limits of these items as Ol' Dirty and his abduction brace got bigger. Until today....

At 4.5 months, ODB now only has to wear his brace for nap time and bed time. Hooray! More importantly, his hip looks great! Most of the diaper changes for the day will only involve a few onesie snaps, instead of wresting velcro and  plastic leg cuffs. I can hold him without the front metal bar of the brace poking my ribs.  Ol' Dirty can have plenty of tummy time to master rolling over.  This is a happy, happy day in our household.

Let the adventures begin...

I am an assistant professor. I am an environmental engineer. And recently, I have committed what is regarded by some as career suicide. I had a baby, pre-tenure. I am throwing tales of my adventures onto the internet like someone throws a coin into a well - to see if it makes a sound. So we begin our three hour tour with my hubsand, the super pup, the professor and Ol' Dirty Baby.